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Title: The Seigneurs of Old Canada:
   A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism
   [Vol. 5 of "The Chronicles of Canada"]
Author: Munro, William Bennett (1875-1957)
Illustrator: Champaigne, Philippe de (1602-1674)
Illustrator: Huot, Charles (1855-1930)
Illustrator: Krieghoff, Cornelius (1815-1872)
Illustrator: Smith, W. W. (ca. 1855)
Date of first publication: 1914
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Company, 1922
Date first posted: 16 July 2008
Date last updated: 16 July 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #147

This ebook was produced by: David T. Jones
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This file was produced from images generously made available
by the Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries

The physical copy of "The Seigneurs of Old Canada"
used as the base for this ebook was lacking a map,
which is therefore also lacking in this digital edition.

A painting "The Habitant" by [John H.] Macnaughton
(fl. 1876-1899) has been omitted as well: it originally
appeared facing page 96. The year of Macnaughton's
passing is not documented. Canadian copyright law
unfortunately makes no provision for orphaned
works such as this which are almost certainly in the public
domain, but for which definitive documentation of the
author's lifespan cannot be found. Such works must
regrettably be treated as still being under copyright.




CHRONICLES OF CANADA

Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton

In thirty-two volumes

5

THE SEIGNEURS OF
OLD CANADA

BY

WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO

    *    *    *    *    *

_Part II_

_The Rise of New France_

THE SEIGNEURS
OF OLD CANADA

A Chronicle of New-World
Feudalism

BY
WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO

[Illustration: bookplate]

TORONTO

GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY

1922

Copyright in all Countries subscribing to
the Berne Convention

TO

C. S. G. M.

_fide et amore_




CONTENTS
                                                                   Page
  I. AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE                                             1

 II. GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS                                     33

III. THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA--Hébert, La Durantaye, Le Moyne   61

 IV. SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT                                           87

  V. HOW THE HABITANT LIVED                                         104

 VI. 'AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM'                                       122

VII. THE TWILIGHT OF FEUDALISM                                      139

     BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE                                           151

     INDEX                                                          153





ILLUSTRATIONS


LE CANADIEN                                               _Frontispiece_
  After a painting by Krieghoff.

MAP OF THE SEIGNEURIES, 1790                            _Facing page_ 2
  Prepared by the author on the basis of an official
  map in the Dominion Archives.

CARDINAL RICHELIEU                                             "     18
  From a painting in the Louvre, Paris.

THE HABITANT                                                   "     96
  Painting by Macnaughton.

INTERIOR OF A FRENCH-CANADIAN FARM-HOUSE                       "    106
  After a painting by Krieghoff.

LA CANADIENNE                                                  "    112
  After a painting by Krieghoff.

HABITANT PLOUGHING                                             "    118
  From the painting by Huot.

THE SEIGNEURIAL COURT, 1855                                    "    146
  From a drawing by W. W. Smith.




CHAPTER I




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 Creçy, 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.

The sage Tocqueville has somewhere remarked that whether France was
loved or hated by the outside world she could not be ignored. That is
very true. The Gaul has at all stages of his national history defied
an attitude of indifference in others. His country has been at many
times the head and at all times the heart of Europe. His hysteria has
made Europe hysterical, while his sober national sense at critical
moments has held the whole continent to good behaviour. For a
half-dozen centuries there was never a squabble at any remote part of
Europe in which France did not stand ready and willing to take a hand
on the slightest opportunity. That policy, as pursued particularly by
Louis XIV and the Bonapartes, made a heavy drain in brawn and brain on
the vitality of the race; but despite it all, the peaceful
achievements of France within her own borders continued to astonish
mankind. It is this astounding vigour, this inexhaustible stamina,
this unexampled recuperative power that has at all times made France a
nation which, whether men admire or condemn her policy, can never be
treated with indifference. It was these qualities which enabled her,
throughout exhausting foreign troubles, to retain her leadership in
European scholarship, in philosophy, art, and architecture; this is
what has enabled France to be the grim warrior of Europe without
ceasing ever to be the idealist of the nations.

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 æsthetic 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.

So far as her form and spirit of government went, France by the middle
of the seventeenth century was a despotism both in theory and in fact.
Men were still living who could recall the day when France had a real
parliament, the Estates-General as it was called. This body had at
onetime all the essentials of a representative assembly. It might have
become, as the English House of Commons became, the grand inquest of
the nation. But it did not do so. The waxing personal strength of the
monarchy curbed its influence, its authority weakened, and throughout
the great century of French colonial expansion from 1650 to 1750 the
Estates-General was never convoked. The centralization of political
power was complete. 'The State! I am the State.' These famous words
imputed to Louis XIV expressed no vain boast of royal power. Speaking
politically, France was a pyramid. At the apex was the Bourbon
sovereign. In him all lines of authority converged. Subordinate to him
in authority, and dominated by him when he willed it, were various
appointive councils, among them the Council of State and the so-called
Parliament of Paris, which was not a parliament at all, but a
semi-judicial body entrusted with the function of registering the
royal decrees. Below these in the hierarchy of officialdom came the
intendants of the various provinces-—forty or more of them. Loyal
agents of the crown were these intendants. They saw to it that no
royal mandate ever went unheeded in any part of the king's domain.
These forty intendants were the men who really bridged the great
administrative gulf which lay between the royal court and the people.
They were the most conspicuous, the most important, and the most
characteristic officials of the old régime. Without them the royal
authority would have tumbled over by its own sheer top-heaviness. They
were the eyes and ears of the monarchy; they provided the monarch with
fourscore eager hands to work his sovereign will. The intendants, in
turn, had their underlings, known as the sub-delegates, who held the
peasantry in leash. Thus it was that the administration, like a
pyramid, broadened towards its base, and the whole structure rested
upon the third estate, or rank and file of the people.

Such was the position, the power, and administrative framework of
France when her kings and people turned their eyes westward across
the seas. From the rugged old Norman and Breton seaports courageous
mariners had been for a long time lengthening their voyages to new
coasts. As early as 1534 Jacques Cartier of St Malo had made the first
of his pilgrimages to the St Lawrence, and in 1542 his associate
Roberval had attempted to plant a colony there. They had found the
shores of the great river to be inhospitable; the winters were
rigorous; no stores of mineral wealth had appeared; nor did the land
seem to possess great agricultural possibilities. From Mexico the
Spanish galleons were bearing home their rich cargoes of silver
bullion. In Virginia the English navigators had found a land of fair
skies and fertile soil. But the hills and valleys of the northland had
shouted no such greeting to the voyageurs of Brittany. Cartier had
failed to make his landfall at Utopia, and the balance-sheet of his
achievements, when cast up in 1544, had offered a princely dividend of
disappointment.

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 3, 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 régime 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.

But to return to the little cradle of empire at the foot of Cape
Diamond. Champlain for a score of years worked himself to premature
old age in overcoming those many obstacles which always meet the
pioneer. More settlers were brought; a few seigneuries were granted;
priests were summoned from France; a new fort was built; and by sheer
perseverance a settlement of about three hundred souls had been
established by 1627. But no single individual, however untiring in his
efforts, could do all that needed to be done. It was consequently
arranged, with the entire approval of Champlain, that the task of
building up the colony should be entrusted to a great colonizing
company formed for the purpose under royal auspices. In this project
the moving spirit was no less a personage than Cardinal Richelieu, the
great minister of Louis XIII. Official France was now really
interested. Hitherto its interest, while profusely enough expressed,
had been little more than perfunctory. With Richelieu as its sponsor a
company was easily organized. Though by royal decree it was chartered
as the Company of New France, it became more commonly known as the
Company of One Hundred Associates; for it was a co-operative
organization with one hundred members, some of them traders and
merchants, but more of them courtiers. Colonizing companies were the
fashion of Richelieu's day. Holland and England were exploiting new
lands by the use of companies; there was no good reason why France
should not do likewise.

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.

When Louis XIV came to the throne and chose Colbert as his chief
minister it was deemed wise to look into the colonial situation.[1]
Both were surprised and angered by the showing. It appeared that not
only had the company neglected its obligations, but that its officers
had shrewdly concealed their shortcomings from the royal notice. The
great Bourbon therefore acted promptly and with firmness. In a couple
of notable royal decrees he read the directors a severe lecture upon
their avarice and inaction, took away all the company's powers,
confiscated to the crown all the seigneuries which the directors had
granted to themselves, and ordered that the colony should thenceforth
be administered as a royal province. By his later actions the king
showed that he meant what his edicts implied. The colony passed under
direct royal government in 1663, and virtually remained there until
its surrender into English hands an even century later.

[Footnote 1: See in this Series _The Great Intendant_, chap. i.]

Louis XIV was greatly interested in Canada. From beginning to end of
his long administration he showed this interest at every turn. His
officials sent from Quebec their long dispatches; the patient monarch
read them all, and sent by the next ship his budget of orders, advice,
reprimand, and praise. As a royal province, New France had for its
chief official a governor who represented the royal dignity and power.
The governor was the chief military officer, and it was to him that
the king looked for the proper care of all matters relating to the
defence and peace of New France. Then there was the Sovereign Council,
a body made up of the bishop, the intendant, and certain prominent
citizens of the colony named by the king on the advice of his
colonial representatives. This council was both a law-making and a
judicial body. It registered and published the royal decrees, made
local regulations, and acted as the supreme court of the colony. But
the official who loomed largest in the purely civil affairs of New
France was the intendant. He was the overseas apostle of Bourbon
paternalism, and as his commission authorized him to 'order all things
as he may think just and proper,' the intendant never found much
opportunity for idleness.

Tocqueville, shrewdest among historians of pre-revolutionary France,
has somewhere pointed out that under the old régime 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; François 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 be 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 _mémoire_, 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 Château of
St Louis at Quebec was too far away for any such violent procedure.

