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 1 1
The Rise of New France
LE CANADIEN
After a painting by Krieghoff
A Chronicle of New -World
Feudalism
BY
WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO
TORONTO
GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY
1922
Copyright in all Countries subscribing to
the Berne Convention
v?77
C-Off I O
TO
C. S. G. M.
fide et amora
CONTENTS
Page
I. AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE .... I
II. GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS . . 33
III. THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA —
Hubert, La Durantaye, Le Moyne . . . 6l
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
ix
ILLUSTRATIONS
LE CANADIEN Frontispiece
After a painting- by Krieghoff.
MAP OF THE SEIGNEURIES, 1790 . Facingpage 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 . .-.'.„ Il8
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 him-
self as he works his way through the chronicles
of a dozen centuries. From the age of Charle-
magne 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 Euro-
pean 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.
5.O.C. A
2 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
It was France that first brought an orderl;
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 Cregy, 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 re-
marked 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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 3
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 re-
cuperative power that has at all times made
France a nation which, whether men admire
ir condemn her policy, can never be treated
rith indifference. It was these qualities which
Cabled her, throughout exhausting foreign
roubles, to retain her leadership in European
scholarship, in philosophy, art, and architecture;
his 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 prosper-
ous eras that France began her task of creating
qn 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
4 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 elo-
quence. But France was the aesthetic as well
as the military dictator of seventeenth-cen-
tury 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 gentle-
men 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,
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 5
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
hadaPbne tune all the essentials of a repre-
sentative 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 com-
plete. ' 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
6 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 in-
tendants. 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 regime. With-
out 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 in-
tendants, in turn, had their underlings, known
as the sub-delegates, who held the peasantry
in leash. Thus it was that the administra-
tion, 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 ad-
ministrative framework of France when her
kings and people turned their eyes westward
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 7
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 achieve-
ments, 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
8 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 9
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 re-
lations with the Indians, and made ready with
his twenty-eight followers to spend the winter
in the new settlement. It was a painful ex-
perience. The winter was long and bitter ;
scurvy raided the Frenchmen's cramped
io THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
quarters, and in the spring only eight fol-
lowers 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 any-
thing 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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE II
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 fiefg in New
France to all immigrants whose station in life
warranted the belief that they would main-
tain 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
hieFarchyaslfs Outstanding feature. /
Feudalism is a much-abused term. To the v/
minds of most laymen it has a rather hazy (Co*'
association with things despotic, oppressive, j
and mediaeval. The mere mention of the t
conjures up those days of the Dark Ages when
armour-clad knights found their chief re-
creation 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
12 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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
v 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 bear-
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 13
ing 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 power-
ful 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 pay-
ments. 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
14 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
vassal became the censitaire or peasant culti-
vator 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 de-
pendants by any personal tie, the seigneurs
usually turned affairs over to their bailiffs, men
with hearts of adamant, who squeezed from
the seigneuries every sou the hapless peasantry
could yield. These publicans of the old regime
have much to answer for. They and their
work were not least among the causes which
brought upon the crown and upon the privi-
leged 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 arid
eighteenth centuries, ought men to associate,
if they must, their notions of grinding oppres-
sion 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 manifes-
tation of Bourbon stupidity — that is a com-
mon 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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 15
ren 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 Massa-
chusetts 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 settle-
ment of pioneers surrounded by hostile abo-
rigines. 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 ?
16 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 ; w^
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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 17
approval of Champlain, that the task of build-
ing up the colony should be entrusted to a
great colonizing company formed for the pur-
pose 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 pro-
fusely 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
ocganization 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 suc-
s.o.c. B
i8 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
ceeded, if its profits were large and its achieve
ments 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 coloniza-
tion had begun. ' Having in view the estab-
lishment 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
CARDINAL RICHELIEU
From a painting in the Louvre, Paris
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 19
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 cap-
tured, 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 com-
pany's expense. In only two ways did the
company, after the first few years of its ex-
istence, 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 com-
pany showed some interest was in the giving
of seigneuries — chiefly to themselves. About
20 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
sixty of these seigneuries were granted, large
tracts all of them. One director of the com-
pany 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 situa-
tion.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 short-
comings from the royal notice. The great
1 See in this Series The Great Intendant, chap. i.
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 21
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 com-
pany'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.
Louis XIV was greatly interested in Canada.
From beginning to end of his long administra-
tion 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
ti1
22 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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.
TocqueviHe, shrewdest among historians
of pre-revolutionary France, has somewhere
pointed out that under the old regime the
administration took the place of Providence.
It sought to be as omniscient and as omni-
potent ; 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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 23
for a paternal order. An ordinance establish-
ing 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 in-
tendant'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 inten-
dants of New France. Jean Talon, whose
prudence and energy did much to set the colony
on its feet, was the first ; Frangois 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,
24 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 there-
fore ordered that for the future these grants
should be made by the governor and intendant
j ointly . Thenceforth they were usually so made,
although in some cases the intendant disre-
garded 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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 25
of the home government and invoked its in-
tervention. In all such matters he was praetor
and tribune combined. Without the intend-
ancy 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^wenJLjfcp 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 enter-
prise, 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 mtmoire,
often of pitiless length, setting forth the facts
and figures. Then His Majesty would re-
spond with an edict ordering that all seigneurs
who did not forthwith help the colony by
putting settlers on their lands should have
26 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 sove-
reign 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 registra-
tion of his decrees. But the Chateau 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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 27
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
28 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 re-
spective 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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 29
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 gradu-
ally 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 in-
creasingly 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 per-
ceptibly, 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
30 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
own natural increase, for the colonial birth-
rate was high, large families being everywhere
the rule. In 1673 the population of New
France was figured at about seven thousand ;
in 1760 it had reached nearly fifty thousand.
