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CHRONICLES OF CANADA Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton In thirty-two volumes

Volume 5

THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism

AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE

What would history be without the picturesque annals of the Gallic race? This is a question which the serious student may well ask himself as he works his way through the chronicles of a dozen centuries. From the age of Charlemagne to the last of the Bonapartes is a long stride down the ages; but there was never a time in all these years when men might make reckonings in the arithmetic of European politics without taking into account the prestige, the power, and even the primacy of France. There were times without number when France among her neighbours made herself hated with an undying hate; there were times, again, when she rallied them to her side in friendship and admiration. There were epochs in which her hegemony passed unquestioned among men of other lands, and there were times when a sudden shift in fortune seemed to lay the nation prostrate, with none so poor to do her reverence.

It was France that first brought an orderly nationalism out of feudal chaos; it was her royal house of Capet that rallied Europe to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre and led the greatest of the crusades to Palestine. Yet the France of the last crusades was within a century the France of Crecy, just as the France of Austerlitz was more speedily the France of Waterloo; and men who followed the tricolour at Solferino lived to see it furled in humiliation at Sedan. No other country has had a history as prolific in triumph and reverse, in epochs of peaceful progress and periods of civil commotion, in pageant and tragedy, in all that gives fascination to historical narrative. Happy the land whose annals are tiresome! Not such has been the fortune of poor old France.

It was during one of her proud and prosperous eras that France began her task of creating an empire beyond the Atlantic. At no time, indeed, was she better equipped for the work. No power of Western Europe since the days of Roman glory had possessed such facilities for conquering and governing new lands. If ever there was a land able and ready to take up the white man's burden it was the France of the seventeenth century. The nation had become the first military power of Europe. Spain and Italy had ceased to be serious rivals. Even England, under the Stuart dynasty, tacitly admitted the military primacy of France. Nor was this superiority of the French confined to the science of war. It passed unquestioned in the arts of peace. Even Rome at the height of her power could not dominate every field of human activity. She could rule the people with authority and overcome the proud; but even her own poets rendered homage to Greece in the realms of art, sculpture, and eloquence. But France was the aesthetic as well as the military dictator of seventeenth- century Europe. Her authority was supreme, as Macaulay says, on all matters from orthodoxy in architecture to the proper cut of a courtier's clothes. Her monarchs were the first gentlemen of Europe. Her nobility set the social standards of the day. The rank and file of her people--and there were at least twenty million of them in the days of Louis Quatorze--were making a fertile land yield its full increase. The country was powerful, rich, prosperous, and, for the time being, outwardly contented.

For a half-century following the abortive efforts of Cartier and Roberval, the French authorities had made no serious or successful attempt to plant a colony in the New World. That is not surprising, for there were troubles in plenty at home. Huguenots and Catholics were at each other's throats; the wars of the Fronde convulsed the land; and it was not till the very end of the sixteenth century that the country settled down to peace within its own borders. Some facetious chronicler has remarked that the three chief causes of early warfare were Christianity, herrings, and cloves. There is much golden truth in that nugget. For if one could take from human history all the strife that has been due either to bigotry or to commercial avarice, a fair portion of the bloodstreaks would be washed from its pages. For the time being, at any rate, France had so much fighting at home that she was unable, like her Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English neighbours, to gain strategic points for future fighting abroad. Those were days when, if a people would possess the gates of their enemies, it behoved them to begin early. France made a late start, and she was forced to take, in consequence, what other nations had shown no eagerness to seize.

It was Samuel Champlain, a seaman of Brouage, who first secured for France and for Frenchmen a sure foothold in North America, and thus became the herald of Bourbon imperialism. After a youth spent at sea, Champlain engaged for some years in the armed conflicts with the Huguenots; then he returned to his old marine life once more. He sailed to the Spanish main and elsewhere, thereby gaining skill as a navigator and ambition to be an explorer of new coasts. In 1603 came an opportunity to join an expedition to the St Lawrence, and from this time to the end of his days the Brouage mariner gave his whole interest and energies to the work of planting an outpost of empire in the New World. Champlain was scarcely thirty-six when he made his first voyage to Canada; he died at Quebec on Christmas Day, 1635. His service to the king and nation extended over three decades.

With the crew of his little vessel, the Don de Dieu, Champlain cast anchor on July 9, 1608, beneath the frowning natural ramparts of Cape Diamond, and became the founder of a city built upon a rock. The felling of trees and the hewing of wood began. Within a few weeks Champlain raised his rude fort, brought his provisions ashore, established relations with the Indians, and made ready with his twenty-eight followers to spend the winter in the new settlement. It was a painful experience. The winter was long and bitter; scurvy raided the Frenchmen's cramped quarters, and in the spring only eight followers were alive to greet the ship which came with new colonists and supplies. It took a soul of iron to continue the project of nation-planting after such a tragic beginning; but Champlain was not the man to recoil from the task. More settlers were landed; women and children were brought along; land was broken for cultivation; and in due course a little village grew up about the fort. This was Quebec, the centre and soul of French hopes beyond the Atlantic.