The colonial council never sought to find out what would follow an
open defiance of the royal wishes. It had a safer plan. Decrees were
always promptly registered; but when they did not suit the councillors
they were just as promptly pigeon-holed, and the people of the colony
were thus left in complete ignorance of the new regulations. On one
occasion the intendant Raudot, in looking over the council records
for legal light on a case before him, found a royal decree which had
been registered by the council some twenty years before, but not an
inkling of which had ever reached the people to whom it had conveyed
new rights against their seigneurs. 'It was the interest of the
attorney-general as a seigneur, as it was also the interest of other
councillors who are seigneurs, that the provisions of this decree
should never be made public,' is the frank way in which the intendant
explained the matter in one of his dispatches to the king. The fact is
that the royal arm, supremely powerful at home, lost a good deal of
its strength when stretched across a thousand leagues of ocean. If
anything happened amiss after the ships left Quebec in the late
summer, there was no regular means of making report to the king for a
full twelvemonth. The royal reply could not be had at the earliest
until the ensuing spring; if the king's advisers desired to look into
matters fully it sometimes happened that another year passed before
the royal decision reached Quebec. By that time matters had often
righted themselves, or the issue had been forgotten. At any rate the
direct influence of the crown was much less effective than it would
have been had the colony been within easy reach. The governor and
intendant were accordingly endowed by the force of circumstances with
large discretionary powers. When they agreed it was possible to order
things about as they chose. When they disagreed on any project the
matter went off to the king for decision, which often meant that it
was shelved indefinitely.

The administration of New France was not efficient. There were too
many officials for the size and needs of the colony. Their respective
spheres of authority were too loosely defined. Nor did the crown
desire to have every one working in harmony. A moderate amount of
friction-—provided it did not wholly clog the wheels of
administration-—was not deemed an unmixed evil. It served to make each
official a tale-bearer against his colleague, so that the home
authorities might count on getting all sides to every story. The
financial situation, moreover, was always precarious. At no time could
New France pay its own way; every second dispatch from the governor
and intendant asked the king for money or for things that cost money.
Louis XIV was astonishingly generous in the face of so many of these
demands upon his exchequer, but the more he gave the more he was
asked to give. When the stress of European wars curtailed the king's
bounty the colonial authorities began to issue paper money; the issues
were gradually increased; the paper soon depreciated, and in its
closing years the colony fairly wallowed in the slough of almost
worthless fiat currency.

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 year 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 birthrate 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.




CHAPTER II

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 rôle 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[2] 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 Mère
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.[3]

[Footnote 2: The livre was practically the modern franc, about twenty
cents.]

[Footnote 3: Another view will be found in _The Great Intendant_ in
this Series, chap. iv.]

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 Château 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
halfhearted 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 newcomers 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
years of the eighteenth century, therefore, the practice of exacting a
_prix d'entrée_ 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 Arrêts 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.

The first arrêt went direct to the point. 'The king has been
informed,' it recites, 'that there are some seigneurs who refuse under
various pretexts to grant lands to settlers who apply for them,
preferring rather the hope that they may later sell these lands.' Such
attitude, the decree went on to declare, was absolutely repugnant to
His Majesty's intentions, and especially 'unfair to incoming settlers
who thus find land less open to free settlement in situations best
adapted for agriculture.' It was, therefore, ordered that if any
applicant for lands should be by any seigneur denied a reasonable
grant on the customary terms, the intendant should forthwith step in
and issue a deed on his own authority. In this case the annual
payments were to go to the colonial treasury, and not to the seigneur.
This decree simplified matters considerably. After it became the law
of the colony no one desiring land from a seigneur's ungranted domain
was expected to offer anything above the customary annual dues and
services. The seigneur had no legal right to demand more. By one
stroke of the royal pen the Canadian seigneur had lost all right of
ownership in his seigneury; he became from this time on a trustee
holding lands in trust for the future immigrant and for the sons of
the people. However his lands might grow in value, the seigneur,
according to the letter of the law, could exact no more from new
tenants than from those who had first settled upon his estate. This
was a revolutionary change; it put the seigneurial system in Canada on
a basis wholly different from that in France; it proved that the king
regarded the system as useful only in so far as it actively
contributed to the progress of the colony. Where it stood in the way
of progress he was prepared to apply the knife even at its very
vitals.

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 arrêt,
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 arrêts 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 arrêt, 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 (_tenir feu et lieu_) 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, Gédéon de Catalogne. Catalogne,
who was a native of Béarn, 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, Verchères,
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-Salières
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 (chiefly captains and
lieutenants) 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.

When Talon arranged to have the Carignans disbanded in Canada he
decided that they should be given lands in that section of the colony
where they would be most useful in guarding New France at its most
vulnerable point. This weakest point was the region along the
Richelieu between Lake Champlain and the St Lawrence. By way of this
route would surely come any English expedition sent against New
France, and this likewise was the portal through which the Mohawks had
already come on their errands of massacre. If Canada was to be safe,
this region must become the colony's mailed fist, ready to strike in
repulse at an instant's notice. All this the intendant saw very
plainly, and he was wise in his generation. Later events amply proved
his foresight. The Richelieu highway was actually used by the men of
New England on various subsequent expeditions against Canada, and it
was the line of Mohawk incursion so long as the power of this proud
redskin clan remained unbroken. At no time during the French period
was this region made entirely secure; but Talon's plan made the
Richelieu route much more difficult for the colony's foes, both white
and red, than it otherwise would have been.

Here was an interesting experiment in Roman imperial colonization
repeated in the New World. When the empire of the Cæsars 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 Pérade, Nicolet, and Bécancour. Nicolett had passed into the
hands of the Courvals, a trading family of Three Rivers, and Bécancour
was held by Pierre Robineau, the son of his famous father, Réné
Robineau de Bécancour. 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
Chevrotière, 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 François
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 Lotbinière, Lauzonn, La Durantayee, Bellechasse, Rivière
Ouellee, 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.




CHAPTER III

THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA--HÉBERT,
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
Hébert, 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, Hébert 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 Hébert 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 Hébert
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
Hébert 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, Hébert, and one other.

With serious dangers all about, and lack of support at home, Port
Royal could make no headway, and in 1613 Hébert 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. Hébert 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 Hébert 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, Hébert 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 of his varied experience. Not long after his arrival at Quebec,
Hébert'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,
Hébert 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 Hébert 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, Hébert 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 Hébert'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 Hébert 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 Hébert'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 Hébert
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
Hébert'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 Hébert, 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.

By this indenture feudalism cast its first anchor in the New World.
Some historians have attributed to the influence of Richelieu this
policy of creating a seigneurial class in the transmarine dominions of
France. The cardinal-minister, it is said, had an idea that the
landless aristocrats of France might be persuaded to emigrate to the
colonies by promises of lavish seigneurial estates wrested from the
wilderness. It will be noted, however, that Hébert received his
title-deed before Richelieu assumed the reins of power, so that,
whatever influence the latter may have had on the extension of the
seigneurial system in the colonies, he could not have prompted its
first appearance there.

Hébert died in 1627. Little as we know about his life, the clerical
chroniclers tell us a good deal about his death, which proves that he
must have had all the externals of piety. He was extolled as the
Abraham of a new Israel. His immediate descendants were numerous, and
it was predicted that his seed would replenish the earth. Assuredly,
this portion of the earth needed replenishing, for at the time of
Hébert's death Quebec was still a struggling hamlet of sixty-five
souls, two-thirds of whom were women and children unable to till the
fields. Hébert certainly did his share. His daughters married in the
colony and had large families. By these marriages a close alliance was
formed with the Couillards and other prominent families of the
colony's earliest days. From these and later alliances some of the
best-known families in the history of French Canada have come
down,--the Jolliets, De Lérys, De Ramesays, Fourniers and
Taschereaus,--and the entire category of Hébert's descendants must run
well into the thousands. All but unknown by a busy world outside, the
memory of this Paris apothecary has none the less been cherished for
nearly three hundred years in many a Canadian home. Had all the
seigneurs of the old régime served their king with half his zeal the
colony would not have been left in later days so naked to its enemies.

But not all the seigneurs of Old Canada were of Hébert's type. Too
many of them, whether owing to inherited Norman traits, to their
previous environment in France, or to the opportunities which they
found in the colony, developed an incurable love of the forest life.
On the slightest pretext they were off on a military or trading
expedition, leaving their lands, tenants, and often their own families
to shift as best they might. Fields grew wild while the seigneurs, and
often their habitants with them, spent the entire spring, summer, and
autumn in any enterprise that promised to be more exciting than sowing
and reaping grain. Among the military seigneurs of the upper St
Lawrence and Richelieu regions not a few were of this type. They were
good soldiers and quickly adapted themselves to the circumstances of
combat in the New World, meeting the Iroquois with his own arts and
often combining a good deal of the red man's craftiness with a white
man's superior intelligence. Insatiable in their thirst for adventure,
they were willing to assume all manner of risks or privations. Spring
might find them at Lake Champlain, autumn at the head-waters of the
Mississippi, a trusty birch-bark having carried them the thousand
miles between. Their work did not figure very heavily in the colony's
annual balance-sheet of progress with its statistics of acreage newly
cleared, homes built and harvests stowed safely away. But according to
their own ideals of service they valiantly served the king, and they
furnish the historian of the old régime with an interesting and
unusual group of men. Neither New England nor the New Netherlands
possessed this type within their borders, and this is one reason why
the pages of their history lack the contrast of light and shade which
marks from start to finish the annals of New France.

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 Campellé, but attached to the Carignan-Salières 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[4] 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.

[Footnote 4: Jean de Lauzon, at this time president of the Company of
One Hundred Associates, which, as we have seen, had the feudal
suzerainty of Canada. Lauzon was afterwards governor of New France,
1651-56.]

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.[5] 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.

[Footnote 5: These sons were: (1) Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, born
1656, who succeeded his father as seigneur and became the first Baron
de Longueuil, later served as lieutenant-governor of Montreal, and was
killed in action at Saratoga on June 8, 1729; (2) Jacques Le Moyne de
Ste Hélène, born 1659, who fell at the siege of Quebec in 1690; (3)
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, born in 1661, voyageur to Hudson Bay and
the Spanish Main, died at Havana in 1706; (4) Paul Le Moyne de
Maricourt, born 1663, captain in the marine, died in 1704 from
hardships during an expedition against the Iroquois; (5) Francois Le
Moyne de Bienville, born 1666, intrepid young border-warrior, killed
by the Iroquois in 1691; Joseph Le Moyne de Sérigny, born 1668, served
as a youth in the expeditions of his brother to Hudson Bay, died in
1687; (7) Louis Le Moyne de Chateauguay, born 1676, his young life
ended in action at Fort Bourbon (Nelson or York Factory) on Hudson Bay
in 1694; (8) Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, born 1680, founder
of New Orleans, governor of Louisiana, died in Paris, 1767; (9)
Gabriel Le Moyne d'Assigny, born 1681, died of yellow fever at San
Domingo in 1701: (10) Antoine Le Moyne de Chateauguay, born 1683,
governor of French Guiana.]