The development of agriculture on the
seigneurial lands did not, however, keep pace
with growth in population. It was hard to
keep settlers to the prosaic task of tilling the
soil. There were too many distractions, chief
among them the lure of the Indian trade. The
traffic ,in furs offered large profits and equally
large risks ; but it always yielded a full
dividend of adventure and hair-raising ex-
perience. 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
AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE 31
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 re-
mained in France. Once in a while a horde of
them descended to Quebec or Montreal, dis-
posed of their furs to merchants, filled them-
selves 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 en-
abled 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 clear-
ing of the seigneuries proceeded very slowly.
At the close of French dominion in 1760 the
amount of cultivated land was only about
32 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
three hundred thousand arpents, or about five
acres for every head of population — not a very
satisfactory snowing 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 inter-
course 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 in-
ward as far as the eye could reach, broken only
here and there by tracts of meadow and wood-
land. 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 seven-
teenth century were not lacking in their thirst
for excitement, whether heroic or otherwise.
Their race furnished the New World with ex-
plorers and forest merchants by the hundred.
The most venturesome voyageurs, the most
s.o.c. C
34 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
intrepid traders, and the most untiring mission-
aries 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 agri-
culture. 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.
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 35
It was in the mind of the king that ' persons
of quality ' as well as peasants should be in-
duced 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 wilder-
ness, 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 dur-
ing the first half-century of its history. The
role of a ' gentleman of the wilderness ' did not
appeal very strongly even to those who had
no tangible asset but the family name. Hence
it was that not a half-dozen seigneurs were
in actual occupancy of their lands on the
St Lawrence when the king took the colony
out of the company's hands in 1663.
But when Talon came to the colony as
intendant in 1665 this situation was quickly
changed. Uncleared seigneuries were declared
forfeited. Actual occupancy was made a con-
dition 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
36
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 in-
tendant'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 livres1 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,
1 The livre was practically the modern franc, about twenty cents.
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 37
one cannot be altogether sure. The English
agent at Paris wrote that they were ' lewd
strumpets gathered up by the officers of the
city,' and even the saintly Mere Marie de
1' Incarnation confessed that there was beau-
coup 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.1
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 1 664 were of Norman origin ; while in
1680 it was estimated that at least four-fifths
of the entire population of New France had
1 Another view will be found in The Great Intcndant in this
Series, chap. iv.
38 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
some Norman blood in their veins. Officials
and merchants came chiefly from Paris,
and they coloured the life of the little settle-
ment 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 arrange-
ments 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
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 39
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.1 JTn 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 in-
variably 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 descrip-
tion, 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 dis-
puted 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
40 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
the quint was payable to the public treasury.
This, as its name implies, amounted to one-
fifth of the seigneury's value ; but it rarely
accrued, and even when it did the generous
monarch usually rebated a part or all of it.
Not a single sou was ever exacted by the crown
from the great majority of the seigneurs. If
agriculture made slow headway in New France
it was not because officialdom exploited the land
to its own profit. Never were the landowners
of a new country treated more generously or
given greater incentive to diligence.
But if the king did not ask the seigneurs for
money he asked for other things. He required,
in the first place, that each should render fealty
and homage with due feudal ceremony to his
official representative at Quebec. Accordingly,
the first duty of the seigneur, after taking
possession of his new domain, was to repair
without sword or spur to the Chateau of St
Louis at Quebec, a gloomy stone structure that
frowned on the settlement from the heights
behind. Here, on bended knee before the
governor, the new liegeman swore fealty to his
lord the king and promised to render due
obedience in all lawful matters. This was one
of the things which gave a tinge of chivalry
to Canadian feudalism, and helped to make
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 41
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 con-
fronted 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 desir-
able, of course, that the seigneurs should lend
a hand in encouraging the immigration of
people from their old homes in France. Some
of them did this. Robert Giffard, who held
the seigneury of Beauport just below Quebec,
was a notable example. The great majority
of the seigneurs, however, made only half-
hearted attempts in this direction, and their
efforts went for little or nothing. What they
did was to meet, on arrival at Quebec, the ship-
42 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
loads of settlers sent out by the royal officers.
There they gathered about the incoming vessel,
like so many land agents, each explaining what
advantages in the way of a good location and
fertile soil he had to offer. Those seigneurs
who had obtained tracts near the settlement at
Quebec had, of course, a great advantage in all
this, for the new-comers naturally preferred to
set up their homes where a church would be
near at hand, and where they could be in touch
with other families during the long winters.
Consequently the best locations in all the
seigneuries near Quebec were soon taken,
and then settlers had to take lands mora 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.
v For a time the immigrants found little or no
difficulty in obtaining farms on easy terms.