For the first twenty years of its existence the little colony had a stormy time. Some of the settlers were unruly, and gave Champlain, who was both maker and enforcer of the laws, a hard task to hold them in control. During these years the king took little interest in his new domains; settlers came slowly, and those who came seemed to be far more interested in trading with the Indians than in carving out permanent homes for themselves. Few there were among them who thought of anything but a quick competence from the profits of the fur trade, and a return to France at the earliest opportunity thereafter.

Now it was the royal idea, in so far as the busy monarch of France had any fixed purpose in the matter, that the colony should be placed upon a feudal basis--that lands should be granted and sub-granted on feudal terms. In other words, the king or his representative stood ready to give large tracts or fiefs in New France to all immigrants whose station in life warranted the belief that they would maintain the dignity of seigneurs. These, in turn, were to sub-grant the land to ordinary settlers, who came without financial resources, sent across usually at the expense of His Majesty. In this way the French authorities hoped to create a powerful military colony with a feudal hierarchy as its outstanding feature.

Feudalism is a much-abused term. To the minds of most laymen it has a rather hazy association with things despotic, oppressive, and mediaeval. The mere mention of the term conjures up those days of the Dark Ages when armour-clad knights found their chief recreation in running lances through one another; when the overworked, underfed labourers of the field cringed and cowered before every lordly whim. Most readers seem to get their notions of chivalry from Scott's Talisman, and their ideas on feudalism from the same author's immortal Ivanhoe. While scholars keep up a merry disputation as to the historical origin of the feudal system, the public imagination goes steadily on with its own curious picture of how that system lived and moved and had its being. A prolix tale of origins would be out of place in this chronicle; but even the mind of the man in the street ought to be set right as regards what feudalism was designed to do, and what in fact it did, for mankind, while civilization battled its way down the ages.

Feudalism was a system of social relations based upon land. It grew out of the chaos which came upon Europe in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire. The fall of Roman power flattened the whole political structure of Western Europe, and nothing arose to take its place. Every lord or princeling was left to depend for defence upon the strength of his own arm; so he gathered around him as many vassals as he could. He gave them land; they gave him what he most wanted,--a promise to serve and aid in time of war. The lord gave and promised to guard; the vassal took and promised to serve. Thus there was created a personal relation, a bond of mutual loyalty, wardship, and service, which bound liegeman to lord with hoops of steel. No one can read Carlyle's trenchant Past and Present without bearing away some vivid and altogether wholesome impressions concerning the essential humanity of this great mediaeval institution. It shares with the Christian Church the honour of having made life worth living in days when all else combined to make it intolerable. It brought at least a semblance of social, economic, and political order out of helpless and hopeless disorganization. It helped Europe slowly to recover from the greatest catastrophe in all her history.

But our little systems have their day, as the poet assures us. They have their day and cease to be. Feudalism had its day, from dawn to twilight a day of picturesque memory. But it did not cease to exist when its day of service was done. Long after the necessity for mutual service and protection had passed away; long after the growth of firm monarchies with powerful standing armies had established the reign of law, the feudal system kept its hold upon the social order in France and elsewhere. The obligation of military service, when no longer needed, was replaced by dues and payments. The modern cash nexus replaced the old personal bond between vassal and lord. The feudal system became the seigneurial system. The lord became the seigneur; the vassal became the censitaire or peasant cultivator whose chief function was to yield revenue for his seigneur's purse. These were great changes which sapped the spirit of the ancient institution. No longer bound to their dependants by any personal tie, the seigneurs usually turned affairs over to their bailiffs, men with hearts of adamant, who squeezed from the seigneuries every sou the hapless peasantry could yield. These publicans of the old regime have much to answer for. They and their work were not least among the causes which brought upon the crown and upon the privileged orders that terrible retribution of the Red Terror. Not with the mediaeval institution of feudalism, but with its emaciated descendant, the seigneurial system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ought men to associate, if they must, their notions of grinding oppression and class hatred.

