Read Ebook: The Seigneurs of Old Canada : A Chronicle of New World Feudalism by Munro William Bennett Langton H H Hugh Hornby Editor Wrong George McKinnon Editor

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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.

The coming of this regiment, its work in the colony, and its ultimate settlement, is an interesting story, illustrating as it does the deep personal interest which the Grand Monarque displayed in the development of his new dominions. For a long time prior to 1665 the land had been scourged at frequent intervals by Iroquois raids. Bands of marauding redskins would creep stealthily upon some outlying seigneury, butcher its people, burn everything in sight, and then decamp swiftly to their forest lairs. The colonial authorities, helpless to guard their entire frontiers and unable to foretell where the next blow would fall, endured the terrors of this situation for many years. In utter desperation they at length called on the king for a regiment of trained troops as the nucleus of a punitive expedition. The Iroquois would be tracked to their own villages and there given a memorable lesson in letters of blood and iron. The king, as usual, complied, and on a bright June day in 1665 a glittering cavalcade disembarked at Quebec. The Marquis de Tracy with two hundred gaily caparisoned officers and men of the regiment of Carignan-Salieres formed this first detachment; the other companies followed a little later. Quebec was like a city relieved from a long siege. Its people were in a frenzy of joy.

The work which the regiment had been sent out to do was soon begun. The undertaking was more difficult than had been anticipated, and two expeditions were needed to accomplish it; but the Iroquois were thoroughly chastened, and by the close of 1666 the colony once more breathed easily. How long, however, would it be permitted to do so? Would not the departure of the regiment be a signal to the Mohawks that they might once again raid the colony's borders with impunity? Talon thought that it would, hence he hastened to devise a plan whereby the Carignans might be kept permanently in Canada. To hold them there as a regular garrison was out of the question; it would cost too much to maintain six hundred men in idleness. So the intendant proposed to the king that the regiment should be disbanded at Quebec, and that all its members should be given inducements to make their homes in the colony.

Once more the king assented. He agreed that the officers of the regiment should be offered seigneuries, and provided with funds to make a start in improving them. For the rank and file who should prove willing to take lands within the seigneuries of the officers the king consented to provide a year's subsistence and a liberal grant in money. The terms proved attractive to some of the officers and to most of the men. Accordingly, arrangements were at once made for getting them established on their new estates. Just how many permanent settlers were added to the colonial population in this way is not easy to ascertain; but about twenty-five officers together with nearly four hundred men volunteered to stay. Most of the non-commissioned officers and men showed themselves to be made of good stuff; their days were long in the land, and their descendants by the thousand still possess the valley of the Richelieu. But the officers, good soldiers though they were, proved to be rather faint-hearted pioneers. The task of beating swords into ploughshares was not altogether to their tastes. Hence it was that many of them got into debt, mortgaged their seigneuries to Quebec or Montreal merchants, soon lost their lands, and finally drifted back to France.

Here was an interesting experiment in Roman imperial colonization repeated in the New World. When the empire of the Caesars was beginning to give way before the oncoming barbarians of Northern Europe, the practice of disbanding legions on the frontier and having them settle on the lands was adopted as a means of securing defence, without the necessity of spending large sums on permanent outpost garrisons. The retired soldier was a soldier still, but practically self-supporting in times of peace. These praedia militaria of the Romans gave Talon his idea of a military cantonment along the Richelieu, and in broaching his plans to the king he suggested that the 'practice of the politic and warlike Romans might be advantageously used in a land which, being so far away from its monarch, must trust for existence to the strength of its own arms.'

All who took lands in this region, whether seigneurs or habitants, were bound to serve in arms at the call of the king, although this obligation was not expressly provided in the deeds of land. Never was a call to arms without response. These military settlers and their sons after them were only too ready to gird on the sword at every opportunity. It was from this region that expeditions quietly set forth from time to time towards the borders of New England, and leaped like a lynx from the forest upon some isolated hamlet of Massachusetts or New York. The annals of Deerfield, Haverhill, and Schenectady bear to this day their tales of the Frenchman's ferocity, and all New England hated him with an unyielding hate. In guarding the southern portal he did his work with too much zeal, and his stinging blows finally goaded the English colonies to a policy of retaliation which cost the French very dearly.

But to return to the seigneuries along the river. The district of Three Rivers, extending on the north shore of the St Lawrence from Berthier-en-Haut to Grondines, and on the south from St Jean-Deschaillons east to Yamaska, was but sparsely populated when Catalogne prepared to report in 1712. Prominent seigneuries in this region were Pointe du Lac or Tonnancour, the estate of the Godefroys de Tonnancour; Cap de la Magdelaine and Batiscan, the patrimony of the Jesuits; the fief of Champlain, owned by Desjordy de Cabanac; Ste Anne de la Perade, Nicolet, and Becancour. Nicolet had passed into the hands of the Courvals, a trading family of Three Rivers, and Becancour was held by Pierre Robineau, the son of his famous father, Rene Robineau de Becancour. On all of these seigneuries some progress had been made, but often it amounted to very little. Better results had been obtained both eastward and westward of the region.

