A bailleur, a French term, is a land owner who outsourced uncultivated parcels of land as part of an early
Middle Age sharecropping system known as ''complant'' — a precursor to the
métayage
The metayage ; es, mediería ; it, mezzadria . system is the cultivation of land for a proprietor by one who receives a proportion of the produce, as a kind of sharecropping. Another class of land tenancy in France is named , whereby the rent is ...
system. Under this system, a laborer known as a
prendeur would agree to cultivate land owned by the ''bailleur'' in exchange for ownership of the crop and its production. For use of the ''bailleur's'' soil, the ''prendeur'' promised a share (normally a third to two-thirds) of the crop's production or its revenue to the ''bailleur''. The length of this partnership varied and sometimes would extend over generations.
[Hugh Johnson, ''Vintage: The Story of Wine'' pg 116. Simon and Schuster 1989]
References
Agricultural labor
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