Out to his new colony on the St Lawrence the king sent this seigneurial system. A gross and gratuitous outrage, a characteristic manifestation of Bourbon stupidity--that is a common verdict upon the royal action. But it may well be asked: What else was there to do? The seigneurial system was still the basis of land tenure in France. The nobility and even the throne rested upon it. The Church sanctioned and supported it. The people in general, whatever their attitude towards seigneurialism, were familiar with no other system of landholding. It was not, like the encomienda system which Spain planted in Mexico, an arrangement cut out of new cloth for the more ruthless exploitation of a fruitful domain. The Puritan who went to Massachusetts Bay took his system of socage tenure along with him. The common law went with the flag of England. It was quite as natural that the Custom of Paris should follow the fleurs-de-lis.

There was every reason to expect, moreover, that in the New World the seigneurial system would soon free itself from those barnacles of privilege and oppression which were encrusted on its sides at home. Here was a small settlement of pioneers surrounded by hostile aborigines. The royal arm, strong as it was at home, could not well afford protection a thousand leagues away. The colony must organize and learn to protect itself. In other words, the colonial environment was very much like that in which the yeomen of the Dark Ages had found themselves. And might not its dangers be faced in the old feudal way? They were faced in this way. In the history of French Canada we find the seigneurial system forced back towards its old feudal plane. We see it gain in vitality; we see the old personal bond between lord and vassal restored to some of its pristine strength; we see the military aspects of the system revived, and its more sordid phases thrust aside. It turned New France into a huge armed camp; it gave the colony a closely knit military organization; and, in a day when Canada needed every ounce of her strength to ward off encircling enemies both white and red, it did for her what no other system could be expected to do.

This system of company exploitation was particularly popular with the monarchs of all these European countries. It made no demands on the royal purse. If failure attended the company's ventures the king bore no financial loss. But if the company succeeded, if its profits were large and its achievements great, the king might easily step in and claim his share of it all as the price of royal protection and patronage. In both England and Holland the scheme worked out in that way. An English stock company began and developed the work which finally placed India in the possession of the British crown; a similar Dutch organization in due course handed over Java as a rich patrimony to the king of the Netherlands. France, however, was not so fortunate. True enough, the Company of One Hundred Associates made a brave start; its charter gave great privileges, and placed on the company large obligations; it seemed as though a new era in French colonization had begun. 'Having in view the establishment of a powerful military colony,' as this charter recites, the king gave to the associates the entire territory claimed by France in the western hemisphere, with power to govern, create trade, grant lands, and bestow titles of nobility. For its part the company was to send out settlers, at least two hundred of them a year; it was to provide them with free transportation, give them free lands and initial subsistence; it was to support priests and teachers--in fact, to do all things necessary for the creation of that 'powerful military colony' which His Majesty had in expectation.

It happened, however, that the first fleet the company dispatched in 1628 did not reach Canada. The ships were attacked and captured, and in the following year Quebec itself fell into English hands. After its restoration in 1632 the company, greatly crippled, resumed operations, but did very little for the upbuilding of the colony. Few settlers were sent out at all, and of these still fewer went at the company's expense. In only two ways did the company, after the first few years of its existence, show any interest in its new territories. In the first place, its officers readily grasped the opportunity to make some profits out of the fur trade. Each year ships were sent to Quebec; merchandise was there landed, and a cargo of furs taken in exchange. If the vessel ever reached home, despite the risks of wreck and capture, a handsome dividend for those interested was the outcome. But the risks were great, and, after a time, when the profits declined, the company showed scant interest in even the trading part of its business. The other matter in which the directors of the company showed some interest was in the giving of seigneuries --chiefly to themselves. About sixty of these seigneuries were granted, large tracts all of them. One director of the company secured the whole island of Orleans as his seigneurial estate; others took generous slices on both shores of the St Lawrence. But not one of these men lifted a finger in the way of redeeming his huge fief from the wilderness. Every one seems to have had great zeal in getting hold of these vast tracts with the hope that they would some day rise in value. As for the development of the lands, however, neither the company nor its officers showed any such fervour in serving the royal cause. Thirty years after the company had taken its charter there were only about two thousand inhabitants in the colony; not more than four thousand arpents of land were under cultivation; trade had failed to increase; and the colonists were openly demanding a change of policy.

Tocqueville, shrewdest among historians of pre-revolutionary France, has somewhere pointed out that under the old regime the administration took the place of Providence. It sought to be as omniscient and as omnipotent; its ways were quite as inscrutable. In this policy the intendant was the royal man-of-all-work. The king spoke and the intendant transformed his words into action. As the sovereign's great interest in the colony moved him to speak often, the intendant's activity was prodigious. Ordinances, edicts, judgments and decrees fairly flew from his pen like sparks from an anvil. Nothing that needed setting aright was too inconsequential for a paternal order. An ordinance establishing a system of weights and measures for the colony rubs shoulders with another inhibiting the youngsters of Quebec from sleigh- riding down its hilly thoroughfares in icy weather. Printed in small type these decrees of the intendant's make up a bulky volume, the present-day interest of which is only to show how often the hand of authority thrust itself into the daily walk and conversation of Old Canada.