The district of Quebec was the first to be allotted in seigneuries, and here of course agriculture had made better headway. Grondines, La Chevrotiere, Portneuf, Pointe aux Trembles, Sillery, and Notre-Dame des Anges were all thriving properties ranging along the river bank eastward to the settlement at Quebec. Just beyond the town lay the flourishing fief of Beauport, originally owned by Robert Giffard, but now held by his heirs, the family of Juchereau Duchesnay. This seigneury was destined to loom up prominently in later days when Montcalm held Wolfe at bay for weeks along the Beauport shore. Fronting Beauport was the spacious island of Orleans with its several thriving parishes, all included within the seigneury of Francois Berthelot, on whom the king for his zeal and enterprise had conferred the title of Comte de St Laurent. A score of other seigneurial tracts, including Lotbiniere, Lauzon, La Durantaye, Bellechasse, Riviere Ouelle, and others well known to every student of Canadian genealogy, were included within the huge district round the ancient capital.

The king's representatives had been much too freehanded in granting land. No seigneur had a tenth of his tract under cultivation, yet all the best-located and most fertile soil of the colony had been given out. Those who came later had to take lands in out-of-the-way places, unless by good fortune they could secure the re-grant of something that had been abandoned. The royal generosity did not in the long run conduce to the upbuilding of the colony, and the home authorities in time recognized the imprudence of their policy. Hence it was that edict after edict sought to make these gentlemen of the wilderness give up whatever land they could not handle properly, and if these decrees of retrenchment had been strictly enforced most of the seigneurial estates would have been mercilessly reduced in area. But the seigneurs who were the most remiss happened to be the ones who sat at the council board in Quebec, and what they had they usually managed to hold, despite the king's command.

THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA--HEBERT, LA DURANTAYE, LE MOYNE

It was to the seigneurs that the king looked for active aid in promoting the agricultural interests of New France. Many of them disappointed him, but not all. There were seigneurs who, in their own way, gave the king's interests a great deal of loyal service, and showed what the colony was capable of doing if all its people worked with sufficient diligence and zeal. Three of these pioneers of the seigneuries have been singled out for special attention in this chapter, because each prefigures a type of seigneur who did what was expected of him, although not always in the prescribed way. Their work was far from being showy, and offers a writer no opportunity to make his pages glow. The priest and the trader afford better themes. But even the short and simple annals of the poor, if fruitful in achievement, are worth the recounting.

The honour of being the colony's first seigneur belongs to Louis Hebert, and it was a curious chain of events that brought him to the role of a yeoman in the St Lawrence valley. Like most of these pilgrim fathers of Canada, Hebert has left to posterity little or no information concerning his early life and his experience as tiller of virgin soil. That is a pity; for he had an interesting and varied career from first to last. What he did and what he saw others do during these troublous years would make a readable chronicle of adventure, perseverance, and ultimate achievement. As it is, we must merely glean what we can from stray allusions to him in the general narratives of early colonial life. These tell us not a tithe of what we should like to know; but even such shreds of information are precious, for Hebert was Canada's first patron of husbandry. He connected his name with no brilliant exploit either of war or of peace; he had his share of adventure, but no more than a hundred others in his day; the greater portion of his adult years were passed with a spade in his hands. But he embodies a type, and a worthy type it is.

Most of Canada's early settlers came from Normandy, but Louis Hebert was a native of Paris, born in about 1575. He had an apothecary's shop there, but apparently was not making a very marked success of his business when in 1604. he fell in with Biencourt de Poutrincourt, and was enlisted as a member of that voyageur's first expedition to Acadia. It was in these days the custom of ships to carry an apothecary or dispenser of health-giving herbs. His functions ran the whole gamut of medical practice from copious blood-letting to the dosing of sailors with concoctions of mysterious make. Not improbably Hebert set out with no intention to remain in America; but he found Port Royal to his liking, and there the historian Lescarbot soon found him not only 'sowing corn and planting vines,' but apparently 'taking great pleasure in the cultivation of the soil.' All this in a colony which comprised five persons, namely, two Jesuit fathers and their servant, Hebert, and one other.

With serious dangers all about, and lack of support at home, Port Royal could make no headway, and in 1613 Hebert made his way back to France. The apothecary's shop was re-opened, and the daily customers were no doubt regaled with stories of life among the wild aborigines of the west. But not for long. There was a trait of restlessness that would not down, and in 1616 the little shop again put up its shutters. Hebert had joined Champlain in the Brouage navigator's first voyage to the St Lawrence. This time the apothecary burned his bridges behind him, for he took his family along, and with them all his worldly effects. The family consisted of his wife, two daughters, and a young son. The trading company which was backing Champlain's enterprise promised that Hebert and his family should be paid a cash bonus and should receive, in addition to a tract of land, provisions and stores sufficient for their first two years in the colony. For his part, Hebert agreed to serve without pay as general medical officer of the settlement, to give his other services to the company when needed, and to keep his hands out of the fur trade. Nothing was said about his serving as legal officer of the colony as well; but that task became part o his varied experience. Not long after his arrival at Quebec, Hebert's name appears, with the title of procureur du Roi, at the foot of a petition sent home by the colonists to the king.