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 43
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 diffi-
culty. 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 ff entree became
common ; indeed it was difficult for a settler
to get the lands he most desired except by
44 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
making such payment. As most of the new-
comers could not afford to do this they were
often forced to make their homes in unfavour-
able, out-of-the-way places, while better situa-
tions 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 mer-
cenary ; they were taking advantage of tech-
nicalities 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
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 45
farms without written titles have been sub-
jected to heavy rents and dues, the seigneurs
refusing to grant them regular deeds except
on onerous conditions ; and these conditions
they find themselves obliged to accept, because
otherwise they will have their labour for
nothing.'
The royal authorities paid due heed to these
complaints, and, although they did not accept
all Raudot's suggestions, they proceeded to
provide corrective measures in the usual way.
This way, of course, was by the issue of royal
edicts. Two of these decrees reached the
colony in the due course of events. They are
commonly known as the Arrets of Marly, and
bear date July n, 1711. Both were carefully
prepared and their provisions show that the
royal authorities understood just where the
entire trouble lay.
The first arret 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
46 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
thus find land less open to free settlement in
situations best adapted for agriculture.1 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 ail 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
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 47
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 promul-
gated ; then quickly forgotten. Few of the
habitants seem to have ever heard of it ; new-
comers, of course, knew nothing of their rights
under its provisions. Seigneurs continued to
get special terms for advantageous locations,
the applicants for lands being usually quite
willing to pay a bonus whenever they could
afford to do so. Now and then some one,
having heard of the royal arret, would appeal
to the intendant, whereupon the seigneur made
haste to straighten out things satisfactorily.
Then, as now, the presumption was that the
people knew the law, and were in a position to
take advantage of its protecting features ; but
the agencies of information were so few that
the provisions of a new decree rarely became
common property.
The second of the two arrets of Marly was
designed to uphold the hands of those seigneurs
who were trying to do right. The king and
48 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
his ministers were convinced, from the infor-
mation 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 spend-
ing their energies in the fur trade. It was the
royal opinion that real homesteading should be
insisted upon, and he decreed, accordingly, that
wherever a habitant did not make a substantial
start in clearing his farm, the land should be
forfeited in a year to the seigneur. This arret,
unlike its companion decree, was rigidly en-
forced. 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 develop-
ment of the colony proceeded with exasperating
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 49
slowness. Each year the governor and in-
tendant 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 dis-
couraging.
" 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 evi-
dently just what the home authorities wanted
to know when they arranged for a topo-
graphical and general report on the seigneuries
in 1712. This investigation, on the intendant's
advice, was entrusted to an engineer, Gedeon
de Catalogne. Catalogne, who was a native of
Beam, born in 1662, came to Canada about
the year 1685. He was engaged on the im-
provement 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
s.o.c D
50 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 owner-
ship, 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 pro-
ducts, 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 settle-
ments he was represented by a subordinate.
Each district, likewise, had its own royal court,
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 51
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 im-
portant of the seigneuries in the district bear-
ing 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 com-
manded 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 govern-
ment, and now held by their heirs. La Val-
terie, Lanoraie, and Berthier-en-Haut, were
the most conspicuous among these riparian
fiefs. Across the stream lay Chateauguay and
Longueuil, the patrimony of the Le Moynes ;
likewise the seigneuries of Varennes, Vercheres,
52 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 Law-
rence 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 in-
teresting 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 red-
. skins would creep stealthily upon some out-
* lying seigneury, butcher its people, burn every-
thing in sight, and then decamp swiftly to their
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 53
forest lairs. The colonial authorities, help-
less to guard their entire frontiers and unable
to foretell where the next blow would fall,
endured the terrors of this situation for many
years. In utter desperation they at length
called on the king for a regiment of trained
troops as the nucleus of a punitive expedition.
The Iroquois would be tracked to their own
villages and there given a memorable lesson in
letters of blood and iron. The king, as usual,
complied, and on a bright June day in 1665 a
glittering cavalcade disembarked at Quebec.
The Marquis de Tracy with two hundred gaily
caparisoned officers and men of the regiment
of Carignan-Salieres formed this first detach-
ment ; 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 accom-
plish it ; but the Iroquois were thoroughly
chastened, and by the close of 1666 the colony
once more breathed easily. How long, how-
ever, would it be permitted to do so ? Would
not the departure of the regiment be a signal
54 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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, arrange-
ments 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
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 55
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
56 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 re-
mained 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 Caesars
was beginning to give way before the oncoming
barbarians of Northern Europe, the practice of
disbanding legions on the frontier and having
them settle on the lands was adopted as a
means of securing defence, without the necessity
of spending large sums on permanent outpost
garrisons. The retired soldier was a soldier
still, but practically self-supporting in times
of peace. These praedia militaria of the
Romans gave Talon his idea of a military can-
tonment along the Richelieu, and in broaching
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 57
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 with-
out 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 guard-
ing 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, extend-
ing on the north shore of the St Lawrence
58 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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. Pro-
minent seigneuries in this region were Pointe
du Lac or Tonnancour, the estate of the
Godefroys de Tonnancour ; Cap de la Magde-
laine and Batiscan, the patrimony of the
Jesuits ; the fief of Champlain, owned by
Desjordy de Cabanac ; Ste Anne de la Perade,
Nicolet, and Becancour. Nicolet had passed
into the hands of the Courvals, a trading family
of Three Rivers, and Becancour was held by
Pierre Robineau, the son of his famous father,
Rene Robineau de Becancour. On all of these
seigneuries some progress had been made, but
often it amounted to very little. Better results
had been obtained both eastward and westward
of the region.