From first to last there were a dozen intendants of New France. Jean Talon, whose prudence and energy did much to set the colony on its feet, was the first; Fracois Bigot, the arch-plunderer of public funds, who did so much to bring the land to disaster, was the last. Between them came a line of sensible, hard-working, and loyal men who gave the best that was in them to the uphill task of making the colony what their royal master wanted it to be. Unfortunate it is that Bigot's astounding depravity has led too many readers and writers of Canadian history to look upon the intendancy of New France as a post held chiefly by rascals. As a class no men served the French crown more steadfastly or to better purpose.

Now it was to the intendant, in Talon's time, that the king committed the duty of granting seigneuries and of supervising the seigneurial system in operation. But, later, when Count Frontenac, the iron governor of the colony, came into conflict with the intendant on various other matters, he made complaint to the court at Versailles that the intendant was assuming too much authority. A royal decree therefore ordered that for the future these grants should he made by the governor and intendant jointly. Thenceforth they were usually so made, although in some cases the intendant disregarded the royal instructions and signed the title-deeds alone; and it appears that in all cases he was the main factor in determining who should get seigneuries and who should not. The intendant, moreover, made himself the chief guardian of the relations between the seigneurs and their seigneurial tenants. When the seigneurs tried to exact in the way of honours, dues, and services any more than the laws and customs of the land allowed, the watchful intendant promptly checkmated them with a restrictive decree. Or when some seigneurial claim, even though warranted by law or custom, seemed to be detrimental to the general wellbeing of the people, he regularly brought the matter to the attention of the home government and invoked its intervention. In all such matters he was praetor and tribune combined. Without the intendancy the seigneurial system would soon have become an agent of oppression, for some Canadian seigneurs were quite as avaricious as their friends at home.

The heyday of Canadian feudalism was the period from 1663 to about 1750. During this interval nearly three hundred fiefs were granted. Most of them went to officials of the civil administration, many to retired military officers, many others to the Church and its affiliated institutions, and some to merchants and other lay inhabitants of the colony. Certain seigneurs set to work with real zeal, bringing out settlers from France and steadily getting larger portions of their fiefs under cultivation. Others showed far less enterprise, and some no enterprise at all. From time to time the king and his ministers would make inquiry as to the progress being made. The intendant would reply with a memoire often of pitiless length, setting forth the facts and figures. Then His Majesty would respond with an edict ordering that all seigneurs who did not forthwith help the colony by putting settlers on their lands should have their grants revoked. But the seigneurs who were most at fault in this regard were usually the ones who had most influence in the little administrative circle at Quebec. Hence the king's orders were never enforced to the letter, and sometimes not enforced at all. Unlike the Parliament of Paris, the Sovereign Council at Quebec never refused to register a royal edict. What would have happened in the event of its doing so is a query that legal antiquarians might find difficult to answer. Even a sovereign decree bearing the Bourbon sign-manual could not gain the force of law in Canada except by being spread upon the council's records. In France the king could come clattering with his escort to the council hall and there, by his so termed 'bed of justice,' compel the registration of his decrees. But the Chateau of St Louis at Quebec was too far away for any such violent procedure.

In addition to meeting the annual deficit of the colony the royal authorities encouraged and assisted emigration to New France. Whole shiploads of settlers were at times gathered and sent to Quebec. The seigneurs, by the terms of their grants, should have been active in this work; but very few of them took any share in it. Nearly the entire task of applying a stimulus to emigration was thrust on the king and his officials at home. Year after gear the governor and intendant grew increasingly urgent in repeated requests for more settlers, until a rebuke arrived in a suggestion that the king was not minded to depopulate France in order to people his colonies. The influx of settlers was relatively large during the years 1663-72. Then it dwindled perceptibly, although immigrants kept coming year by year so long as war did not completely cut off communication with France. The colony gained bravely, moreover, through its own natural increase, for the colonial birth-rate was high, large families being everywhere the rule. In 1673 the population of New France was figured at about seven thousand; in 1760 it had reached nearly fifty thousand.