All this looked fair enough on its face, but as matters turned out, Hebert made a poor bargain. The company gave him only half the promised bonus, granted him no title to any land, and for three years insisted upon having all his time for its own service. A man of ordinary tenacity would have made his way back to France at the earliest opportunity. But Hebert was loyal to Champlain, whom he in no way blamed for his bad treatment. At Champlain's suggestion he simply took a piece of land above the settlement at Quebec, and without waiting for any formal title-deed began devoting all his spare hours to the task of getting it cleared and cultivated. His small tract comprised only about a dozen arpents on the heights above the village; and as he had no one to help him the work of clearing it moved slowly. Trees had to be felled and cut up, the stumps burned and removed, stones gathered into piles, and every foot of soil upturned with a spade. There were no ploughs in the colony at this time. To have brought ploughs from France or to have made them in the colony would have availed nothing, for there were no horses at Quebec. It was not until after the sturdy pioneer had finished his lifework that ploughs and horses came to lessen the labour of breaking new land.

Nevertheless, Hebert was able by unremitting industry to get the entire twelve arpents into cultivable shape within four or five years. With his labours he mingled intelligence. Part of the land was sown with maize, part sown with peas, beans, and other vegetables, a part set off as an orchard, and part reserved as pasture. The land was fertile and produced abundantly. A few head of cattle were easily provided for in all seasons by the wild hay which grew in plenty on the flats by the river. Here was an indication of what the colony could hope to do if all its settlers were men of Hebert's persistence and stability. But the other prominent men of the little settlement, although they may have turned their hands to gardening in a desultory way, let him remain, for the time being, the only real colonist in the land. On his farm, moreover, a house had been built during these same years with the aid of two artisans, but chiefly by the labour of the owner himself. It was a stone house, about twenty feet by forty in size, a one-story affair, unpretentious and unadorned, but regarded as one of the most comfortable abodes in the colony. The attractions of this home, and especially the hospitality of Madame Hebert and her daughters, are more than once alluded to in the meagre annals of the settlement. It was the first dwelling to be erected on the plateau above the village; it passed to Hebert's daughter, and was long known in local history as the house of the widow Couillard. Its exact situation was near the gate of the garden which now encircles the seminary, and the remains of its foundation walls were found there in 1866 by some workmen in the course of their excavations.

That strivings so worthy should have in the end won due recognition from official circles is not surprising. The only wonder is that this recognition was so long delayed. An explanation can be found, however, in the fact that the trading company which controlled the destinies of the colony during its precarious infancy was not a bit interested in the agricultural progress of New France. It had but two aims--in the first place to get profits from the fur trade, and in the second place to make sure that no interlopers got any share in this lucrative business. Its officers placed little value upon such work as Hebert was doing. But in 1623 the authorities were moved to accord him the honour of rank as a seigneur, and the first title-deed conveying a grant of land en seigneurie was issued to him on February 4 of that year. The deed bore the signature of the Duc de Montmorenci, titular viceroy of New France. Three years later a further deed, confirming Hebert's rights and title, and conveying to him an additional tract of land on the St Charles river, was issued to him by the succeeding viceroy, Henri de Levy, Duc de Ventadour.

The preamble of this document recounts the services of the new seigneur. 'Having left his relatives and friends to help establish a colony of Christian people in lands which are deprived of the knowledge of God, not being enlightened by His holy light,' the document proceeds, 'he has by his painful labours and industry cleared lands, fenced them, and erected buildings for himself, his family and his cattle.' In order, accordingly, 'to encourage those who may hereafter desire to inhabit and develop the said country of Canada,' the land held by Hebert, together with an additional square league on the shore of the St Charles, is given to him 'to have and to hold in fief noble for ever,' subject to such charges and conditions as might be later imposed by official decree.

When the Carignans stepped ashore at Quebec in 1665 one of their officers was Olivier Morel de la Durantaye, a captain in the regiment of Campelle, but attached to the Carignan-Salieres for its Canadian expedition. In the first expedition against the Mohawks he commanded the advance guard, and he was one of the small band who spent the terrible winter of 1666-67 at Fort Ste Anne near the head of Lake Champlain, subsisting on salt pork and a scant supply of mouldy flour. Several casks of reputedly good brandy, as Dollier de Casson records, had been sent to the fort, but to the chagrin of the diminutive garrison they turned out to contain salt water, the sailors having drunk the contents and refilled the casks on their way out from France. Warlike operations continued to engross Durantaye's attentions for a year or two longer, but when this work was finished he returned with some of his brother officers to France, while others remained in the colony, having taken up lands in accordance with Talon's plans. In 1670, however, he was back at Quebec again, and having married a daughter of the colony, applied at once for the grant of a seigneury. This was given to him in the form of a large tract, two leagues square, on the south shore of the lower St Lawrence, between the seigneury of Beaumont des Islets and the Bellechasse channel. To this fief of La Durantaye adjoining lands were subsequently added by new grants, and in 1674 the seigneur also obtained the fief of Kamouraska. His entire estate comprised about seventy thousand arpents, making him one of the largest landowners in the colony.

