A
bailleur, a French term, is a landowner who outsourced uncultivated parcels of land as part of an early
Middle Age sharecropping system known as
complant — a precursor to the métayage 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 would sometimes extend over generations.
[Hugh Johnson, Vintage: The Story of Wine pg 116. Simon and Schuster 1989]
