HIRING, in law, may be defined as a contract by which one man grants the use of a thing to another in re-turn for a certain price. It corresponds to the locatio-con-ductio of Roman law. That contract was either a letting of a thing (locatio-condactio rei) or of labour (locatio operarum). The distinguishing feature of the contract was the price. Thus the contracts of mutuum, commodatum, depositum, and mandatum, which are all gratuitous con-tracts, become, if a price is fixed, cases of locatio-conductio. In modern English law the term can scarcely be said to be used in a strictly technical sense. The contracts which the Roman law grouped together under the head of locatio-conductio—such as those of landlord and tenant, master and servant, &c.—are not in English law treated as cases ! of hiring but as independent varieties of contract. Neither in law books nor in ordinary discourse could a tenant farmer be said to hire his land. Hiring would generally be applied to contracts in which the services of a man or the use of a thing are engaged for a short time.