Durantaye began his work in a leisurely way, and the census of 1681 gives us the outcome of his ten years of effort. He himself had not taken up his abode on the land nor, so far as can be ascertained, had he spent any time or money in clearing its acreage. With his wife and four children he resided at Quebec, but from time to time he made visits to his holding and brought new settlers with him. Twelve families had built their homes within the spacious borders of his seigneury. Their whitewashed cottages were strung along a short stretch of the river bank side by side, separated by a few arpents. Men, women, and children, the population of La Durantaye numbered only fifty-eight; sixty-four arpents had been cleared; and twenty-eight horned cattle were reported among the possessions of the habitants. Rather significantly this colonial Domesday of 1681 mentions that the sixteen able-bodied men of the seigneury possessed 'seven muskets' among them. From its situation, however, the settlement was not badly exposed to Indian assault.

In the way of cleared lands and population the fief of La Durantaye had made very modest progress. Its nearest neighbour, Bellechasse, contained two hundred and twenty-seven persons, living upon three hundred and twenty arpents of cultivable land. With an arsenal of sixty-two muskets it was better equipped for self-defence. The census everywhere took more careful count of muskets than of ploughs; and this is not surprising, for it was the design of the authorities to build up a 'powerful military colony' which would stand on its own feet without support from home. They did not seem to realize that in the long run even military prowess must rest with that land which most assiduously devotes itself to the arts of peace.

Ten years later the fief of Durantaye made a somewhat better showing. The census of 1692 gave it a marked increase in population, in lands made arable, and in herds of domestic cattle. A house had been built for the seigneur, whose family occupied it at times, but showed a preference for the more attractive life at Quebec. Durantaye was not one of the most prosperous seigneuries, neither was it among those making the slowest progress. As Catalogne phrased the situation in 1712, its lands were 'yielding moderate harvests of grain and vegetables.' Fruit-trees had been brought to maturity in various parts of the seigneury and were bearing well. Much of the land was well wooded with oak and pine, a good deal of which had been already, in 1712, cut down and marketed at Quebec.

Morel de la Durantaye could not resign himself to the prosaic life of a cultivator. He did not become a coureur de bois like many of his friends and associates, but like them he had a taste for the wild woods, and he pursued a career not far removed from theirs. In 1684 he was in command of the fortified trading-post at Michilimackinac, and he had a share in Denonville's expedition against the Onondagas three years later. On that occasion he mustered a band of traders who, with a contingent of friendly Indians, followed him down to the lakes to join the punitive force. In 1690 he was at Montreal, lending his aid in the defence of that part of the colony against raiding bands of Iroquois which were once again proving a menace. At Boucherville, in 1694, one historian tells us with characteristic hyperbole, Durantaye killed ten Iroquois with his own hand. Mohawks were not, as a rule, so easy to catch or kill. Two years later he commanded a detachment of troops and militiamen in operations against his old-time foes, and in 1698 he was given a royal pension of six hundred livres per year in recognition of his services. Having been so largely engaged in these military affrays, little time had been available for the development of his seigneury. His income from the annual dues of its habitants was accordingly small, and the royal gratuity was no doubt a welcome addition. The royal bounty never went begging in New France. No one was too proud to dip his hand into the king's purse when the chance presented itself.

In June 1703 Durantaye received the signal honour of an appointment to the Superior Council at Quebec, and this post gave him additional remuneration. For the remaining twenty-four years of his life the soldier-seigneur lived partly at Quebec and partly at the manor-house of his seigneurial estate. At the time of his death, in 1727, these landed holdings had greatly increased in population, in cleared acreage, and in value, although it cannot be said that this progress had been in any direct way due to the seigneur's active interest or efforts. He had a family of six sons and three daughters, quite enough to provide for with his limited income, but not a large family as households went in those days. Durantaye was not among the most effective of the seigneurs; but little is to be gained by placing the various leaders among the landed men of New France in sharp contrast, comparing their respective contributions one with another. The colony had work for all to do, each in his own way.

Among those who came to Montreal in 1641, when the foundations of the city were being laid, was the son of a Dieppe innkeeper, Charles Le Moyne by name. Born in 1624, he was only seventeen when he set out to seek his fortune in the New World. The lure of the fur trade promptly overcame him, as it did so many others, and the first few years of his life in Canada were spent among the Hurons in the regions round Georgian Bay. On becoming of age, however, he obtained a grant of lands on the south shore of the St Lawrence, opposite Montreal, and at once began the work of clearing it. This area, of fifty lineal arpents in frontage by one hundred in depth, was granted to Le Moyne by M. de Lauzon as a seigneury on September 24, 1647.

