As has been intimated, the manorial system was already on a steady decline, especially in western Europe, at the opening of the sixteenth century. A goodly number of peasants who had once been serfs were now free-tenants, lessees, or hired laborers. Of course rent of farm-land in our present sense--each owner of the land letting out his property to a tenant and, in return, exacting as large a monetary payment as possible--was then unknown. But there was a growing class of peasants who were spoken of as free-tenants to distinguish them from serf- tenants. These free-tenants, while paying regular dues, as did the others, were not compelled to work two or three days every week in the lord's fields, except occasionally in busy seasons such as harvest; they were free to leave the estate and to marry off their daughters or to sell their oxen without the consent of the lord; and they came to regard their customary payments to the lord not so much as his due for their protection as actual rent for their land. [Sidenote: Hired Laborers] While more prosperous peasants were becoming free-tenants, many of their poorer neighbors found it so difficult to gain a living as serfs that they were willing to surrender all claim to their own little strips of land on the manor and to devote their whole time to working for fixed wages on the fields which were cultivated for the nobleman himself, the so-called lord's demesne. Thus a body of hired laborers grew up claiming no land beyond that on which their miserable huts stood and possibly their small garden-plots. [Sidenote: Métayers] Besides hired laborers and free-tenants, a third group of peasants appeared in places where the noble proprietor did not care to superintend the cultivation of his own land. In this case he parceled it out among particular peasants, furnishing each with livestock and a plow and expecting in return a fixed proportion of the crops, which in France usually amounted to one-half. Peasants who made such a bargain were called in France _métayers_, and in England "stock-and-land lessees." The arrangement was not different essentially from the familiar present-day practice of working a farm "on shares." [Sidenote: Steady Decline of Serfdom]