The district of Quebec was the first to be
allotted in seigneuries, and here of course
agriculture had made better headway.
Grondines, La Chevrotiere, Portneuf, Pointe
aux Trembles, Sillery, and Notre-Dame des
Anges were all thriving properties ranging
along the river bank eastward to the settlement
at Quebec. Just beyond the town lay the
flourishing fief of Beauport, originally owned
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS 59
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 Fran?ois
Berthelot, on whom the king for his zeal and
enterprise had conferred the title of Comte
de St Laurent. A score of other seigneurial
tracts, including Lotbiniere, Lauzon, La Dur-
antaye, Bellechasse, Riviere Ouelle, and others
well known to every student of Canadian gene-
alogy, 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 re-
cognized the imprudence of their policy. Hence
60 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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— HEBERT,
LA DURANTAYE, LE MOYNE '
IT was to the seigneurs that the king looked
for active aid in promoting the agricultural
interests of New France. Many of them dis-
appointed 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 achieve-
ment, are worth the recounting.
81
62 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
The honour of being the colony's first
seigneur belongs to Louis Hebert, and it was
a curious chain of events that brought him to
the role of a yeoman in the St Lawrence valley.
Like most of these pilgrim fathers of Canada,
Hebert has left to posterity little or no informa-
tion concerning his early life and his experi-
ence as tiller of virgin soil. That is a pity ;
for he had an interesting and varied career
from first to last. What he did and what he
saw others do during these troublous years
would make a readable chronicle of adventure,
perseverance, and ultimate achievement. As
it is, we must merely glean what we can from
stray allusions to him in the general narratives
of early colonial life. These tell us not a tithe
of what we should like to know ; but even such
shreds of information are precious, for Hebert
was Canada's first patron of husbandry. He
connected his name with no brilliant exploit
either of war or of peace ; he had his share of
adventure, but no more than a hundred others
in his day ; the greater portion of his adult
years were passed with a spade in his hands.
But he embodies a type, and a worthy type
it is.
Most of Canada's early settlers came from
Normandy, but Louis Hebert was a native of
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 63
Paris, born in about 1575. He had an apothe-
cary's shop there, but apparently was not mak-
ing a very marked success of his business when
in 1604 he fell in with Biencourt de Poutrin-
court, and was enlisted as a member of that
voyageur's first expedition to Acadia. It was
in these days the custom of ships to carry an
apothecary or dispenser of health-giving herbs.
His functions ran the whole gamut of medical
practice from copious blood-letting to the
dosing of sailors with concoctions of mysterious
make. Not improbably Hebert set out with no
intention to remain in America ; but he found
Port Royal to his liking, and there the historian
Lescarbot soon found him not only ' sowing
corn and planting vines,' but apparently * tak-
ing great pleasure in the cultivation of the soil.'
All this in a colony which comprised five
persons, namely, two Jesuit fathers and their
servant, Hebert, and one other.
With serious dangers all about, and lack of
support at home, Port Royal could make no
headway, and in 1613 Hebert made his way
back to France. The apothecary's shop was
re-opened, and the daily customers were no
doubt regaled with stories of life among the
wild aborigines of the west. But not for long.
There was a trait of restlessness that would not
64 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
down, and in 1616 the little shop again put
up its shutters. Hebert had joined Champlain
in the Brouage navigator's first voyage to the
St Lawrence. This time the apothecary burned
his bridges behind him, for he took his family
along, and with them all his worldly effects.
The family consisted of his wife, two daughters,
and a young son. The trading company
which was backing Champlain's enterprise
promised that Hebert and his family should
be paid a cash bonus and should receive,
in addition to a tract of land, provisions and
stores sufficient for their first two years in the
colony. For his part, Hebert agreed to serve
without pay as general medical officer of the
settlement, to give his other services to the
company when needed, and to keep his hands
out of the fur trade. Nothing was said about
his serving as legal officer of the colony as
well ; but that task became part of his varied
experience. Not long after his arrival at
Quebec, Hebert's name appears, with the title
of procureur du Roi, at the foot of a petition
sent home by the colonists to the king.
All this looked fair enough on its face, but
as matters turned out, Hebert made a poor
bargain. The company gave him only half
the promised bonus, granted him no title to any
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 65
land, and for three years insisted upon having
all his time for its own service. A man of
ordinary tenacity would have made his way
back to France at the earliest opportunity.
But Hebert was loyal to Champlain, whom
he in no way blamed for his bad treatment.
At Champlain's suggestion he simply took
a piece of land above the settlement at
Quebec, and without waiting for any formal
title-deed began devoting all his spare hours to
the task of getting it cleared and cultivated.
His small tract comprised only about a dozen
arpents on the heights above the village ; and
as he had no one to help him the work of clear-
ing 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
lif ework that ploughs and horses came to lessen
the labour of breaking new land.