Despite the fact that his holding was directly in the path of Indian attacks, Le Moyne made steady progress in clearing it; he built himself a house, and in 1654, at the age of twenty-eight, married Mademoiselle Catherine Primot, formerly of Rouen. The governor of Montreal, M. de Maisonneuve, showed his good will by a wedding gift of ninety additional arpents. But Le Moyne's ambition to provide for a rapidly growing family led him to petition the intendant for an enlargement of his holdings, and in 1672 the intendant Talon gave him the land which lay between the seigneuries of Varennes and La Prairie de la Magdelaine. This with his other tract was united to form the seigneury of Longueuil. Already the king had recognized Le Moyne's progressive spirit by giving him rank in the noblesse, the letters-patent having been issued in 1668. On this seigneury the first of the Le Moynes de Longueuil lived and worked until his death in 1685.

Charles Le Moyne had a family of eleven sons, of whom ten grew to manhood and became figures of prominence in the later history of New France. From Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico their exploits covered every field of activity on land and sea. What scions of a stout race they were! The strain of the old Norse rover was in them all. Each one a soldier, they built forts, founded cities, governed colonies, and gave their king full measure of valiant service.

The eldest, who bore his father's name and possessed many of his traits, inherited the seigneury. Soon he made it one of the most valuable properties in the whole colony. The old manor-house gave way to a pretentious chateau flanked by four imposing towers of solid masonry. Its dimensions were, as such things went in the colony, stupendously large, the structure being about two hundred feet in length by one hundred and seventy in breadth. The great towers or bastions were loopholed in such way as to permit a flanking fire in the event of an armed assault; and the whole building, when viewed from the river, presented an impressive facade. The grim Frontenac, who was not over-given to eulogy, praised it in one of his dispatches and said that it reminded him of the embattled chateaux of old Normandy. Speaking from the point of view of the other seigneurs, the cost of this manorial abode of the Longueuils must have represented a fortune. The structure was so well built that it remained fit for occupancy during nearly a full century, or until 1782, when it was badly damaged by fire. A century later still, in 1882, the walls remained; but a few years afterwards they were removed to make room for the new parish church of Longueuil.

Le Moyne did more than build an imposing house. He had the stones gathered from the lands and used in building houses for his people. The seigneur's mill was one of the best. A fine church raised its cross-crowned spire near by. A brewery, built of stone, was in full operation. The land was fertile and produced abundant harvests. When Catalogne visited Longueuil in 1712 he noted that the habitants were living in comfortable circumstances, by reason of the large expenditures which the seigneur had made to improve the land and the means of communication. Whatever Charles Le Moyne could gather together was not spent in riotous living, as was the case with so many of his contemporaries, but was invested in productive improvements. That is the way in which he became the owner of a model seigneury.

A seigneur so progressive and successful could not escape the attention of the king. In 1698 the governor and the intendant joined in bringing Le Moyne's services to the favourable notice of the minister, with the suggestion that it should receive suitable acknowledgment. Two years later this recognition came in the form of a royal decree which elevated the seigneury of Longueuil to the dignity of a barony, and made its owner the Baron de Longueuil. In recounting the services rendered to the colony by the new baron the patent mentioned that 'he has already erected at his own cost a fort supported by four strong towers of stone and masonry, with a guard-house, several large dwellings, a fine church bearing all the insignia of nobility, a spacious farmyard in which there is a barn, a stable, a sheep-pen, a dovecote, and other buildings, all of which are within the area of the said fort; next to which stands a banal mill, a fine brewery of masonry, together with a large retinue of servants, horses, and equipages, the cost of which buildings amount to sixty thousand livres; so much so that this seigneury is one of the most valuable in the whole country.' The population of Longueuil, in the census returns of 1698, is placed at two hundred and twenty-three.

The new honour spurred its recipient to even greater efforts; he became one of the first gentlemen of the colony, served a term as lieutenant-governor at Montreal, and, going into battle once more, was killed in action near Saratoga in the expedition of 1729. The barony thereupon passed to his son, the third Charles Le Moyne, born in 1687, who lived until 1755, and was for a time administrator of the colony. His son, the third baron, was killed during the Seven Years' War in the operations round Lake George, and the title passed, in the absence of direct male heirs, to his only daughter, Marie Le Moyne de Longueuil who, in 1781, married Captain David Alexander Grant of the 94th British regiment. Thus the old dispensation linked itself with the new. The eldest son of this marriage became fifth Baron de Longueuil in 1841. Since that date the title has been borne by successive generations in the same family.