The development of agriculture on the seigneurial lands did not, however, keep pace with growth in population. It was hard to keep settlers to the prosaic task of tilling the soil. There were too many distractions, chief among them the lure of the Indian trade. The traffic in furs offered large profits and equally large risks; but it always yielded a full dividend of adventure and hair-raising experience. The fascination of the forest life gripped the young men of the colony, and they left for the wilderness by the hundred. There is a roving strain in Norman blood. It brought the Norseman to France and Sicily; it took his descendants from the plough and sent them over the waters of the New World, from the St Lawrence to the Lakes and from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Church and state joined hands in attempt to keep them at home. Royal decrees of outlawry and ecclesiastical edicts of excommunication were issued against them. Seigneurs stipulated that their lands would be forfeited unless so many arpents were put under crop each year. But all to little avail. So far as developing the permanent resources of the colony were concerned these coureurs de bois might just as well have remained in France. Once in a while a horde of them descended to Quebec or Montreal, disposed of their furs to merchants, filled themselves with brandy and turned bedlam loose in the town. Then before the authorities could unwind the red tape of legal procedure they were off again to the wilds.

This Indian trade, despite the large and valuable cargoes of beaver pelts which it enabled New France to send home, was a curse to the colony. It drew from husbandry the best blood of the land, the young men of strength, initiative, and perseverance. It wrecked the health and character of thousands. It drew the Church and the civil government into profitless quarrels. The bishop flayed the governor for letting this trade go on. The governor could not, dared not, and sometimes did not want to stop it. At any rate it was a great obstacle to agricultural progress. With it and other distractions in existence the clearing of the seigneuries proceeded very slowly. At the close of French dominion in 1760 the amount of cultivated land was only about three hundred thousand arpents, or about five acres for every head of population--not a very satisfactory showing for a century of Bourbon imperialism in the St Lawrence valley.

Yet the colony, when the English conquerors came upon it in 1759, was far from being on its last legs. It had overcome the worst of its obstacles and had created a foundation upon which solid building might be done. Its people had reached the stage of rude but tolerable comfort. Its highways of trade and intercourse had been freed from the danger of Indian raids. It had some small industries and was able to raise almost the whole of its own food-supply. The traveller who passed along the great river from Quebec to Montreal in the early autumn might see, as Peter Kalm in his Travels tells us he saw, field upon field of waving grain extending from the shores inward as far as the eye could reach, broken only here and there by tracts of meadow and woodland. The outposts of an empire at least had been established.

GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS

A good many people, as Robert Louis Stevenson once assured us, have a taste for 'heroic forms of excitement.' And it is well for the element of interest in history that this has been so at all ages and among all races of men. The most picturesque and fascinating figures in the recorded annals of nations have been the pioneers,--the men who have not been content to do what other men of their day were doing. Without them and their achievements history might still be read for information, but not for pleasure; it might still instruct, but it would hardly inspire.

In the narratives of colonization there is ample evidence that Frenchmen of the seventeenth century were not lacking in their thirst for excitement, whether heroic or otherwise. Their race furnished the New World with explorers and forest merchants by the hundred. The most venturesome voyageurs, the most intrepid traders, and the most untiring missionaries were Frenchmen. No European stock showed such versatility in its relations with the aborigines; none proved so ready to bear all manner of hardship and discomfort for the sake of the thrills which came from setting foot where no white man had ever trod. The Frenchman of those days was no weakling either in body or in spirit; he did not shrink from privation or danger; in tasks requiring courage and fortitude he was ready to lead the way. When he came to the New World he wanted the sort of life that would keep him always on his mettle, and that could not be found within the cultivated borders of seigneury and parish. Hence it was that Canada in her earliest years found plenty of pioneers, but not always of the right type. The colony needed yeomen who would put their hands to the plough, who would become pioneers of agriculture. Such, however, were altogether too few, and the yearly harvest of grain made a poor showing when compared with the colony's annual crop of beaver skins. Yet the yeoman did more for the permanent upbuilding of the land than the trader, and his efforts ought to have their recognition in any chronicle of colonial achievement.

It was in the mind of the king that 'persons of quality' as well as peasants should be induced to make their homes in New France. There were enough landless gentlemen in France; why should they not be used as the basis of a seigneurial nobility in the colony? It was with this idea in view that the Company of One Hundred Associates was empowered not only to grant large tracts of land in the wilderness, but to give the rank of gentilhomme to those who received such fiefs. Frenchmen of good birth, however, showed no disposition to become resident seigneurs of New France during the first half-century of its history. The role of a 'gentleman of the wilderness' did not appeal very strongly even to those who had no tangible asset but the family name. Hence it was that not a half-dozen seigneurs were in actual occupancy of their lands on the St Lawrence when the king took the colony out of the company's hands in 1663.