Nevertheless, Hebert was able by unremitting
industry to get the entire twelve arpents into
cultivable shape within four or five years.
s.o.c. E
66 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 pro-
duced abundantly. A few head of cattle were
easily provided for in all seasons by the wild
hay which grew in plenty on the flats by the
river. Here was an indication of what the
colony could hope to do if all its settlers were
men of Hebert's persistence and stability. But
the other prominent men of the little settle-
ment, 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 re-
garded as one of the most comfortable abodes
in the colony. The attractions of this home,
and especially the hospitality of Madame
Hebert and her daughters, are more than once
alluded to in the meagre annals of the settle-
ment. It was the first dwelling to be erected
on the plateau above the village ; it passed
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 67
to Hebert's daughter, and was long known in
local history as the house of the widow
Couillard. Its exact situation was near the
gate of the garden which now encircles the
seminary, and the remains of its foundation
walls were found there in 1866 by some work-
men 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 ex-
planation 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 agri-
cultural progress of New France. It had but
two aims — in the first place to get profits from
the fur trade, and in the second place to make
sure that no interlopers got any share in this
lucrative business. Its officers placed little
value upon such work as Hebert was doing.
But in 1623 the authorities were moved to
accord him the honour of rank as a seigneur,
and the first title-deed conveying a grant
of land en seigneurie was issued to him on
February 4 of that year. The deed bore the
signature of the Due de Montmorenci, titular
viceroy of New France. Three years later a
further deed, confirming Hebert's rights and
title, and conveying to him an additional tract
of land on the St Charles river, was issued to
him by the succeeding viceroy, Henri de Levy,
Due de Ventadour.
The preamble of this document recounts
the services of the new seigneur. ' Having left
his relatives and friends to help establish a
colony of Christian people in lands which are
deprived of the knowledge of God, not being
enlightened by His holy light,' the document
proceeds, 'he has by his painful labours and
industry cleared lands, fenced them, and
erected buildings for himself, his family and his
cattle.' In order, accordingly, ' to encourage
those who may hereafter desire to inhabit and
develop the said country of Canada,' the land
held by Hebert, together with an additional
square league on the shore of the St Charles,
is given to him ' to have and to hold in fief noble
for ever,' subject to such charges and conditions
as might be later imposed by official decree.
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
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 69
the landless aristocrats of France might be
persuatterfr to" emigrate to the colonies by
promises of lavish seigneurial estates wrested
from the wilderness. It will be noted, how-
ever/lha't Hebert 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.
Hebert-tlie4in 1627. Little as we know
about his life, the-elerical 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 Hebert'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. Hebert 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
70 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
some of the best-known families in the his-
tory of French Canada have come down, —
the Jolliets, De Lerys, De Ramesays, Fourniers
and Taschereaus, — and the entire category of
Hebert'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 regime 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 Hebert'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
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 71
St Lawrence and Richelieu regions not a few
were of this type. They were good soldiers and
quickly adapted themselves to the circum-
stances of combat in the New World, meeting
the Iroquois with his own arts and often com-
bining a good deal of the red man's crafti-
ness 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 accord-
ing to their own ideals of service they valiantly
served the king, and they furnish the historian
of the old regime with an interesting and un-
usual 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
72 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
Morel de la Durantaye, a captain in the
regiment of Campelle, but attached to the
Carignan-Salieres for its Canadian expedition.
In the first expedition against the Mohawks
he commanded the advance guard, and he was
one of the small band who spent the terrible
winter of 1666-67 at Fort Ste Anne near the
head of Lake Champlain, subsisting on salt
pork and a scant supply of mouldy flour.
Several casks of reputedly good brandy, as
Dollier de Casson records, had been sent to the
fort, but to the chagrin of the diminutive
garrison they turned out to contain salt water, •
the sailors having drunk the contents and re-
filled the casks on their way out from France.
Warlike operations continued to engross Dur-
antaye'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
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 73
and the Bellechasse channel. To this fief of
La Durantaye adjoining lands were subse-
quently 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 out-
come 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, separ-
ated 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
74 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 75
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.1 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 him-
self 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 mus-
tered a band of traders who, with a contin-
gent 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 raid-
ing bands of Iroquois which were once again
proving a menace. At Boucherville, in 1694,
76 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
one historian tells us with characteristic hyper-
bole, Durantaye killed ten Iroquois with his
own hand. Mohawks were not, as a rule, so
easy to catch or kill. Two years later he com-
manded a detachment of troops and militia-
men 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 pre-
sented 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
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 77
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, com-
paring 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 clear-
ing it. This area, of fifty lineal arpents in
frontage by one hundred in depth, was granted
78 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
to Le Moyne by M. de Lauzon l 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 him-
self 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 hold-
ings, 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.
1 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.
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 79
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.1 What
scions of a stout race they were ! The strain
of the old Norse rover was in them all. Each
one a soldier, they built forts, founded cities,
governed colonies, and gave their king full
measure of valiant service.
The eldest, who bore his father's name and
1 These sons were: (i) 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 Helene, 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 i666\ intrepid young border-warrior,
killed by the Iroquois in 1691 ; Joseph Le Moyne de Se*rigny,
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, orn 1681, died of yellow fever at San
Domingo in 1701: (10) Antoine Le Moyne de Chateauguay,
born 1683, governor of French Guiana.
8o THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
possessed many of his traits, inherited the
seigneury. Soon he made it one of the most
valuable properties in the whole colony. The
old manor-house gave way to a pretentious
chateau flanked by four imposing towers of
solid masonry. Its dimensions were, as such
things went in the colony, stupendously large,
the structure being about two hundred feet in
length by one hundred and seventy in breadth.