The barony of Longueuil at one time included an area of about one hundred and fifty square miles, much of it heavily timbered and almost all fit for cultivation. The thriving towns of Longueuil and St Johns grew up within its limits in the century following the conquest. As population increased, much of the land was sold into freehold; and when the seigneurial system was abolished in 1854 what had not been sold was entailed. An entailed estate, though not now of exceeding great value, it still remains.

These three seigneurs, Hebert, La Durantaye, and Le Moyne, represent three different, yet not so very dissimilar types of landed pioneer. Hebert, the man of humble birth and limited attainments, made his way to success by unremitting personal labour under great discouragements. He lived and died a plain citizen. He had less to show for his life-work than the others, perhaps; but in those swaddling days of the colony's history his task was greater. Morel de la Durantaye, the man-at-arms, well born and bred, took his seigneurial rank as a matter of course, and his duties without much seriousness. His seigneury had his attention only when opportunities for some more exciting field of action failed to present themselves. Interesting figure though he was--an excellent type of a hundred others--it was well for the colony that not all its seigneurs were like him in temperament and ways. Le Moyne, the nearest Canadian approach to the seigneur of Old France in the days before the Revolution, combined the best qualities of the other two. There was plenty of red blood in his veins, and to some of his progeny went more of it than was good for them. He was ready with his sword when the occasion called. An arm shot off by an Iroquois flintlock in 1687 gave him through life a grim reminder of his combative habits in early days. But warfare was only an avocation; the first fruits of the land absorbed his main interest throughout the larger part of his days. Each of these men had others like him, and the peculiar circumstances of the colony found places for them all. The seigneurs of Old Canada did not form a homogeneous class; men of widely differing tastes and attainments were included among them. There were workers and drones; there were men who made a signal success as seigneurs, and others who made an utter failure. But taken as a group there was nothing very commonplace about them, and it is to her two hundred seigneurs or thereabouts that New France owes much of the glamour that marks her tragic history.

SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT

In its attitude toward the seigneurs the crown was always generous. The seigneuries were large, and from the seigneurs the king asked no more than that they should help to colonize their grants with settlers. It was expected, in turn, that the seigneurs would show a like spirit in all dealings with their dependants. Many of them did; but some did not. On the whole, however, the habitants who took farms within the seigneuries fared pretty well in the matter of the feudal dues and services demanded from them. Compared with the seigneurial tenantry of Old France their obligations were few in number, and imposed almost no burden at all.

This is a matter upon which a great deal of nonsense has been written by English writers on the early history of Canada, most of whom have been able to see nothing but the spectre of paternalism in every domain of colonial life. It is quite true, as Tocqueville tells us, that the physiognomy of a government can be best judged in its colonies, for there its merits and faults appear as through a microscope. But in Canada it was the merits rather than the faults of French feudalism which came to the front in bold relief. There it was that seigneurial polity put its best foot forward. It showed that so long as defence was of more importance than opulence the institution could fully justify its existence. Against the seigneurial system as such no element in the population of New France ever raised, so far as the records attest, one word of protest during the entire period of French dominion. The habitants, as every shred of reliable contemporary evidence goes to prove, were altogether contented with the terms upon which they held their lands, and thought only of the great measure of freedom from burdens which they enjoyed as compared with their friends at home. To speak of them as 'slaves to the corvees and unpaid military service, debarred from education and crammed with gross fictions as an aid to their docility and their value as food for powder,' is to display a rare combination of hopeless bigotry and crass ignorance. The habitant of the old regime in Canada was neither a slave nor a serf; neither down-trodden nor maltreated; neither was he docile and spineless when his own rights were at issue. So often has all this been shown that it is high time an end were made of these fictions concerning the woes of Canadian folk-life in the days before the conquest.

We have ample testimony concerning the relations of seigneur and habitant in early Canada, and it comes from many quarters. First of all there are the title-deeds of lands, thousands of which have been preserved in the various notarial archives. It ought to be explained, in passing, that when a seigneur wished to make a grant of land the services of a notary were enlisted. Notaries were plentiful; the census of 1681 enumerated twenty-four of them in a population of less than ten thousand. The notary made his documents in the presence of the parties, had them signed, witnessed, and sealed with due formality. The seigneur kept one copy, the habitant another, and the notary kept the original. In the course of time, therefore, each notary accumulated quite a collection or cadastre of legal records which he kept carefully. At his death they were passed over to the general registry, or office of the greffier, at Quebec. In general the notaries were men of rather meagre education; their work on deeds and marriage settlements was too often very poorly done, and lawsuits were all the more common in consequence. But the colony managed to get along with this system of conveyancing, crude and undependable as it was.

In the title-deeds of lands granted by the seigneurs to the habitants the situation and area are first set forth. The grants were of all shapes and sizes. As a rule, however, they were in the form of a parallelogram, with the shorter end fronting the river and the longer side extending inland. The usual river frontage was from five to ten lineal arpents, and the depth ranged from ten to eighty arpents. It should be explained that the arpen de Paris, in terms of which colonial land measurements were invariably expressed, served both as a unit of length and as a unit of area. The lineal arpent was the equivalent of one hundred and ninety-two English feet. The superficial arpent, or arpent of area, contained about five-sixths of an acre. The habitant's customary frontage on the river was, accordingly, from about a thousand to two thousand feet, while his farm extended rearwards a distance of anywhere from under a half-mile to three miles.