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 château 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 châteaux 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
guardhouse, 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.

Of all the titles of honour, great and small, which the French crown
granted to the seigneurs of Old Canada, that of the Baron de Longueuil
is the only one now legally recognized in the Dominion. After the
conquest the descendants of Charles Le Moyne maintained that, having
promised to respect the ancient land tenures, the new British
suzerains were under obligation to recognize Longueuil as a barony. It
was not, however, until 1880 that a formal request for recognition was
made to Her Majesty Queen Victoria. The matter was, of course,
submitted to the law officers of the crown, and their decision ruled
the claim to be well grounded. By royal proclamation, accordingly, the
rank and title of Charles Colmore Grant, seventh Baron de Longueuil,
were formally recognized.[6]

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.

[Footnote 6: The royal recognition was officially promulgated as
follows: 'The Queen has been graciously pleased to recognize the right
of Charles Colmore Grant, Esquire, to the title of Baron de Longueuil,
of Longueuil, in the province of Quebec, Canada. This title was
conferred on his ancestor, Charles Le Moyne, by letters-patent of
nobility signed by King Louis XIV in the year 1700.'--(_London
Gazette_, December 7, 1880.)]

No family of New France maintained more steadily its favourable place
in the public view than the house of Longueuil. The sons, grandsons,
and great-grandsons of the Dieppe innkeeper's boy were leaders of
action in their respective generations. Soldiers, administrators, and
captains of industry, they contributed their full share to the sum of
French achievement, alike in war and peace. By intermarriage also the
Le Moynes of Longueuil connected themselves with other prominent
families of French Canada, notably those of Beaujeu, Lanaudière, and
Gaspé. Unlike most of the colonial _noblesse_, they were well-to-do
from the start, and the barony of Longueuil may be rightly regarded as
a good illustration of what the seigneurial system could accomplish at
its best.

These three seigneurs, Hébert, La Durantaye, and Le Moyne, represent
three different, yet not so very dissimilar types of landed pioneer.
Hébert, 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.




CHAPTER IV

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 corvées
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,'[7] is to display a rare combination of hopeless bigotry and
crass ignorance. The habitant of the old régime 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.

[Footnote 7: A. G. Bradley, _The Fight with France for North America_
(London, 1905, p. 388).]

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.

Now it happened that in thus adapting the shape of grants to the
immediate convenience and caprice of the habitants a curious handicap
was in the long run placed upon agricultural progress. By the terms of
the Custom of Paris, which was the common law of the colony, all the
children of a habitant's family, male and female, inherited equal
shares of his lands. When, therefore, a farm was to be divided at its
owner's decease each participant in the division wanted a share in the
river frontage. With large families the rule, it can easily be seen
that this demand could only be met by shredding the farm into mere
ribbons of land with a frontage of only fifty or a hundred feet and a
depth of a mile or more. That was the usual course pursued; each child
had his strip, and either undertook to get a living out of it or sold
his land to an adjoining heir. In any case, the houses and barns of
the one who came into ownership of these thin oblongs were always
situated at or near the water-front, so that the work of farming the
land necessitated a great deal of travelling back and forth. Too many
of the habitants, accordingly, got into the habit of spending all
their time on the fields nearest the house and letting the rear grow
wild. The situation militated against proper rotation of crops, and in
many ways proved an obstacle to progress. The trouble was not that the
farms were too small to afford the family a living. In point of area
they were large enough; but their abnormal shape rendered it difficult
for the habitant to get from them their full productive power with the
rather short season of cultivation that the climate allowed.

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
(about three hundred feet). 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 _côtes_, 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 (sous) 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_ were paid each year on St Martin's Day, early in
November. By that time the harvest had been flailed and safely stowed
away; the poultry had fattened among the fields of stubble. One and
all, the habitants came to the manor-house to give the seigneur his
annual tribute. Carrioles and celêches filled his yard. Women and
children were brought along, and the occasion became a neighbourhood
holiday. The manor-house was a lively place throughout the day, the
seigneur busily checking off his lists as the habitants, one after
another, drove in with their grain, their poultry, and their wallets
of copper coins. The men smoked assiduously; so did the women
sometimes. Not infrequently, as the November air was damp and chill,
the seigneur passed his flagon of brandy among the thirsty
brotherhood, and few there were who allowed this token of hospitality
to pass them by. With their tongues thus loosened, men and women
glibly retailed the neighbourhood gossip and the latest tidings which
had filtered through from Quebec or Montreal. There was an incessant
clatter all day long, to which the captive fowls, with their feet
bundled together but with throats at full liberty, contributed their
noisy share. As dusk drew near there was a general handshaking, and
the carrioles scurried off along the highway. Every one called his
neighbour a friend, and the people of each seigneury were as one great
family.

[Illustration: THE HABITANT From a painting by Macnaughton]

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 _banalités_. 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 banalité_--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 loopholed 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 (_droit de four
banal_) 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 régime, to the
habitant's corvée 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 corvée 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 corvée labour from the seigneur's point of view. So far as a
painstaking study of the records can disclose, the corvée 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.

Then there was the maypole obligation, quaintest among seigneurial
claims. By the terms of their tenure the habitants of the seigneury
were required to appear each May Day before the main door of the
manor-house, and there to plant a pole in the seigneur's honour.


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


Bright and early in the morning, as Gaspé 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.




CHAPTER V

HOW THE HABITANT LIVED


The seigneurs of New France were not a privileged order. Between them
and the habitants there was no great gulf fixed, no social impasse
such as existed between the two classes in France. The seigneur often
lived and worked like a habitant; his home was not a great deal better
than theirs; his daily fare was much the same. The habitant, on the
other hand, might himself become a seigneur by saving a little money,
and this is what frequently happened. By becoming a seigneur, however,
he did not change his mode of life, but continued to work as he had
done before. There were some, of course, who took their social rank
with great seriousness, and proved ready to pay out good money for
letters-patent giving them minor titles of nobility. Thus Jacques Le
Ber, a bourgeois of Montreal who made a comfortable fortune out of the
fur trade, bought a seigneury and then acquired the rank of
_gentilhomme_ by paying six thousand livres for it. But the possession
of an empty title, acquired by purchase or through the influence of
official friends at Quebec, did not make much impression on the masses
of the people. The first citizens in the hearts of the community were
the men of personal courage, talent, and worldly virtues.


    Sur cette terre encor sauvage
    Les vieux titres sont inconnus;
    La noblesse est dans le courage,
    Dans les talents, dans les vertus.


Nevertheless, to be a seigneur was always an honour, for the
manor-house was the recognized social centre of every neighbourhood.

The manor-house was not a mansion. Built sometimes of rough-hewn
timber, but more commonly of stone, it was roomy and comfortable,
although not much more pretentious than the homes of well-to-do
habitants. Three or four rooms on the ground floor with a spacious
attic made up the living quarters. The furniture often came from
France, and its quality gave the whole interior an air of distinction.
As for the habitants, their homes were also of stone or timber-—long
and rather narrow structures, heavily built, and low. They were
whitewashed on the outside with religious punctuality each spring. The
eaves projected over the walls, and high-peaked little dormer windows
thrust themselves from the roof here and there. The houses stood very
near the roadway, with scarcely ever a grass plot or single shade tree
before them. In midsummer the sun beat furiously upon them; in winter
they stood in all their bleakness full-square to the blasts that drove
across the river.

Behind the house was a storeroom built in 'lean-to' fashion, and not
far away stood the barn and stable, made usually of timbers laid one
upon the other with chinks securely mortared. Somewhat aloof was the
root-house, half dug in the ground, banked generously with earth round
about and overhead. Within convenient distance of the house, likewise,
was the bake-oven, built of boulders, mortar, and earth, with the
wood-pile near by. Here with roaring fires once or twice each week the
family baking was done. Round the various buildings ran some sort of
fence, whether of piled stones or rails, and in a corner of the
enclosed plot was the habitant's garden. Viewed by the traveller who
passed along the river this straggling line of whitewashed structures
stood out in bold relief against the towering background of green
hills beyond. The whole colony formed one long rambling village, each
habitant touching elbows with his neighbour on either side.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A FRENCH-CANADIAN FARM-HOUSE After a
painting by Krieghoff]

Within the habitant's abode there were usually not more than three
regular rooms. The front door opened into a capacious living room with
its great open fireplace and hearth. This served as dining-room as
well. A gaily coloured woollen carpet or rug, made in the colony,
usually decked the floor. There was a table and a couch; there were
chairs made of pine with seats of woven underbark, all more or less
comfortable. Often a huge sideboard rose from the floor to the low,
open-beamed ceiling. Pictures of saints adorned the walls. A
spinning-wheel stood in the corner, sharing place perhaps with a
musket set on the floor stock downward, but primed for ready use.
Adjoining this room was the kitchen with its fireplace for cooking,
its array of pots and dishes, its cupboards, shelves, and other
furnishings. All of these latter the habitant and his sons made for
themselves. The economic isolation of the parish made its people
versatile after their own crude fashion. The habitant was a handy man,
getting pretty good results from the use of rough material and tools.
Even at the present day his descendants retain much of this facility.
At the opposite end of the house was a bedroom. Upstairs was the
attic, so low that one could scarcely stand upright in any part of it,
but running the full length and breadth of the house. Here the
children, often a round dozen of them, were stowed at night. A shallow
iron bowl of tallow with a wick protruding gave its dingy light.
Candles were not unknown, but they were a luxury. Every one went to
bed when darkness came on, for there was nothing else to do. Windows
were few, and to keep out the cold they were tightly battened down.
The air within must have been stifling; but, as one writer has
suggested, the habitant and his family got along without fresh air in
his dwelling just as his descendant of to-day manages to get along
without baths.