The great towers or bastions were loopholed in
such way as to permit a flanking fire in the
event of an armed assault ; and the whole
building, when viewed from the river, presented
an impressive fagade. The grim Frontenac,
who was not over-given to eulogy, praised it in
one of his dispatches and said that it reminded
him of the embattled chateaux of old Nor-
mandy. 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
THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 81
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 in-
vested 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 favour-
able notice of the minister, with the suggestion
that it should receive suitable acknowledg-
ment. 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
s.o.c. F
82 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
de Longueuil. In recounting the services
rendered to the colony by the new baron the
patent mentioned that ' he has already erected
at his own cost a fort supported by four strong
towers of stone and masonry, with a guard-
house, several large dwellings, a fine church
bearing all the insignia of nobility, a spacious
farmyard in which there is a barn, a stable, a
sheep-pen, a dovecote, and other buildings, all
of which are within the area of the said fort ;
next to which stands a banal mill, a fine
brewery of masonry, together with a large
retinue of servants, horses, and equipages, the
cost of which buildings amount to sixty
thousand livres ; so much so that this
seigneury is one of the most valuable in the
whole country.' The population of Longueuil,
in the census returns of 1698, is placed at two
hundred and twenty-three.
The new honour spurred its recipient to even
greater efforts ; he became one of the first
gentlemen of the colony, served a term as
lieutenant-governor at Montreal, and, going
into battle once more, was killed in action near
Saratoga in the expedition of 1729. The
barony thereupon passed to his son, the third
Charles Le Moyne, born in 1687, who lived
until 1755, and was for a time administrator
of the colony. His son, the third baron, was
killed during the Seven Years' War in the
operations round Lake George, and the title
passed, in the absence of direct male heirs, to
his only daughter, Marie Le Moyne de
Longueuil who, in 1781, married Captain
David Alexander Grant of the 94th British
regiment. Thus the old dispensation linked
itself with the new. The eldest son of this
marriage became fifth Baron de Longueuil in
1841. Since that date the title has been borne
by successive generations in the same family.
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 re-
cognized in the Dominion. After the con-
quest 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 pro-
clamation, accordingly, the rank and title of
84 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
Charles Colmore Grant, seventh Baron de
Longueuil, were formally recognized.1
The barony of Longueuil at one time in-
cluded 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.
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,
1 The royal recognition was officially promulgated as follows :
4 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.)
! THREE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA 85
, alike in war and peace. By intermarriage also
vthe Le Moynes of Longueuil connected them-
selves with other prominent families of French
r|Canada, notably those of Beaujeu, Lanaudiere,
•and Gaspe. 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
ifceigneurial system could accomplish at its best.
These three seigneurs, Hebert, La Durantaye,
and Le Moyne, represent three different, yet
not so very dissimilar types of landed pioneer.
Hebert, the man of humble birth and limited
attainments, made his way to success by un-
remitting personal labour under great dis-
couragements. 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
,4yas greater. Morel de la Durantaye, the
Iman-at-arms, well born and bred, took his
seigneurial rank as a matter of course, and
,friis duties without much seriousness. His
«eigneury had his attention only when oppor-
tunities for some more exciting field of action
(failed to present themselves. Interesting figure
jthough he was — an excellent type of a hundred
Jothers — it was well for the colony that not all
86 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 avoca-
tion; 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 obliga-
tions 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.
87
88 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 com-
pared with their friends at home. To speak of
them as ' slaves to the corvees and unpaid
military service, debarred from education and
crammed with gross fictions as an aid to their
docility and their value as food for powder,' J
is to display a rare combination of hopeless
1 A. G. Bradley, The Fight with France for North America
(London, 1905, p. 388).
SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT 89
jotry and crass ignorance. The habitant
the old regime in Canada was neither a slave
lor a serf ; neither down-trodden nor mal-
reated ; neither was he docile and spineless
fhen his own rights were at issue. So often
las all this been shown that it is high time an
ind were made of these fictions concerning the
roes of Canadian folk-life in the days before
ic conquest.
We have ample testimony concerning the
relations of seigneur and habitant in early
Canada, and it comes from many quarters.
First of all there are the title-deeds of lands,
thousands of which have been preserved in the
various notarial archives. It ought to be ex-
plained, in passing, that when a seigneur wished
to make a grant of land the services of a notary
were enlisted. Notaries were plentiful ; the cen-
sus of 1 68 1 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, there-
fore, each notary accumulated quite a collec-
tion or cadastre of legal records which he kept
carefully. At his death they were passed over
90 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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
\
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 front-
age 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
SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT 91
his farm extended rearwards a distance of any-
where 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 con-
cerned. 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
92 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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
SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT 93
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 ren-
dered 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 I But this royal remedy for the
ills of New France went the way of many
94 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
others. The authorities saw that it would
work no cure, and only one attempt was ever
made to punish those habitants who showed de-
fiance. 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
cdtes9 as the habitants termed each line of
houses along the river, stretched all the way
from Quebec to Montreal. From the St Law-
rence the whole colony looked like one un-
ending, 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
SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT 95
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.
96 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 con-
stituted a burden, and the habitants doubt-
less 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 celeches
THE HABITANT
from a painting by Macnaughton
SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT 97
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 neighbour-
hood 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, con-
tributed 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.