This rather peculiar configuration of the farms arose wholly from the way in which the colony was first settled. For over a century after the French came to the St Lawrence all the seigneuries were situated directly on the shores of the river. This was only natural, for the great waterway formed the colony's carotid artery, supplying the life-blood of all New France so far as communications were concerned. From seigneury to seigneury men traversed it in canoes or bateaux in summer, and over its frozen surface they drove by carriole during the long winters. Every one wanted to be in contact with this main highway, so that the demand for farms which should have some river frontage, however small, was brisk from the outset. Near the river the habitant began his clearing and built his house. Farther inland, as the lands rose from the shore, was the pasture; and behind this again lay the still uncleared woodland. When the colony built its first road, this thoroughfare skirted the north shore of the St Lawrence, and so placed an even greater premium on farms contiguous to the river. It was only after all the best lands with river frontage had been taken up that settlers resorted to what was called 'the second range' farther inland.

So important a handicap did this situation place upon the progress of agriculture that in 1744 the governor and the intendant drew the attention of the home authorities to it, and urged that some remedy be provided. With simple faith in the healing power of a royal edict, the king promptly responded with a decree which ordered that no habitant should thenceforth build his house and barn on any plot of land which did not have at least one and one-half lineal arpents of frontage . Any buildings so erected were to be demolished. What a crude method of dealing with a problem which had its roots deep down in the very law and geography of the colony! But this royal remedy for the ills of New France went the way of many others. The authorities saw that it would work no cure, and only one attempt was ever made to punish those habitants who showed defiance. The intendant Bigot, in 1748, ordered that some houses which various habitants had erected at L'Ange-Gardien should be pulled down, but there was a great hue and cry from the owners, and the order remained unenforced. The practice of parcelling lands in the old way continued, and in time these cotes, as the habitants termed each line of houses along the river, stretched all the way from Quebec to Montreal. From the St Lawrence the whole colony looked like one unending, straggling village-street.

But let us outline the dues and services which the habitant, by the terms of his title-deed, must render to his seigneur. First among these were the annual payments commonly known as the cens et rentes. To the habitant this was a sort of annual rental, although it was really made up of two separate dues, each of which had a different origin and nature. The cens was a money payment and merely nominal in amount. Back in the early days of feudalism it was very probably a greater burden; in Canada it never exceeded a few sous for a whole farm. The rate of cens was not uniform: each seigneur was entitled to what he and the habitant might agree upon, but it never amounted to more than the merest pittance, nor could it ever by any stretch of the imagination be deemed a burden. With the cens went the rentes, the latter being fixed in terms of money, poultry, or produce, or all three combined. 'One fat fowl of the brood of the month of May or twenty sols for each lineal arpent of frontage'; or 'one minot of sound wheat or twenty sols for each arpent of frontage' is the way in which the obligation finds record in some title-deeds which are typical of all the rest. The seigneur had the right to say whether he wanted his rentes in money or in kind, and he naturally chose the former when prices were low and the latter when prices were high.

It is a little difficult to estimate just what the ordinary habitant paid each year by way of cens et rentes to his seigneur, but under ordinary conditions the rental would amount to about ten or twelve sous and a half-dozen chickens or a bushel of grain for the average farm. Not a very onerous annual payment for fifty or sixty acres of land! Yet this was the only annual emolument which the seigneur of Old Canada drew each year from his tenantry. With twenty-five allotments in his seigneury the yearly income would be perhaps thirty or forty livres if translated into money, that is to say, six or eight dollars in our currency. Allowing for changes in the purchasing power of money during the last two hundred years, a fair idea of the burden placed on the habitant by his payment of the cens et rentes may be given by estimating it, in terms of present-day agricultural rentals, at, say, fifty cents yearly per acre. This is, of course, a rough estimate, but it conveys an idea that is approximately correct and, indeed, about as near the mark as one can come after a study of the seigneurial system in all its phases. The payment constituted a burden, and the habitants doubtless would have welcomed its abolition; but it was not a heavy tax upon their energies; it was less than the Church demanded from them; and they made no serious complaints regarding its imposition.

The cens et rentes made up the only payment which the seigneur received each year, but there was another which became due at intervals. This was the payment known as the lods et ventes, a mutation fine which the seigneur had the right to demand whenever a farm changed hands by sale or by descent, except to direct heirs. One-twelfth of the value was the seigneur's share, but it was his custom to rebate one-third of this amount. Lands changed hands rather infrequently, and in any case the seigneur's fine was very small. From this source he received but little revenue and it came irregularly. Only in the days after the conquest, when land rose in value and transfers became more frequent, could the lods et ventes be counted among real sources of seigneurial income.