For the most part the people of Old Canada were comfortably clothed
and well fed. Warm cloth of drugget--_étoffe du pays_, as it was
called--came from the hand-looms of every parish. It was all wool and
stood unending wear. It was cheap, and the women of the household
fashioned it into clothes. Men, women, and children alike wore it in
everyday use; but on occasions of festivity they liked to appear in
their brighter plumage of garments brought from France. In the summer
the children went nearly unclothed and barefooted always. A single
garment without sleeves and reaching to the knees was all that covered
their nakedness. In winter every one wore furs outdoors. Beaver skins
were nearly as cheap as cloth, and the wife of the poorest habitant
could have a winter wardrobe that it would nowadays cost a small
fortune to provide. Heavy clogs made of hide--the _bottes sauvages_ as
they were called--or moccasins of tanned and oiled skins, impervious
to the wet, were the popular footwear in winter and to some extent in
summer as well. They were laced high up above the ankles, and with a
liberal supply of coarse-knitted woollen socks the people managed to
trudge anywhere without discomfort even in very cold weather. Plaited
straw hats were made by the women for ordinary summer use, but hats of
beaver, made in the fashion of the day, were always worn on dress
occasions. Every man wore one to Mass each Sunday morning. In winter
the knitted cap or toque was the favourite. Made in double folds of
woollen yarn with all the colours of the rainbow, it could be drawn
down over the ears as a protection from the cold; with its tassel
swinging to and fro this toque was worn by everybody, men, women, and
children alike. Attached to the coat was often a hood, known as a
_capuchin_, which might be pulled over the toque as an additional
head-covering on a journey through the storm. Knitted woollen gloves
were also made at home, likewise mitts of sheepskin with the wool left
inside. The apparel of the people was thus adapted to their
environment, and besides being somewhat picturesque it was thoroughly
comfortable.

The daily fare of New France was not of limitless variety, but it was
nourishing and adequate. Bread made from wheat flour and cakes made
from ground maize were plentiful. Meat and fish were within the reach
of all. Both were cured by smoke after the Indian fashion and could be
kept through the winter without difficulty. Vegetables of various
kinds were grown, but peas were the great staple. Peas were to the
French what maize was to the redskin. In every rural home _soupe aux
pois_ came daily to the table. Whole families were reared to vigorous
manhood on it. Even to-day the French Canadian has not by any means
lost his liking for this nourishing and palatable food. Beans, too,
were a favourite vegetable in the old days; not the tender _haricots_
of the modern menu, but the _fêves_ or large, tough-fibred beans that
grew in Normandy and were brought by its people to the New World.
There were potatoes, of course, and they were _patates_, not _pommes
de terre_. Cucumbers were plentiful, indeed they were being grown by
the Indians when the French first came to the St Lawrence. As they
were not indigenous to that region it is for others than the student
of history to explain how they first came there. Fruits there were
also, such as apples, plums, cherries, and French goose-berries, but
not in abundance. Few habitants had orchards, but most of them had one
or two fruit-trees grown from seedlings which came from France. Wild
fruits, especially raspberries, cranberries, and grapes, were to be
had for the picking, and the younger members of each family gathered
them all in season. Even in the humbler homes of the land there was no
need for any one to go hungry. More than one visitor to the colony,
indeed, was impressed by the rude comfort in which the habitants
lived. 'The boors of these manours,' wrote the voluble La Hontan,[8]
'live with greater comfort than an infinity of the gentry in France.'
And for once he was probably right.

[Footnote 8: Louis Armand, Baron La Hontan, came to Canada in 1683,
and lived for some time among the habitants of Beaupré, below Quebec,
and afterwards in the neighbourhood of Montreal. He also journeyed in
the Far West and wrote a fantastic account of his travels, of which an
English edition was published in 1703.]

As for drink, there were both tea and coffee to be had from the
traders; but they were costly and not in very general use. Milk was
cheap and plentiful. Brandy and wine came from France in shiploads,
but brandy was largely used in the Indian trade, and wine appeared
only on the tables of the well-to-do; the ordinary habitant could not
afford it save on state occasions. Cheap beer, brewed in the colony,
was within easier range of his purse. There were several breweries in
the colony, although they do not appear to have been very profitable
to their owners. Home-brewed ale was much in use. When duly aged it
made a fine beverage, although insidious in its effects sometimes. But
no guest ever came to any colonial home without a proffer of something
to drink. Hospitality demanded it. The habitant, as a rule, was very
fond of the flagon. Very often, as the records of the day lead us to
believe, he drank not wisely but too well. Idleness had a hand in the
development of this trait, for in the long winters the habitant had
little to do but visit his neighbours.

[Illustration: LA CANADIENNE After a painting by Krieghoff]

The men of New France smoked a great deal, and the women sometimes
followed their example. Children learned to smoke before they learned
to read or write. Tobacco was grown in the colony, and every habitant
had a patch of it in his garden; and then as now this _tabac canadien_
was fierce stuff with an odour that scented the whole seigneury. The
art of smoking a pipe was one of the first lessons which the Frenchman
acquired from his Indian friends, and this became the national solace
through the long spells of idleness. Such as it was, the tobacco of
the colony was no luxury, for every one could grow enough and to spare
to serve his wants. The leaves were set in the sun to cure, and were
then put away till needed.

As to the methods of farming, neither the contemporary records nor the
narratives of travel tell us much. But it is beyond doubt that the
habitant was not a very scientific cultivator. Catalogne remarks in
his valuable report that if the fields of France were cultivated like
the farms of Canada three-fourths of the people would starve.
Fertilization of the land was rare. All that was usually done in this
direction was to burn the stubble in the spring before the land went
under the plough. Rotation of crops was practically unknown. A portion
of each farm was allowed to lie fallow once in a while, but as these
fallow fields were rarely ploughed and weeds might grow without
restraint, the rest from cultivation was of little value. Even the
cultivated fields were ploughed but once a year and rather poorly at
that, for the land was ploughed in ridges and there was a good deal of
waste between the furrows. When Peter Kalm, the famous Scandinavian
naturalist and traveller, paid his visit to the colony in 1748 he
found 'white wheat most commonly in the fields.' But oats, rye, and
barley were also grown. Some of the habitants grew maize in great
quantities, while nearly all raised vegetables of various sorts,
chiefly cabbages, pumpkins, and coarse melons. Some gave special
attention to the cultivation of flax and hemp. The meadows of the St
Lawrence valley were very fertile, and far superior, in Kalm's
opinion, to those of the New England colonies; they furnished fodder
in abundance. Wild hay could be had for the cutting, and every
habitant had his conical stack of it on the river marshes. Hence the
raising of cattle and horses became an important branch of colonial
husbandry. The cattle and sheep were of inferior breed, undersized,
and not very well cared for. The horses were much better. The habitant
had a particular fondness for horses; even the poorest tried to keep
two or three. This, as Catalogne pointed out, was a gross
extravagance, for there was no work for the horses to do during nearly
half the year.

The implements of agriculture were as crude as the methods. Most of
them were made in the colony out of inferior materials and with poor
workmanship. Kalm saw no drains in any part of the colony, although,
as he naively remarked, 'they seemed to be much needed in places.' The
fields were seldom fenced, and the cattle often made their way among
the growing grain. The women usually worked with the men, especially
at harvest time, for extra labour was scarce. Even the wife and
daughters of the seigneur might be seen in the fields during the busy
season. Each habitant had a clumsy, wooden-wheeled cart or wagon for
workaday use. In this he trundled his produce to town once or twice a
year. For pleasure there was the celêche and the carriole. The celêche
was a quaint two-wheeled vehicle with its seat set high in the air on
springs of generous girth; the carriole, a low-set sleigh on solid
wooden runners, with a high back to give protection from the cold.
Both are still used in various parts of Quebec to-day. The habitant
made his own harness, often decorating it gaily and taking great pride
in his workmanship.

The feudal folk of New France did not spend all their time or energies
in toil. They had numerous holidays and times of recreation. Loyal to
his Church, the habitant kept every _jour de fête_ with religious
precision. These days came frequently, so much so, according to
Catalogne's report, that during the whole agricultural season from May
to October, only ninety clear days were left for labour. On these
numerous holidays were held the various festivals, religious or
secular. Sunday, also, was a day of general rendezvous. Every one came
to Mass, whatever the weather. After the service various announcements
were made at the church door by the local _capitaine de la milice_,
who represented the civil government in the parish. Then the rest of
the day was given over to visiting and recreation. There was plenty of
time, moreover, for hunting and fishing; and the average habitant did
both to his heart's content. In the winter there was a great deal of
visiting back and forth among neighbours, even on week-days. Dancing
was a favourite diversion and card-playing also. Gambling at cards was
more common among the people than suited either the priests or the
civil authorities, as the records often attest. Less objectionable
amusements were afforded by the _corvées récréatives_ or gatherings at
a habitant's home for some combination of work and play. The
corn-husking corvée, for reasons which do not need elucidation, was of
course the most popular of these. Of study or reading there was very
little, for only a very small percentage of the people could read.
Save for a few manuals of devotion there were no books in the home,
and very few anywhere in the colony.

Two or three chroniclers of the day have left us pen-pictures of the
French Canadians as they were before the English came. As a race,
Giles Hocquart says, they were physically strong, well set-up, with
plenty of stamina. They impressed La Hontan also as vigorous and
untiring at anything that happened to gain their interest. They were
fond of honours and sensitive to the slightest affront. This in part
accounts for their tendency to litigiousness, which various intendants
mentioned with regret. The habitant went to law with his neighbour at
every opportunity. His attitude toward questions of public policy was
one of rare self-control; but when anything touched his own personal
interests he always waxed warm immediately. Pretexts for squabbling
there were in plenty. With lands unfenced and cattle wandering about,
with most deeds and other legal documents loosely drawn, with too much
time on their hands during the winter, it is not surprising that the
people were continually falling out and rushing to the nearest royal
court. The intendant Raudot suggested that this propensity should be
curbed, otherwise there would soon be more lawsuits than settlers in
the colony.

On the whole, however, the habitant was well behaved and gave the
authorities very little trouble. To the Church of his fathers he gave
ungrudging devotion, attending its services and paying its tithes with
exemplary care. The Church was a great deal to the habitant; it was
his school, his hospital, his newspaper, his philosopher telling of
things present and things to come. From a religious point of view the
whole colony was a unit. 'Thank God,' wrote one governor, 'there are
no heretics here.' The Church, needing to spend no time or thought
in crushing its enemies, could give all its attention to its friends.
As for offences against the laws of the land these were conspicuously
few. The banks of the St Lawrence, when once the redskin danger was
put out of the way, were quite safe for men to live upon. The hand of
justice was swift and sure, but its intervention was not very often
needed. New France was as law-abiding as New England; her people were
quite as submissive to their leaders in both Church and State.

