colonus
Colonus is a Latin term used in ancient Rome to denote a tenant farmer who cultivated land owned by another person, typically a landowner or the state. A colonus was a free person, not a slave, who held a lease or a putative right to work a parcel of land in return for rent or a portion of the harvest. In the Roman countryside, colon i often worked on estates as part of a hierarchical system of landholding and labor.
The typical arrangement involved paying rent, which could be in money or in produce, and occasionally rendering
Historically, the colonate served as a mechanism to stabilize agricultural production amid demographic and economic change.
Colonus, in scholarly use, refers to this class of rural tenants in Roman agrarian life and is