Then there were the so-termed banalites. In France their name was legion; no one but a seigneur could own a grist-mill, wine-press, slaughter-house, or even a dovecot. The peasant, when he wanted his grain made into flour or his grapes made into wine, was required to use his seigneur's mill, or press, and to pay the toll demanded. This toll was often exorbitant and the service poor. In Canada, however, there was only one droit de banalite--the grist-mill right. The Canadian seigneur had the exclusive milling privilege; his habitants were bound by their title-deed to bring their grist to his mill, and his legal toll was one-fourteenth of their grain. This obligation did not bear heavily on the people of the seigneuries; most of the complaints concerning it came rather from the seigneurs, who claimed that the toll was too small and did not suffice, in the average seigneury, to pay the wages of the miller. Many seigneurs declined to build mills until the royal authorities stepped in with a decree commanding that those who did not do so should lose their banal right for all time. Then they bestirred themselves.

The seigneurial mills were not very efficient, from all accounts. Crude, clumsy, poorly built affairs, they sometimes did little more than crack the wheat into coarse meal--it could hardly be called flour. The bakers of Quebec complained that the product was often unfit to use. The mills were commonly built in tower-like fashion, and were at times loop-holed in order that they might be used if necessary in the defence of seigneuries against Indian attack. The mill of the Seminary of St Sulpice at Montreal, for example, was a veritable stronghold, rightly counted upon as a place of sure refuge for the settlers in time of need. Racked and decayed by the ravages of time, some of those old walls still stand in their loneliness, bearing to an age of smoke-belching industry their message of more modest achievement in earlier days. Most of these banal mills were fitted with clumsy wind-wheels, somewhat after the Dutch fashion. But nature would not always hearken to the miller's command, and often for days the habitants stood around with their grist waiting in patience for the wind to come up and be harnessed.

Some Canadian seigneurs laid claim to the oven right as well. But the intendant, ever the tribune of his people, sternly set his foot on this pretension. In France the seigneur insisted that the peasantry should bake their bread in the great oven of the seigneury, paying the customary toll for its use. But in Canada, as the intendant explained, this arrangement was utterly impracticable. Through the long months of winter some of the habitants would have to bring their dough a half-dozen miles, and it would be frozen on the way. Each was therefore permitted to have a bake-oven of his own, and there was, of course, plenty of wood near by to keep it blazing.

Many allusions have been made, in writings on the old regime, to the habitant's corvee or obligation to give his seigneur so many days of free labour in each year. In France this incident of seigneurial tenure cloaked some dire abuses. Peasants were harried from their farms and forced to spend weeks on the lord's domain, while their own grain rotted in the fields. But there was nothing of this sort in Canada. Six days of corvee per year was all that the seigneur could demand; and he usually asked for only three, that is to say, one day each in the seasons of ploughing, seedtime, and harvest. And when the habitant worked for his seigneur in this way the latter had to furnish him with both food and tools, a requirement which greatly impaired the value of corvee labour from the seigneur's point of view. So far as a painstaking study of the records can disclose, the corvee obligation was never looked upon as an imposition of any moment. It was apparently no more generally resented than is the so-termed statute-labour obligation which exists among the farming communities of some Canadian provinces at the present day.

As for the other services which the habitant had to render his seigneur, they were of little importance. When he caught fish, one fish in every eleven belonged to his chief. But the seigneur seldom claimed this share, and received it even less often. The seigneur was entitled to take stone, sand, and firewood from the land of any one within his estate; but when he did this it was customary to give the habitant something of equal value in return. Few seigneurs of New France ever insisted on their full pound of flesh in these matters; a generous spirit of give and take marked most of their dealings with the men who worked the land.

Le premier jour de mai, Labourez, J'm'en fus planter un mai, Labourez, A la porte a ma mie.

Bright and early in the morning, as Gaspe tells us, the whole neighbourhood appeared, decked out fantastically, and greeted the manor-house with a salvo of blank musketry. With them they bore a tall fir-tree, its branches cut and its bark peeled to within a few feet of the top. There the tuft of greenery remained. The pole, having been gaudily embellished, was majestically reared aloft and planted firmly in the ground. Round it the men and maidens danced, while the seigneur and his family, enthroned in chairs brought from the manor-house, looked on with approval. Then came a rattling feu de joie with shouts of 'Long live the King!' and 'Long live our seigneur!' This over, the seigneur invited the whole gathering to refreshments indoors. Brandy and cakes disappeared with great celerity before appetites whetted by an hour's exercise in the clear spring air. They drank to the seigneur's health, and to the health of all his kin. At intervals some guest would rush out and fire his musket once again at the maypole, returning for more hospitality with a sense of duty well performed. Before noon the merry company, with the usual round of handshaking, went away again, leaving the blackened pole behind. The echoes of more musket-shots came back through the valleys as they passed out of sight and hearing. The seigneur was more than a mere landlord, as the occasion testified.

HOW THE HABITANT LIVED

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