[Illustration: HABITANT PLOUGHING From the painting by Huot]

The people were fond of music, and seem to have obtained great
enjoyment from their rasping, home-made violins. Every parish had its
fiddler. But the popular repertoire was not very extensive. The Norman
airs and folk-songs of the day were easy to learn, simple and
melodious. They have remained in the hearts and on the lips of all
French Canada for over two centuries. The shantyman of Three Rivers
still goes off to the woods chanting the _Malbrouck s'en va-t-en
guerre_ which his ancestors sang in the days of Blenheim and
Oudenarde. Many other traits of the race have been borne to the
present time with little change. Then as now the habitant was a
voluble talker, a teller of great stories about his own feats and
experiences. Hocquart was impressed with the scant popular regard for
the truth in such things, and well he may have been. Even to-day this
trait has not wholly disappeared.

Unlike his prototype, the censitaire of Old France, the habitant never
became dispirited; even when things went wrong he retained his
_bonhomie_. Taking too little thought for the morrow, he liked, as
Charlevoix remarks, 'to get the fun out of his money, and scarcely
anybody amused himself by hoarding it.' He was light-hearted even to
frivolousness, and this gave the austere Church fathers many serious
misgivings. He was courteous always, but boastful, and regarded his
race as the salt of the earth. A Norman in every bone of his body, he
used, as his descendants still do, quaint Norman idioms and forms of
speech. He was proud of his ancestry. Stories that went back to the
days when 'twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings' were passed
along from father to son, gaining in terms of prodigious valour as
they went. His versatility gained him the friendship and confidence of
the Indian, an advantage which his English brother to the south was
rarely able to secure.

Much of the success which marked French diplomacy with the tribes was
due to this versatility. Beneath an ungainly exterior the habitant
often concealed a surprising ability in certain lines of action. He
was a master of blandishment when he had an end thereby to gain.
Dealings which required duplicity, provided the outcome appeared to be
desirable, did not rudely shock his conscience. He had no Puritan
scruples in his dealings with men of another race and religion. But in
many things he had a high sense of honour, and nothing roused his ire
so readily as to question it. Unstable as water, however, he did not
excel in tasks that took patience. He wanted to plough one day and
hunt the next, so that in the long run he rarely did anything well.
This spirit of independence was very pronounced. The habitant felt
himself to be a free man. This is why he spurned the name
'censitaire.' As Charlevoix puts it, 'he breathed from his birth the
air of liberty,' and showed it in the way he carried his head. A
singular type, when all is said, and worthy of more study than it has
received.




CHAPTER VI

'AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM'


Church and State had a common aim in early Canada. Both sought
success, not for themselves, but for 'the greater glory of God.' From
beginning to end, therefore, the Catholic Church was a staunch ally of
the civil authorities in all things which made for real and permanent
colonial progress. There were many occasions, of course, when these
two powers came almost to blows, for each had its own interpretation
of what constituted the colony's best interests. But historians have
given too much prominence to these rather brief intervals of
antagonism, and have thereby created a misleading impression. The
civil and religious authorities of New France were not normally at
variance. They clashed fiercely now and then, it is quite true; but
during the far greater portion of two centuries they supported each
other firmly and worked hand in hand.

Now the root of all trouble, when these two interests came into
ill-tempered controversy, was the conduct of the coureurs de bois.
These roving traders taught the savages all the vices of French
civilization in its most degenerate days. They debauched the Indian
with brandy, swindled him out of his furs, and entered into illicit
relations with the women of the tribes. They managed in general to
convince the aborigines that all Frenchmen were dishonest and
licentious. That the representatives of the Most Christian King should
tolerate such conduct could not be regarded by the Church as anything
other than plain malfeasance in office.

The Church in New France was militant, and in its vanguard of warriors
was the Jesuit missionary. Members of the Society of Jesus first came
to Quebec in 1625; others followed year by year and were sent off to
establish their outposts of religion in the wilderness. They were men
of great physical endurance and unconquerable will. The Jesuit went
where no others dared to go; he often went alone, and always without
armed protection.

Behold him on his way; his breviary Which from his girdle hangs, his
only shield. That well-known habit is his panoply, That Cross the only
weapon he will wield; By day he bears it for his staff afield, By
night it is the pillow of his bed. No other lodging these wild woods
can yield Than Earth's hard lap, and rustling overhead A canopy of
deep and tangled boughs far spread.

It is not strange that the Jesuit father should have disliked the
traders. A single visit from these rough and lawless men would undo
the spiritual labour of years. How could the missionary enforce his
lessons of righteousness when men of his own race so readily gave the
lie to all his teachings? The missionaries accordingly complained to
their superiors in poignant terms, and these in turn hurled their
thunderbolts of excommunication against all who offended. But the
trade was profitable, and Mammon continued, as in all ages, to retain
his corps of ardent disciples. Religion and trade never became
friendly in New France, nor could they ever become friendly so long as
the Church stood firmly by its ancient traditions as a friend of law
and order.

With agriculture, however, religion was on better terms. Men who
stayed on their farms and tilled the soil might be grouped into
parishes, their lands could be made to yield the tithe, their
spiritual needs might readily be ministered unto. Hence it became the
policy of the Church to support the civil authorities in getting
lands cleared for settlement, in improving the methods of cultivation,
and in strengthening the seigneurial system at every point. This
support the hierarchy gave in various ways, by providing curés for
outlying seigneuries, by helping to bring peasant farmers from France,
by using its influence to promote early marriages, and above all by
setting an example before the people in having progressive agriculture
on Church lands.

Both directly and through its dependent organizations the Catholic
Church became the largest single landholder of New France. As early as
1626 the Jesuits received their first grant of land, the concession of
Notre-Dame des Anges, near Quebec; and from that date forward the
order received at intervals large tracts in various parts of the
colony. Before the close of French dominion in Canada it had acquired
a dozen estates, comprising almost a million arpents of land. This was
about one-eighth of the entire area given out in seigneuries. Its two
largest seigneurial estates were Batiscan and Cap de la Magdelaine;
but Notre-Dame des Anges and Sillery, though smaller in area, were
from their closeness to Quebec of much greater value. The king
appreciated the work of the Jesuits in Canada, and would gladly have
contributed from the royal funds to its furtherance. But as the civil
projects of the colony took a great deal of money, he was constrained,
for the most part, to show his appreciation of religious enterprise by
grants of land. As land was plentiful his bounty was lavish--sometimes
a hundred thousand arpents at a time.

Next to the Jesuits as sharers of the royal generosity came the bishop
and the Quebec seminary, with a patrimony of nearly seven hundred
thousand arpents, an accumulation which was largely the work of
François de Laval, first bishop of Quebec and founder of the seminary.
The Sulpicians had, at the time the colony passed into English hands,
an estate of about a quarter of a million arpents, including the most
valuable seigneury of New France, on the island of Montreal. The
Ursulines of Quebec and of Three Rivers possessed about seventy-five
thousand arpents, while other orders and institutions, a half-dozen in
all, had estates of varying acreage. Directly under its control the
Church had thus acquired in mortmain over two million arpents, while
the lay landowners of the colony had secured only about three times as
much. It held about one-quarter of all the granted lands, so that its
position in Canada was relatively much stronger than in France.

These lands came from the king or his colonial representatives by
royal patent. They were given sometimes in frankalmoigne or sometimes
as ordinary seigneuries. The distinction was of little account
however, for when land once went into the 'dead hand' it was likely to
stay there for all time. The Church and its institutions, as seigneurs
of the land, granted farms to habitants on the usual terms, gave them
their deeds duly executed by a notary, received their annual dues, and
assumed all the responsibilities of a lay seigneur. And as a rule the
Church made a good seigneur. Settlers were brought out from France,
and a great deal of care was taken in selecting them. They were aided,
encouraged, and supported through the trying years of pioneering. As
early as 1667 Laval was able to point with pride to the fact that his
seigneuries of Beaupré and Isle d'Orleans contained over eleven
hundred persons--more than one-quarter of the colony's entire
population. These ecclesiastical seigneuries, moreover, were among the
best in point of intelligent cultivation. With funds and knowledge at
its disposal, the Church was better able than the ordinary lay
seigneur to provide banal mills and means of communication. These
seigneuries were therefore kept in the front rank of agricultural
progress, and the example which they set before the eyes of the people
must have been of great value.

The seigneurial system was also strengthened by the fact that the
boundaries of seigneuries and parishes were usually the same. The
chief reason for this is that the parish system was not created until
most of the seigneuries had been settled. There were parishes,
so-termed, in the colony from the very first; but not until 1722 was
the entire colony set off into parish divisions. Forty-one parishes
were created in the Quebec district; thirteen in the district of Three
Rivers; and twenty-eight in the region round Montreal. These
eighty-two parishes were roughly coterminous with the existing
seigneuries, but not always so. Some few seigneuries had six or eight
parishes within their bounds. In other cases, two or three seigneuries
were merged into a single great parish. In the main, however, the two
units of civil and spiritual power were alike.

From this identification of the parish and seigneury came some
interesting results. The seigneurial church became the parish church;
where no church had been provided the manor-house was commonly used as
a place of worship. Not infrequently the parish curé took up his abode
in the seigneur's home and the two grew to be firm friends, each
aiding the other with the weight of his own special authority and
influence. The whole system of neighbourhood government, as the late
Abbé Casgrain once pointed out, was based upon the authority of two
men, the curé and the seigneur, 'who walked side by side and extended
mutual help to each other. The censitaire, who was at the same time
parishioner, had his two rallying-points--the church and the
manor-house. The interests of the two were identical.' From this close
alliance with the parish the seigneurial system naturally derived a
great deal of its strong hold upon the people, for their fidelity to
the priest was reflected in loyalty to the seigneur who ranked as his
chief local patron and protector.