The cens et rentes made up the only pay-
ment which the seigneur received each year,
s.o.c. G
98 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
but there was another which became due at
intervals. This was the payment known as
the lods et ventes, a mutation fine which the
seigneur had the right to demand whenever a
farm changed hands by sale or by descent,
except to direct heirs. One-twelfth of the value
was the seigneur's share, but it was his custom
to rebate one-third of this amount. Lands
changed hands rather infrequently, and in any
case the seigneur's fine was very small. From
this source he received but little revenue and
it came irregularly. Only in the days after
the conquest, when land rose in value and
transfers became more frequent, could the
lods et ventes be counted among real sources
of seigneurial income.
Then there were the so-termed banalites.
In France their name was legion ; no one
but a seigneur could own a grist-mill, wine-
press, slaughter-house, or even a dovecot. The
peasant, when he wanted his grain made into
flour or his grapes made into wine, was re-
quired 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 banalit6
— the grist-mill right. The Canadian seigneur
had the exclusive milling privilege; his habi-
SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT 99
v
tants were bound by their title-deed to bring
their grist to his mill, and his legal toll was
one-fourteenth of their grain. This obliga- \
tion did not bear heavily on the people of the
seigneuries; most of the complaints concern-
ing it came rather from the seigneurs, who
claimed that the toll was too small and did
not suffice, in the average seigneury, to pay
the wages of the miller. Many seigneurs--
declined to build mills until the royal authorities
stepped in with a decree commanding that those
who did not do so should lose their banal right
for all time. Then they bestirred themselves.
The seigneurial mills were not very efficient,
from all accounts. Crude, clumsy, poorly
built affairs, they sometimes did little more
than crack the wheat into coarse meal — it
could hardly be called flour. The bakers of
Quebec complained that the product was often
unfit to use. The mills were commonly built
in tower-like fashion, and were at times loop-
holed in order that they might be used if
necessary in the defence of seigneuries against
Indian attack. The mill of the Seminary of
St Sulpice at Montreal, for example, was a
veritable stronghold, rightly counted upon as a
place of sure refuge for the settlers in time of
need. Racked and decayed by the ravages of
ioo THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 ex-
plained, this arrangement was utterly im-
practicable. 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 there-
fore 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
SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT 101
on the old regime, to the habitant's corvee or
obligation to give his seigneur so many days
of free labour in each year. In France this
incident of seigneurial tenure cloaked some dire
abuses. Peasants were harried from their
farms and forced to spend weeks on the lord's
domain, while their own grain rotted in the
fields. But there was nothing of this sort in
Canada. Six days of corvee per year was all
that the seigneur could demand ; and he
usually asked for only three, that is to say, one
day each in the seasons of ploughing, seedtime,
and harvest. And when the habitant worked
for his seigneur in this way the latter had to
furnish him with both food and tools, a re-
quirement which greatly impaired the value
of corvee labour from the seigneur's point of
view. So far as a painstaking study of the
records can disclose, the corvee obligation was
never looked upon as an imposition of any
moment. It was apparently no more generally
resented than is the so-termed statute-labour
obligation which exists among the farming
communities of some Canadian provinces at
the present day.
As for the other services which the habitant
had to render his seigneur, they were of little
importance. When he caught fish, one fish in
102 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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,
A la porte a ma mie.
Bright and early in the morning, as Gaspe
tells us, the whole neighbourhood appeared,
decked out fantastically, and greeted the manor-
house with a salvo of blank musketry. With
them they bore a tall fir-tree, its branches cut
and its bark peeled to within a few feet of the
SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT 103
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, return-
ing for more hospitality with a sense of duty
well performed. Before noon the merry com-
pany, 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
104
HOW THE HABITANT LIVED 105
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 com-
munity were tlie 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 neighbour-
hood.
The manor-house was not a mansion. Built
sometimes of rough-hewn timber, but more
commonly of stone, it was roomy and com-
fortable, 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 dis-
tinction. As for the habitants, their homes
were also of stone or timber — long and rather
narrow structures, heavily built, and low.
io6 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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
1 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 gener-
ously with earth round about and overhead.
Within convenient distance of the house, like-
wise, 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
HOW THE HABITANT LIVED 107
towering background of green hills beyond.
The whole colony formed one long rambling
village, each habitant touching elbows with his
neighbour on either side.
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 side-
board 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
io8 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
and tools. Even at the present day
descendants retain much of this facility,
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 un-
known, 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 — etoffe du pays,
as it was called — came from the hand-looms of
every parish. It was all wool and stood un-
ending 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
HOW THE HABITANT LIVED 109
to appear in their brighter plumage of garments
brought from France. In the summer the
children went nearly unclothed and bare-
footed 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, im-
pervious 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 pro-
no THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
tection 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 nourish-
ing and palatable food. Beans, too, were a
HOW THE HABITANT LIVED in
favourite vegetable in the old days; not the
tender haricots of the modern menu, but the
feves 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 palates, 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 im-
pressed by the rude comfort in which the
habitants lived. ' The boors of these manours,'
wrote the voluble La Hontan,1 ' live with
1 Louis Armand, Baron La Hontan, came to Canada in 1683,
and lived for some time among the habitants of Beaupre, below
H2 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
greater comfort than an infinity of the gentry
in France.' And for once he was probably
right.