But when Talon came to the colony as intendant in 1665 this situation was quickly changed. Uncleared seigneuries were declared forfeited. Actual occupancy was made a condition of all future grants. The colony must be built up, if at all, by its own people. The king was urged to send out settlers, and he responded handsomely. They came by hundreds. The colony's entire population, including officials, priests, traders, seigneurs, and habitants, together with women and children, was about three thousand, according to a census taken a year after Talon arrived. Two years later, owing largely to the intendant's unceasing efforts, it had practically doubled. Nothing was left undone to coax emigrants from France. Money grants and free transportation were given with unwonted generosity, although even in the early years of his reign the coffers of Louis Quatorze were leaking with extravagance at every point. At least a million livres in these five years is a sober estimate of what the royal treasury must have spent in the work of colonizing Canada.

No campaign for immigrants in modern days has been more assiduously carried on. Officials from Paris searched the provinces, gathering together all who could be induced to go. The intendant particularly asked that women be sent to the colony, strong and vigorous peasant girls who would make suitable wives for the habitants. The king gratified him by sending whole shiploads of them in charge of nuns. As to who they were, and where they came from, one cannot be altogether sure. The English agent at Paris wrote that they were 'lewd strumpets gathered up by the officers of the city,' and even the saintly Mere Marie de l'Incarnation confessed that there was beaucoup de canaille among them. La Hontan has left us a racy picture of their arrival and their distribution among the rustic swains of the colony, who scrimmaged for points of vantage when boatloads of women came ashore from the ships.

The male settlers, on the other hand, came from all classes and from all parts of France. But Normandy, Brittany, Picardy, and Perche afforded the best recruiting grounds; from all of them came artisans and sturdy peasants. Normandy furnished more than all the others put together, so much so that Canada in the seventeenth century was more properly a Norman than a French colony. The colonial church registers, which have been kept with scrupulous care, show that more than half the settlers who came to Canada during the decade after 1664. were of Norman origin; while in 1680 it was estimated that at least four-fifths of the entire population of New France had some Norman blood in their veins. Officials and merchants came chiefly from Paris, and they coloured the life of the little settlement at Quebec with a Parisian gaiety; but the Norman dominated the fields--his race formed the backbone of the rural population.

Arriving at Quebec the incoming settlers were met by officials and friends. Proper arrangements for quartering them until they could get settled were always made beforehand. If the new-comer were a man of quality, that is to say, if he had been anything better than a peasant at home, and especially if he brought any funds with him, he applied to the intendant for a seigneury. Talon was liberal in such matters. He stood ready to give a seigneurial grant to any one who would promise to spend money in clearing his land. This liberality, however, was often ill-requited. Immigrants came to him and gave great assurances, took their title-deeds as seigneurs, and never upturned a single foot of sod. In other cases the new seigneurs set zealously to work and soon had good results to show.

In size these seigneuries varied greatly. The social rank and the reputed ability of the seigneur were the determining factors. Men who had been members of the noblesse in France received tracts as large as a Teutonic principality, comprising a hundred square miles or more. Those of less pretentious birth and limited means had to be content with a few thousand arpents. In general, however, a seigneury comprised at least a dozen square miles, almost always with a frontage on the great river and rear limits extending up into the foothills behind. The metes and bounds of the granted lands were always set forth in the letters-patent or title-deeds; but almost invariably with utter vagueness and ambiguity. The territory was not surveyed; each applicant, in filing his petition for a seigneury, was asked to describe the tract he desired. This description, usually inadequate and inaccurate, was copied in the deed, and in due course hopeless confusion resulted. It was well that most seigneurs had more land than they could use; had it not been for this their lawsuits over disputed boundaries would have been unending.

Liberal in the area of land granted to the new seigneurs, the crown was also liberal in the conditions exacted. The seigneur was asked for no initial money payment and no annual land dues. When his seigneury changed owners by sale or by inheritance other than in direct descent, a mutation fine known as the quint was payable to the public treasury. This, as its name implies, amounted to one-fifth of the seigneury's value; but it rarely accrued, and even when it did the generous monarch usually rebated a part or all of it. Not a single sou was ever exacted by the crown from the great majority of the seigneurs. If agriculture made slow headway in New France it was not because officialdom exploited the land to its own profit. Never were the landowners of a new country treated more generously or given greater incentive to diligence.

But if the king did not ask the seigneurs for money he asked for other things. He required, in the first place, that each should render fealty and homage with due feudal ceremony to his official representative at Quebec. Accordingly, the first duty of the seigneur, after taking possession of his new domain, was to repair without sword or spur to the Chateau of St Louis at Quebec, a gloomy stone structure that frowned on the settlement from the heights behind. Here, on bended knee before the governor, the new liegeman swore fealty to his lord the king and promised to render due obedience in all lawful matters. This was one of the things which gave a tinge of chivalry to Canadian feudalism, and helped to make the social life of a distant colony echo faintly the pomp and ceremony of Versailles. The seigneur, whether at home or beyond the seas, was never allowed to forget the obligation of personal fidelity imposed upon him by his king.