The people of the seigneuries paid a tithe or ecclesiastical tax for
the support of their parish church. In origin, as its name implies,
this payment amounted to one-tenth of the land's annual produce; but
in New France the tithe was first fixed in 1663 at one-thirteenth,
but in 1679 this was reduced to one twenty-sixth. At this figure it
has remained to the present day. Tithes were at the outset levied on
every product of the soil or of the handiwork of man; but in practice
they were collected on grain crops only. When the habitants of New
France began to raise flax, hemp, and tobacco some of the priests
insisted that these products should yield tithes also; but the
Superior Council at Quebec ruled against this claim, and the king, on
appeal, confirmed the council's decision. The Church collected its
dues with strictness; the curés frequently went into the fields and
estimated the total crop of each farm, so that they might later judge
whether any habitant had held back the Church's due portion. Tithes
were usually paid at Michaelmas, everything being delivered to the
curé at his own place of abode. When he lived with the seigneur the
tithes and seigneurial dues were paid together. But the total of the
tithes collected during any year of the old régime was not large. In
1700 they amounted in value to about five thousand livres, a sum which
did not support one-tenth of the colony's body of priests. By far the
larger part of the necessary funds had to be provided by generous
friends of the Church in France.

Churches were erected in the different seigneuries by funds and labour
secured in various ways. Sometimes the bishop obtained money from
France, sometimes the seigneur provided it, sometimes the habitants
collected it among themselves. More often a part of what was necessary
came from each of these three sources. Except in the towns, however,
the churches were not pretentious in their architecture, and rarely
cost much money. Stone, timber, and other building materials were
taken freely from the lands of the seigneury, and the work of
construction was usually performed by the parishioners themselves. As
a result the edifices were rather ungainly as a rule, being built of
rough-hewn timber. In 1681 there were only seven stone churches in all
the seigneuries, and the royal officers deplored the fact that the
people did not display greater pride or taste in the architecture of
their sanctuaries. Bishop Laval felt strongly that this was
discreditable, and steadfastly refused to perform the ceremony of
consecration in any church which had not been substantially built of
stone.

Where a seigneur erected a church at his own expense it was customary
to let him have the patronage, or right of naming the priest. This
was an honour which the seigneurs seem to have valued highly. 'Every
one here is puffed up with the greatest vanity,' wrote the intendant
Duchesneau in 1681; 'there is not one but pretends to be a patron and
wants the privilege of naming a curé for his lands, yet they are
heavily in debt and in extreme poverty.' None of the great bishops of
New France--Laval, St Vallier, or Pontbriand--had much sympathy with
this seigneurial right of patronage or advowson, and each did what he
could to break down the custom. In the end they succeeded; the bishop
named the priest of every parish, although in many cases he sought the
seigneur's counsel on such matters.

In the church of his seigneury the lord of the manor continued,
however, to have various other prerogatives. For his use a special pew
was always provided, and an elaborate decree, issued in 1709, set
forth precisely where this pew should be. In religious processions the
seigneur was entitled to precedence over all other laymen of the
parish, taking his place directly behind the curé. He was the first to
receive the tokens of the day on occasions of religious festival, as
for example the palms on Palm Sunday. And when he died, the seigneur
was entitled to interment beneath the floor of the church, a privilege
accorded only to men of worldly distinction and unblemished lives. All
this recognition impressed the habitants, and they in turn gave their
seigneur polite deference. Along the line of travel his carriage or
carriole had the right of way, and the habitant doffed his cap in
salute as the seigneur drove by. Catalogne mentioned that, despite all
this, the Canadian seigneurs were not as ostentatiously given tokens
of the habitants' respect as were the seigneurs in France. But this
did not mean that the relations between the two classes were any less
cordial. It meant only that the clear social atmosphere of the colony
had not yet become dimmed by the mists of court duplicity. The
habitants of New France respected the horny-handed man in homespun
whom they called their seigneur: the depth of this loyalty and respect
could not fairly be measured by old-world standards.

As a seigneur of lands the Church had the right to hold courts and
administer justice within the bounds of its great estates. Like most
lay seigneurs it received its lands with full rights of high, middle,
and low jurisdiction (_haute, moyenne_, _et basse justice_). In its
seigneurial courts fines might be imposed or terms of imprisonment
meted out. Even the death penalty might be exacted. Here was a great
opportunity for abuse. A very inquisition would have been possible
under the broad terms in which the king gave his grant of
jurisdiction. Yet the Church in New France never to the slightest
degree used its powers of civil jurisdiction to work oppression. As a
matter of fact it rarely, if ever, made use of these powers at all.
Troubles which arose among the habitants in the Church seigneuries
were settled amicably, if possible, by the parish priest. Where the
good offices of the priest did not suffice, the disputants were sent
off to the nearest royal court. All this is worth comment, for in the
earlier days of European feudalism the bishops and abbots held regular
courts within the fiefs of the Church. And students of jurisprudence
will recall that they succeeded in tincturing the old feudal customs
with those principles of the canon law which all churchmen had learned
and knew. While ostensibly applying crude mediaeval customs, many of
these courts of the Church fiefs were virtually administering a highly
developed system of jurisprudence based on the Roman law. Laval might
have made history repeat itself in Canada; but he had too many other
things engaging his attention.

Lay seigneurs, on the other hand, held their courts regularly. And the
fact that they did so is of great historical significance, for the
right of court-holding rather than the obligation of military service
is the earmark which distinguishes feudalism from all other systems of
land tenure. Practically every Canadian seigneur had the judicial
prerogative; he could establish a court in his seigneury, appoint its
judge or judges, impose penalties upon the habitants, and put the fees
or costs in his own pocket. In France this was a great source of
emolument, and too many seigneurs used their courts to yield income
rather than to dispense even-handed justice. But in Canada, owing to
the relatively small number of suitors in the seigneuries, the system
could not be made to pay its way. Some seigneurs appointed judges who
held court once or twice a week. Others tried to save this expense by
doing the work themselves. Behind the big table in the main room of
his manor-house the seigneur sat in state and meted out justice in
rough-and-ready fashion. He was supposed to administer it in true
accord with the Custom of Paris; he might as well have been asked to
apply the Code of Hammurabi or the Capitularies of Charlemagne. But if
the seigneur did not know the law, he at least knew the disputants,
and his decisions were not often wide of the eternal equities. At any
rate, if a suitor was not satisfied he could appeal to the royal
courts. Only minor cases were dealt with in the seigneurial courts,
and the appeals were not numerous.

On the whole, despite its crudeness, the administration of seigneurial
justice in New France was satisfactory enough. The habitants, as far
as the records show, made no complaint. Justice was prompt and
inexpensive. It discouraged chicane and common barratry. Even the
sarcastic La Hontan, who had little to say in general praise of the
colony and its institutions, accords the judicial system a modest
tribute. 'I will not say,' he writes, 'that the Goddess of Justice is
more chaste here than in France, but at any rate, if she is sold, she
is sold more cheaply. In Canada we do not pass through the clutches of
advocates, the talons of attorneys, and the claws of clerks. These
vermin do not as yet infest the land. Every one here pleads his own
cause. Our Themis is prompt, and she does not bristle with fees,
costs, and charges.' The testimony of others, though not so
rhetorically expressed, is enough to prove that both royal and
seigneurial courts did their work in fairly acceptable fashion.

The Norman habitant, as has already been pointed out, was by nature
restive, impulsive, and quarrelsome. That he did not make every
seigneury a hotbed of petty strife was due largely to the stern hand
held over him by priest and seigneur alike, but by his priest
particularly. The Church in the colony never lost, as in France, the
full confidence of the masses; the higher dignitaries never lost touch
with the priest, nor the latter with the people. The clergy of New
France did not form a privileged order, living on the fruits of other
men's labour. On the contrary, they gave the colony far more than they
took from it. Although paid a mere pittance, they never complained of
the great physical drudgery that their work too often required.
Indeed, if labourers were ever worthy of their hire, such toilers were
the spiritual pioneers of France beyond the seas. No one who does not
approach their aims and achievements with sympathy can ever fully
understand the history of these earlier days. No one who does not
appreciate the dominating place which the Church occupied in every
walk of colonial life can fully realize the great help which it gave,
both by its active interest and by its example, to the agricultural
policy of the civil power. The Church owed much to the seigneurial
system, but not more than the system owed to it.




CHAPTER VII

THE TWILIGHT OF FEUDALISM


When the fleurs-de-lis of the Bourbons fluttered down from the
ramparts of Quebec on September 18, 1759, a new era in the history of
Canadian feudalism began. The new British government promptly allayed
the fears of the conquered people by promising that all vested rights
should be respected and that 'the lords of manors' should continue in
possession of all their ancient privileges. This meant that they
intended to recognize and retain the entire fabric of seigneurial
tenure.

Now this step has been commonly regarded as a cardinal error on the
part of the new suzerains, and on the whole the critics of British
policy have had the testimony of succeeding events on their side. By
1760 the seigneurial system had fully performed for the colony all the
good service it was ever likely to perform. It could easily have been
abolished then and there. Had that action been taken, a great many
subsequent troubles would have been avoided. But in their desire to be
generous the English authorities failed to do what was prudent, and
the seigneurial system remained.

Many of the seigneurs, when Canada passed under British control, sold
their seigneuries and went home to France. How great this hegira was
can scarcely be estimated with exactness, but it is certain that the
_émigrés_ included all the military and most of the civil officials,
together with a great many merchants, traders, and landowners. The
colony lost those who could best afford to go; in other words, those
whom it could least afford to let go. The priests, true to their
traditions, stood by the colony in its hours of trial. But whatever
the extent and character of the out-going, it is true that many
seigneuries changed hands during the years 1763-64. Englishmen bought
these lands at very low figures. Between them and the habitants there
were no bonds of race, religion, language, or social sympathy. The new
English seigneur looked upon his estate as an investment, and
proceeded to deal with the habitants as though they were his tenantry.
All this gave the seigneurial system a rude shock.

There was still another feature which caused the system to work much
less smoothly after 1760 than before. The English did not retain the
office of intendant. Their frame of government had no place for such
an official. Yet the intendant had been the balance-wheel of the whole
feudal machine in the days before the conquest. He it was who kept the
seigneurial system from developing abuses; it was his praetorian power
'to order all things as may seem just and proper' that kept the
seigneur's exactions within rigid bounds. The administration of New
France was a government of men; that of the new regime was a
government of laws. Hence it was that the British officials, although
altogether well-intentioned, allowed grave wrongs to arise.

