By the side of these small properties, which tended to grow smaller under a process of incessant sub-division, lay the large estates of the nobles, the clergy, the magistrates and financiers. In some cases these estates were farmed on a large scale by tenants holding leases at a money-rent, and in the North these farms were numerous and answered well. But the backwardness and the want of capital, which blighted all French agriculture in the eighteenth century, helped to render farm-leases unpopular, and most large proprietors fell back on the system of Métayage, or farming at half profits, under which the landlord supplied and stocked the land, while the labourer gave his labour, and the profits were shared between the two. In Anjou, where the landlords resided on their estates, knew their Métayers personally, and supervised their labours, this system prospered. But in much the greater part of France the Métayers were left to themselves by the landlords, and struggled on in the greatest distress, without enterprise, without capital, often deeply in debt, hardly making enough to yield them the bare means of subsistence, and loath to exert themselves to swell the profits, which they had to divide with a master, who neither knew nor cared for them. 'The Métayer,' says a compassionate seigneur, 'is kept in an abject state by men who are not at all inhuman, but whose prejudices ... lead them to regard him as a different species of being.' Before the outbreak of the Revolution, serfdom, except in some outlying districts, had been extinguished in France; but the condition of the Métayer materially was little above the serf's. In some cases, it is true, he had managed to purchase, independently of his Métairie, a little plot of land of his own, which he cultivated with minute and arduous attention; and in certain districts these plots of ground repaid the toil spent on them, and taught their owners the self-respect of ownership and the dignity which independence gives. But, generally speaking, even these small allotments, numerous as they were, were wretchedly unproductive, and the Métayers and day-labourers who owned them shared the common depression of their class.