A more arduous undertaking next confronted the new seigneur. It was not the royal intention that he should fold his talent in a napkin. On the contrary, the seigneur was endowed with his rank and estate to the sole end that he should become an active agent in making the colony grow. He was expected to live on his land, to level the forest, to clear fields, and to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. He was expected to have his seigneury surveyed into farms, or en censive holdings, and to procure, as quickly as might be, settlers for these farms. It was highly desirable, of course, that the seigneurs should lend a hand in encouraging the immigration of people from their old homes in France. Some of them did this. Robert Giffard, who held the seigneury of Beauport just below Quebec, was a notable example. The great majority of the seigneurs, however, made only half-hearted attempts in this direction, and their efforts went for little or nothing. What they did was to meet, on arrival at Quebec, the shiploads of settlers sent out by the royal officers. There they gathered about the incoming vessel, like so many land agents, each explaining what advantages in the way of a good location and fertile soil he had to offer. Those seigneurs who had obtained tracts near the settlement at Quebec had, of course, a great advantage in all this, for the new-comers naturally preferred to set up their homes where a church would be near at hand, and where they could be in touch with other families during the long winters. Consequently the best locations in all the seigneuries near Quebec were soon taken, and then settlers had to take lands more remote from the little metropolis of the colony. They went to the seigneuries near Montreal and Three Rivers; when the best lands in these areas were taken up, they dispersed themselves along the whole north shore of the St Lawrence from below the Montmorency to its junction with the Ottawa. The north shore having been well dotted with the whitewashed homes, the south shore came in for its due share of attention, and in the last half-century of the French regime a good many settlers were provided for in that region.

For a time the immigrants found little or no difficulty in obtaining farms on easy terms. Seigneurs were glad to give them land without any initial payment and frequently promised exemption from the usual seigneurial dues for the first few years. In any case these dues and services, which will be explained more fully later on, were not burdensome. Any settler of reasonable industry and intelligence could satisfy these ordinary demands without difficulty. Translated into an annual money rental they would have amounted to but a few sous per acre. But this happy situation did not long endure. As the settlers continued to come, and as children born in the colony grew to manhood, the demand for well-situated farms grew more brisk, and some of the seigneurs found that they need no longer seek tenants for their lands. On the contrary, they found that men desiring land would come to them and offer to pay not only the regular seigneurial dues, but an entry fee or bonus in addition. The best situated lands, in other words, had acquired a margin of value over lands not so well situated, and the favoured seigneurs turned this to their own profit. During the early pears of the eighteenth century, therefore, the practice of exacting a prix d'entree became common; indeed it was difficult for a settler to get the lands he most desired except by making such payment. As most of the newcomers could not afford to do this they were often forced to make their homes in unfavourable, out-of-the-way places, while better situations remained untouched by axe or plough.

The watchful attention of the intendant Raudot, however, was in due course drawn to this difficulty. It was a development not at all to his liking. He thought it would be frowned upon by the king and his ministers if properly brought to their notice, and in 1707 he wrote frankly to his superiors concerning it. First of all he complained that 'a spirit of business speculation, which has always more of cunning and chicane than of truth and righteousness in it,' was finding its way into the hearts of the people. The seigneurs in particular, he alleged, were becoming mercenary; they were taking advantage of technicalities to make the habitants pay more than their just dues. In many cases settlers had taken up lands on the merely oral assurances of the seigneurs; then when they got their deeds in writing these deeds contained various provisions which they had not counted upon and which were not fair. 'Hence,' declared the intendant, 'a great abuse has arisen, which is that the habitants who have worked their farms without written titles have been subjected to heavy rents and dues, the seigneurs refusing to grant them regular deeds except on onerous conditions; and these conditions they find themselves obliged to accept, because otherwise they will have their labour for nothing.'

The royal authorities paid due heed to these complaints, and, although they did not accept all Raudot's suggestions, they proceeded to provide corrective measures in the usual way. This way, of course, was by the issue of royal edicts. Two of these decrees reached the colony in the due course of events. They are commonly known as the Arrets of Marly, and bear date July 11, 1711. Both were carefully prepared and their provisions show that the royal authorities understood just where the entire trouble lay.

Unfortunately for those most concerned, however, the royal orders were not allowed to become common knowledge in the colony. The decree was registered and duly promulgated; then quickly forgotten. Few of the habitants seem to have ever heard of it; newcomers, of course, knew nothing of their rights under its provisions. Seigneurs continued to get special terms for advantageous locations, the applicants for lands being usually quite willing to pay a bonus whenever they could afford to do so. Now and then some one, having heard of the royal arret, would appeal to the intendant, whereupon the seigneur made haste to straighten out things satisfactorily. Then, as now, the presumption was that the people knew the law, and were in a position to take advantage of its protecting features; but the agencies of information were so few that the provisions of a new decree rarely became common property.