The new English judges, not unnaturally, misunderstood the seigneurial
system. They stumbled readily into the error that tenure _en censive_
was simply the old English tenure in _copyhold_ under another name.
Now the English copyholder held his land subject to the customs of the
manor; his dues and services were fixed by local custom both as
regards their nature and amount. What more easy, then, than to seek
the local custom in Canada, and apply its rules to the decision of
all controversies respecting seigneurial claims?

Unfortunately for this simple solution, there was a great and
fundamental difference between these two tenures. The Canadian
censitaire had a written title-deed which stated explicitly the dues
and services he was bound to give his seigneur; the copyholder had
nothing of the kind. The habitant, moreover, had various rights
guaranteed to him by royal decrees. No custom of the manor or
seigneury could prevail against written contracts and statute-law. But
the judges do not seem to have grasped this distinction; when cases
involving disputed obligations came before them they called in
notaries to establish what the local customs were, and rendered
judgment accordingly. This gave the seigneur a great advantage, for
the notaries usually took their side. Moreover, the new judicial
system was more expensive than the old, so that when a seigneur chose
to take his claims into court the habitants often let him have
judgment by default rather than incur heavy costs.

During the twenty years following the conquest the externals of the
seigneurial system remained unaltered; but its spirit underwent a
great change. This was amply shown during the American War of
Independence, when the province was invaded by the Arnold-Montgomery
expeditions. In all the years that the colony had been under French
dominion a single word from any seigneur was enough to summon every
one of his able-bodied habitants to arms. But now, only a dozen years
after the English had assumed control, the answer made by the habitant
to such appeals was of a very different nature. The authorities at
Quebec, having only a small body of regular troops available for the
defence of Canada against the invaders, called on the seigneurs to
rally the old feudal array. The proclamation was issued on June 9,
1775. Most seigneurs responded promptly and called their habitants to
armed service. But the latter, for the most part, refused to come. The
seigneurs threatened that their lands would be confiscated; but even
this did not move the habitants to comply. A writer of the time
narrates what happened in one of the seigneuries, and it is doubtless
typical of what took place in others. 'M. Deschambaud went over to his
seigneury on the Richelieu,' he tells us, 'and summoned his tenants to
arms; they listened patiently to what he had to say, and then
peremptorily refused to accede to his demands. At this the seigneur
was foolish enough to draw his sword; whereupon the habitants gave
both him and a few friends who accompanied him a severe thrashing, and
sent them off vowing vengeance. Fearing retaliation, the habitants
armed themselves, and to the number of several hundred prepared to
attack any regular forces which might be sent against them. Through
the discretion of Governor Carleton, however, who hastened to send one
of his officers to disavow the action of the seigneur, and to promise
the habitants that if they returned quietly to their homes they would
not be molested, they were persuaded to disperse.'[9]

As the eighteenth century drew to a close it became evident that the
people were getting restive under the restraints which the seigneurial
system imposed. Lands had risen in value so that the _lods et ventes_
now amounted to a considerable payment when lands changed owners. With
the growth of population the banal right became very valuable to the
seigneurs and an equally great inconvenience to the habitants. Many
seigneurs made no attempt to provide adequate milling facilities.

[Footnote 9: Masères, _Additional Papers concerning the Province of
Quebec_ (1776), pp. 71 _et seq._]

They gave the habitants a choice between bringing their grain to the
half-broken-down windmill of the seigneury or paying the seigneur a
money fine for his permission to take their grist elsewhere. New
seigneurial demands, unheard of in earlier days, were often put forth
and enforced.

The grievances of the habitants were not mitigated, moreover, by the
way in which the authorities of the province gave lands to the United
Empire Loyalists. These exiles from the revolted seaboard colonies
came by thousands during the years following the war, and they were
given generous grants of land. And these lands were not made subject
to any seigneurial dues. They were given in freehold, in free and
common socage. The new owners of these lands paid no annual dues and
rendered no regular services to any superior authority. Their tenure
seemed to the habitants to be very attractive. Hence the influx of the
Loyalists gave strength to a movement for the abolition of seigneurial
tenure--a movement which may be said to have had its first real
beginning about 1790.

It was in that year that the solicitor-general of the province, in
response to a request of the legislative council, presented a long
report on the land-tenure situation. The council, after due
consideration of this report and other data submitted to it, passed a
series of resolutions declaring that the seigneurial system was
retarding the agricultural progress of the province and that, while
its immediate abolition was not practicable, steps should be taken to
get rid of it gradually. But nothing came of these resolutions. The
Constitutional Act of 1791 greatly complicated the situation by its
provisions relating to the so-termed 'clergy reserves,' or
reservations of lands for Church endowment, and it was not until 1825
that the Canada Trade and Tenures Act opened the way for a commutation
of tenures whenever the seigneur and his habitants could agree. This
act was permissive only. It did not apply any compulsion to the
seigneurs. Very few, accordingly, took advantage of its provisions.

This was the situation when the uprising of 1837-38 took place. The
seigneurial system was not a leading cause of the rebellion, but it
was one of the grievances included by the habitants in their general
bill of complaint. Hence, when Lord Durham came to Quebec to
investigate the causes of colonial discontent, the system came in for
its share of study. In his masterly _Report on the Affairs of British
North America_ he recognized that the old system had outlived its
day of usefulness, and that its continuance was unwise. But Durham
outlined no plan for its abolition. He believed that if the province
were given a government responsible to the masses of its own people,
the problem of abolition would soon be solved. One of Durham's
secretaries, Charles Buller, drafted a scheme for commuting the
tenures into freehold, but his plan did not find acceptance.

[Illustration: THE SEIGNEURIAL COURT, 1855 From a drawing by W. W.
Smith]

For nearly twenty years after Durham's investigation the question of
abolishing the seigneurial tenures remained a football of Canadian
politics. Legislative commissions were appointed; they made
investigations; they presented reports; but none succeeded in getting
any comprehensive plan of abolition on the statute-books. In 1854,
however, the question was made a leading issue at the general
election. A definite mandate from the people was the result, and 'An
Act for the Abolition of Feudal Rights and Duties in Lower Canada'
received its enactment during the same year.

The provisions of this act for changing all seigneurial tenures into
freehold are long and somewhat technical. They would not interest the
reader. In brief, it was arranged that the valid rights of each
seigneur should be translated by special commissioners into an annual
money rental, and that the habitants should pay this annual sum. The
seigneur was required to pay no quit-rent to the public treasury. What
he would have paid, by reason of getting his own lands into freehold,
was applied _pro rata_ to the reduction of the annual rentals payable
by the habitants. It was arranged, furthermore, that any habitant
might commute this yearly rental by paying his seigneur a lump sum
such as would represent his rent capitalized at the rate of six per
cent.

The whole undertaking was difficult and complicated. A great many
perplexing questions arose, and a special court had to be created to
deal with them.[10] On the whole, however, the commissioners performed
their tasks carefully and without causing undue friction. Class
prejudice was strong, and by most of the seigneurs the whole scheme
was regarded as a high-handed piece of legislative confiscation. They
opposed it bitterly from first to last. Among the habitants, however,
the abolition of the old tenure was popular, for it meant, in their
opinion, that every one would henceforth be a real landowner. But in
the long run it signified nothing of the sort. Very few of the
habitants took advantage of the provision which enabled them to pay a
lump sum in lieu of an annual rental. Down to the present day the
great majority of them continue to pay their _rente constituée_ as did
their fathers before them. With due adherence to ancient custom they
pay it each St Martin's Day, and to the man whom they still call 'the
seigneur.' Seigneur he is no longer; for the act of 1854 abolished not
only the emoluments, but the honours attaching to this rank. But
traditions live long in isolated communities, and the habitants of the
St Lawrence valley still give, along with their annual rent, a great
deal of old-time deference to the man who holds the lands upon which
they live.

[Footnote 10: This court was constituted of four judges of the Court
of the Queen's Bench and nine judges of the Superior Court of Lower
Canada, as follows: Sir Louis H. La Fontaine, Chief Justice; Justices
Duval, Aylwin, and Caron of the Court of the Queen's Bench; the Hon.
Edward Bowen, Chief Justice; Justices Morin, Mondelet, Vanfelson, Day,
Smith, Meredith, Short, and Badgley of the Superior Court.]

The twilight of European feudalism was more prolonged in French Canada
than in any other land. Its prolongation was unfortunate. For several
decades preceding 1854 it had failed to adjust itself to the new
environment, and its continuance was an obstacle to the economic
progress of Canada. Its abolition was wise--a generation or two
earlier it would have been even wiser. All this is not to say,
however, that the seigneurial system did not serve a highly useful
purpose in its day. So long as it fitted into the needs of the colony,
so long as the intendancy remained to guard the people against
seigneurial avarice, the system had a great deal to be said in its
behalf. It helped to make New France stronger in arms than she could
have become under any other plan of land tenure; and with states as
with men self-preservation is the first law of nature.




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


In two larger books entitled _The Seigniorial System in Canada_ (New
York, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907) and _Documents relating to the
Seigniorial Tenure in Canada_ (Toronto, The Champlain Society, 1908),
the writer has discussed Canadian feudalism in its technical phases.
The former volume contains a full bibliography of manuscript and
printed materials.

The reader who desires to know more about this interesting side of
early Canadian history may also be referred to Professor George M.
Wrong's _Canadian Manor and its Seigneurs_ (Toronto, 1908);
Philippe-Aubert De Gaspé's _Les anciens Canadiens_ (Quebec, 1863);
Professor C. W. Colby's _Canadian Types of the Old Régime_ (New York,
1908), especially chapter iv; W. P. Greenough's _Canadian Folk Life
and Folk Lore_ (New York, 1897); the Abbé H. R. Casgrain's _Paroisse
Canadienne au XVIIe Siècle_ (Quebec, 1880); Benjamin Sulte's articles
on 'La Tenure Seigneuriale' in the _Revue Canadienne_, July-August,
1882; and Léon Gérin's paper on 'L'habitant de Saint-Justin' in the
_Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada_, 1898,
pp. 139-216. There is a short, but very interesting chapter on
'Canadian Feudalism' in Francis Parkman's _Old Régime in Canada_
(Boston, 1893), and various phases of life in New France are admirably
pictured in every one of the same author's other volumes.