The second of the two arrets of Marly was designed to uphold the hands of those seigneurs who were trying to do right. The king and his ministers were convinced, from the information which had come to them, that not all the 'cunning and chicane' in land dealings came from the seigneurs. The habitants were themselves in part to blame. In many cases settlers had taken good lands, had cut down a few trees, thinking thereby to make a technical compliance with requirements, and were spending their energies in the fur trade. It was the royal opinion that real homesteading should be insisted upon, and he decreed, accordingly, that wherever a habitant did not make a substantial start in clearing his farm, the land should be forfeited in a year to the seigneur. This arret, unlike its companion decree, was rigidly enforced. The council at Quebec was made up of seigneurs, and to the seigneurs as a whole its provisions were soon made known. During the twenty years following the issue of the decree of 1711 the intendant was called upon to declare the forfeiture of over two hundred farms, the owners of which had not fulfilled the obligation to establish a hearth and home upon the lands. As a spur to the slothful this decree appears to have had a wholesome effect; although, in spite of all that could be done, the agricultural development of the colony proceeded with exasperating slowness. Each year the governor and intendant tried in their dispatches to put the colony's best foot forward; every autumn the ships took home expressions of achievement and hope; but between the lines the patient king must have read much that was discouraging.

It may be well at this point to take a general survey of the colonial seigneuries, noting what progress had been made. The seigneurial system had been a half-century in full flourish--what had it accomplished? That is evidently just what the home authorities wanted to know when they arranged for a topographical and general report on the seigneuries in 1712. This investigation, on the intendant's advice, was entrusted to an engineer, Gedeon de Catalogne. Catalogne, who was a native of Bearn, born in 1662, came to Canada about the year 1685. He was engaged on the improvement of the colonial fortifications until the intendant set him to work on a survey of the seigneuries. The work occupied two or three years, in the course of which he prepared three excellent maps showing the situation and extent of all the seigneuries in the districts of Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal. The first two maps have been preserved; that of the district of Montreal was probably lost at sea on its way to France. With the two maps Catalogne presented a long report on the ownership, resources, and general progress of the seigneuries. Ninety-three of them are dealt with in all, the report giving in each case the situation and extent of the tract, the nature of the soil and its adaptability to different products, the mineral deposits and timber, the opportunities for industry and trade, the name and rank of the seigneur, the way in which he had come into possession of the seigneury, the provisions made for religious worship, and various other matters.

Catalogne's report shows that in 1712 practically all the lands bordering on both sides of the St Lawrence from Montreal to some distance below Quebec had been made into seigneuries. Likewise the islands in the river and the lands on both sides of the Richelieu had been apportioned either to the Church orders or to lay seigneurs. All these tracts were, for administrative purposes, grouped into the three districts of Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec; the intendant himself took direct charge of affairs at Quebec, but in the other two settlements he was represented by a subordinate. Each district, likewise, had its own royal court, and from the decisions of these tribunals appeals might be carried before the Superior Council, which held its weekly sessions at the colonial capital.

On the island of Montreal was the most important of the seigneuries in the district bearing its name. It was held by the Seminary of St Sulpice, and its six parishes contained in 1712 a population of over two thousand. The soil of the island was fertile and the situation was excellent for trading purposes, for it commanded the routes usually taken by the fur flotillas both from the Great Lakes and from the regions of Georgian Bay. The lands were steadily rising in value, and this seigneury soon became one of the most prosperous areas of the colony. The seminary also owned the seigneury of St Sulpice on the north shore of the river, some little distance below the island.

Stretching farther along this northern shore were various large seigneuries given chiefly to officers or former officers of the civil government, and now held by their heirs. La Valterie, Lanoraie, and Berthier-en-Haut, were the most conspicuous among these riparian fiefs. Across the stream lay Chateauguay and Longueuil, the patrimony of the Le Moynes; likewise the seigneuries of Varennes, Vercheres, Contrecoeur, St Ours, and Sorel. All of these were among the so-termed military seigneuries, having been originally given to retired officers of the Carignan regiment. A dozen other seigneurial properties, bearing names of less conspicuous interest, scattered themselves along both sides of the great waterway. Along the Richelieu from its junction with the St Lawrence to the outer limits of safe settlement in the direction of Lake Champlain, a number of seigneurial grants had been effected. The historic fief of Sorel commanded the confluence of the rivers; behind it lay Chambly and the other properties of the adventurous Hertels. These were settled chiefly by the disbanded Carignan soldiers, and it was their task to guard the southern gateway.

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