INDEX


Agriculture in New France, obstacles to development of, 30-1;
  in 1759, 32;
  in 1616, 65-6.


Bigot, François, last intendant of New France, 23.

Brandy Traffic, the, effect of on the Indians, 123.


Canada. See New France.

Carignan-Salières, regiment of, sent to New France to punish the
Iroquois, and remain as settlers, 52-7.

Carleton, Sir Guy, and the habitants, 144.

Cartier, Jacques, 7.

Casgrain, Abbé, on neighbourhood government in New France, 129.

Catalogne, Gédéon de, his report on the seigneuries of New
France, 49-52, 57-9;
  on the habitant, 113, 116;
  on the relations between seigneurs and habitants, 133.

Champlain, Samuel, his colony at Cape Diamond, 8-10, 16.

Church, the, in New France, 122;
  and the Brandy Traffic, 123-4;
  assists colonization, 124-5;
  largest landholder in New France, 125-7;
  as a seigneur, 127, 133-4;
  and tithes, 129-30;
  church buildings and patronage, 131-2;
  its great influence, 137-8.

Colbert, Jean Baptiste, chief minister of Louis XIV, 20.

Company of One Hundred Associates, the, 17;
  its powers and obligations, 18;
  its failure, 19-21.

Coureurs de bois, 30-1;
  and the Brandy Traffic, 123.


Duchesneau, intendant of New France, on the seigneurs as patrons, 132.

Durantaye, Olivier Morel de la, seigneur of New France, 71-7.

Durham, Lord, on the seigneurial system, 147.


Feudal system, the, creates a bond of mutual wardship and service, 12-13;
  becomes the seigneurial system, 13.

France, her position in Europe in the seventeenth century, 2-4;
  form of her administration, 5-6.
  See New France.

Frontenac, Count, governor of New France, 24.

Fur trade in New France, fascination of, 30;
  some evils of, 31.


Giffard, Robert, seigneur of New France, 41, 59.

Grant, Captain David Alexander, marries into the house of Longueuil, 83.

Grant, Charles Colmore, Baron de Longueuil, his title recognized by
Queen Victoria, 83-4.

Great Britain, and the seigneurial system, 139-50.


Habitants, the, their origin, 37;
  the wives of early settlers, 36-7;
  and the Arrêts of Marly, 45-8;
  under the seigneurial system, 87-94, 133;
  their dues and services: 'cens et rentes,' 94-7;
  'lods et ventes,' 98, 144;
  'banalités,' 98-100;
  'corvées,' 101, 117, and the maypole obligation, 102-3;
  their homes, 105-8;
  clothing, 108-10;
  their daily fare, 110-11;
  their drink and tobacco, 112-13;
  methods of farming, 113-16;
  recreation of, 116-17;
  and the Church, 118-19;
  character of, 119-21;
  hardships of under British regime, 142, 144;
  refuse to respond to call to arms in 1775, 143-4;
  their position contrasted with that of United Empire Loyalists, 145;
  after abolition of seigneurial system, 149.

Hébert, Louis, first seigneur in New France, 62-9;
  his descendants, 69-70.

Hocquart, Giles, on the habitant, 117, 119.


Intendants of New France, their position, 6;
  power and importance of, 22-3;
  and the seigneuries, 24-5.

Iroquois, the, a scourge to the seigneuries, 52-3.


Jesuits, the, in New France, 123-4;
  their estates, 125-6.


Kalm, Peter, a Swedish traveller, 32;
  on agriculture in New France, 114-15.


La Hontan, Louis Armand, Baron, on the habitants, 111 and note, 117;
  on the judicial system of New France, 136.

Laval, François de, Bishop of Quebec, 127;
  and style of church building, 131;
  and patronage, 132.

Le Moyne, Charles, seigneur of Longueuil, 77-9;
  his ten sons and descendants, 79 and note.

Le Moyne, Charles, Baron de Longueuil, 79 and note;
  a model seigneur, 80-2;
  his descendants, 82-5.

Louis XIII and colonization in New France, 10-11, 14.

Louis XIV, his interest in New France, 21-3, 25-6, 35;
  his generosity, 28, 30.


Marie, Mère, de l'Incarnation, 37.

Marly, Arrêts of, 45-8.


New France, Champlain's colony, 8-10, 16;
  administered by Company of One Hundred Associates, 17-20;
  under royal government, 21;
  early administration of, 28-9;
  emigration to, 29;
  population in 1673 and 1760, 30;
  in 1759, 32.


Raudot, intendant of New France, and evasion of royal decree, 27;
  complains of the mercenary spirit shown by seigneurs, 44-5;
  on the habitant, 118.

Richelieu, Cardinal, organizes Company of One Hundred Associates, 17.


St Louis, Château de, seigneurs swear fealty at, 40.

Seigneurial courts, the, 135-6;
  the special court appointed after abolition of seigneurial system,
  148 and note.

Seigneurial system, the, in France, 14;
  in Canada, 16, 46;
  and the Church, 128, 138;
  under Great Britain, 139-45;
  abolition of, 145-50.

Seigneuries, to whom granted, 25;
  size of, 38-9;
  situation of, 42, 49-52, 57-9;
  of the Church, 127-8.

Seigneurs of Old Canada, and the intendant, 24-5;
  obligations of, 39-41;
  and new settlers, 42-3;
  complaints regarding the, 44-5;
  and the Arrêts of Marly, 45-8;
  their love of adventure, 70-1;
  three types of, 85-6;
  their relations with the habitants, 87-103, 133, 144-5;
  their mode of life, 104-5;
  their relations with the curés, 129;
  Church patronage and their prerogatives, 131-3;
  courts of, 135.

Sovereign (or Superior) Council, its powers, 21-2;
  and royal decrees, 26-8, 60;
  on tithes, 130.

Sulpicians, the, their estate in New France, 126.


Talon, Jean, first intendant of New France, 23;
  his success in colonization, 36;
  settles the Carignan-Salières regiment on the southern frontier, 54-7.

Tithes in New France, 129-30.

Tocqueville, Comte de, on France, 2, 22.


Ursulines of Quebec and of Three Rivers, their lands, 126.

    *    *    *    *    *

Printed by T. and A. Constable Ltd., University Press
Edinburgh, Scotland


THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA

Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
of the University of Toronto

A series of thirty-two freshly-written narratives for
popular reading, designed to set forth in historic continuity
the principal events and movements in Canada
to the outbreak of the World War.

    *    *    *    *    *

PART I. THE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS

1. _The Dawn of Canadian History_
  A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
  BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

2. _The Mariner of St Malo_
  A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier
  BY STEPHEN LEACOCK


PART II. THE RISE OF NEW FRANCE

3. _The Founder of New France_
  A Chronicle of Champlain
  BY CHARLES W. COLBY

4. _The Jesuit Missions_
  A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness
  BY THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS

5. _The Seigneurs of Old Canada_
  A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism
  BY WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO

6. _The Great Intendant_
  A Chronicle of Jean Talon
  BY THOMAS CHAPAIS

7. _The Fighting Governor_
  A Chronicle of Frontenac
  BY CHARLES W. COLBY


PART III. THE ENGLISH INVASION

8. _The Great Fortress_
  A Chronicle of Louisbourg
  BY WILLIAM WOOD

9. _The Acadian Exiles_
  A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline
  BY ARTHUR G. DOUGHTY

10. _The Passing of New France_
  A Chronicle of Montcalm
  BY WILLIAM WOOD

11. _The Winning of Canada_
  A Chronicle of Wolfe
  BY WILLIAM WOOD


PART IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF BRITISH CANADA

12. _The Father of British Canada_
  A Chronicle of Carleton
  BY WILLIAM WOOD

13. _The United Empire Loyalists_
  A Chronicle of the Great Migration
  BY W. STEWART WALLACE

14. _The War with the United States_
  A Chronicle of 1812
  BY WILLIAM WOOD


PART V. THE RED MAN IN CANADA

15. _The War Chief of the Ottawas_
  A Chronicle of the Pontiac War
  BY THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS

16. _The War Chief of the Six Nations_
  A Chronicle of Joseph Brant
  BY LOUIS AUBREY WOOD

17. _Tecumseh_
  A Chronicle of the last Great Leader of his People
  BY ETHEL T. RAYMOND


PART VI. PIONEERS OF THE NORTH AND WEST

18. _The 'Adventurers of England' on Hudson Bay_
  A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North
  BY AGNES C. LAUT

19. _Pathfinders of the Great Plains_
  A Chronicle of La Vérendrye and his Sons
  BY LAWRENCE J. BURPEE

20. _Adventurers of the Far North_
  A Chronicle of the Arctic Seas
  BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

21. _The Red River Colony_
  A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba
  BY LOUIS AUBREY WOOD

22. _Pioneers of the Pacific Coast_
  A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters
  BY AGNES C. LAUT

23. _The Cariboo Trail_
  A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia
  BY AGNES C. LAUT


PART VII. THE STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL FREEDOM

24. _The Family Compact_
  A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Upper Canada
  BY W. STEWART WALLACE

25. _The Patriotes of '37_
  A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lower Canada
  BY ALFRED D. DECELLES

26. _The Tribune of Nova Scotia_
  A Chronicle of Joseph Howe
  BY WILLIAM LAWSON GRANT

27. _The Winning of Popular Government_
  A Chronicle of the Union of 1841
  BY ARCHIBALD MACMECHAN


PART VIII. THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY

28. _The Fathers of Confederation_
  A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion
  BY A. H. U. COLQUHOUN

29. _The Day of Sir John Macdonald_
  A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion
  BY SIR JOSEPH POPE

30. _The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier_
  A Chronicle of Our Own Times
  BY OSCAR D. SKELTON


PART IX. NATIONAL HIGHWAYS

31. _All Afloat_
  A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways
  BY WILLIAM WOOD

32. _The Railway Builders_
  A Chronicle of Overland Highways
  BY OSCAR D. SKELTON

    *    *    *    *    *

Published by
Glasgow, Brook & Company
TORONTO, CANADA




[End of _The Seigneurs of Old Canada_ by William Bennett Munro]