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 some-
thing 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. Idle-
ness had a hand in the development of this
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.
LA CANADIENNE
After a painting by Krieghoff
HOW THE HABITANT LIVED 113
trait, for in the long winters the habitant had
little to do but visit his neighbours.
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 theu
people would starve. Fertilization of the land
was rare. All that was usually done in this
s.o.c. H
Ii4 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
direction was to burn the stubble in the spring
before the land went under the plough. Rota-
tion 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 with-
out 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 cultiva-
tion 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 im-
PC
HOW THE HABITANT LIVED 115
rtant branch of colonial husbandry. The
cattle and sheep were of inferior breed, under-
sized, and not very well cared for. The horses
were much better. The habitant had a par-
ticular fondness for horses ; even the poorest
tried to keep two or three. This, as Catalogue
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 celeche and
the carriole. The celeche was a quaint two-
wheeled vehicle with its seat set high in the air
n6 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 fete 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
HOW THE HABITANT LIVED 117
ras a great deal of visiting back and forth
among neighbours, even on week-days. Danc-
ing 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 corvees recreatives or gather-
ings at a habitant's home for some com-
bination of work and play. The corn-husk-
ing corvee, 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
n8 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 con-
tinually falling out and rushing to the nearest
royal court. The intendant Raudot suggested
that this propensity should be curbed, other-
wise 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
P.
HOW THE HABITANT LIVED 119
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 submis-
sive to their leaders in both Church and State.
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 Mal-
brouck 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
120 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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, Itp
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 pro-
digious 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
HOW THE HABITANT LIVED 121
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, pro-
vided 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 pro-
nounced. 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 them-
selves, 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,
122
<AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM' 123
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 mis-
sionary. 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 un-
conquerable 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 ;
124 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 shoul
have disliked the traders. A single visit froi
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
'AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM' 125
authorities in getting lands cleared for settle-
ment, 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 cures for out-
lying 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 Mag-
delaine; 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
126 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
Jesuits in Canada, and would gladly have con-
tributed from the royal funds to its further-
ance. 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 Franfois 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 land-
owners of the colony had secured only about
three times as much. It held about one-quarter
127
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 dis-
tinction 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 exe-
cuted 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 Beaupre 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 know-
128 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
ledge 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
'AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM' 129
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 cure 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 neighbour-
hood government, as the late Abbe Casgrain
once pointed out, was based upon the authority
of two men, the cure 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,
s.o.c. I
I3o THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 cures 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 cure 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 regime 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.
'AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM' 131
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 them-
selves. 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 archi-
tecture of their sanctuaries. Bishop Laval felt
strongly that this was discreditable, and stead-
fastly refused to perform the ceremony of con-
secration 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.
132 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 cure 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 i
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 cure. He was the first t< I
receive the tokens of the day on occasions o:
religious festival, as for example the palmij;
on Palm Sunday. And when he died, tin I
'AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM' 133
seigneur was entitled to interment beneath
the floor of the church, a privilege accorded
only to men of worldly distinction and un-
blemished lives. All this recognition im-
pressed 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 be-
come 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
134 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 in-
quisition 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
'AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM' 135
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 obliga-
tion 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 ap-
pointed 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
136 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
apply the Code of Hammurabi or the Capitu-
laries of Charlemagne. But if the seigneur did
not know the law, he at least knew the dis-
putants, 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 dis-
couraged chicane and common barratry. Even
the sarcastic La Hontan, who had little to say
in general praise of the colony and its in-
stitutions, 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,
'AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM' 137
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 labour-
ers 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 occu-
pied in every walk of colonial life can fully
138 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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
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
139
140 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 emigres 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.
THE TWILIGHT OF FEUDALISM 141
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 govern-
ment 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 govern-
ment of men ; that of the new regime was a
government of laws. Hence it was that the
British officials, although altogether well-in-
tentioned, 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
142 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
of all controversies respecting seigneurial
claims ?
Unfortunately for this simple solution, there
was a great and fundamental difference be-
tween these two tenures. The Canadian cen-
sitaire 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 in-
volving 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 con-
quest the externals of the seigneurial system
remained unaltered ; but its spirit underwent
a great change. This was amply shown
THE TWILIGHT OF FEUDALISM 143
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
labitants to arms. But now, only a dozen
iars after the English had assumed control,
ie 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
Us us, * and summoned his tenants to arms ;
they listened patiently to what he had to say,
and then peremptorily refused to accede to his
144 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
demands. At this the seigneur was foolis
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 retalia-
tion, 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.' l
As the eighteenth century drew to a close it
became evident that the people were getting
restive under the restraints which the sei-
gneurial system imposed. Lands had risen in
value so that the lods et "Denies 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.
1 Masfcres, Additional Papers concerning the Province of Quebeo
(1776), pp. 71 et seq.
THE TWILIGHT OF FEUDALISM 145
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, un-
heard 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 thou-
sands 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
s.o.c. K
146 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 re-
tarding the agricultural progress of the pro-
vince 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, accord-
ingly, 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
THE TWILIGHT OF FEUDALISM 147
America he recognized that the old system had
outlived its day of usefulness, and that its
continuance was unwise. But Durham out-
lined 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 Duller,
drafted a scheme for commuting the tenures
into freehold, but his plan did not find accept-
ance.
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
148 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
the reader. In brief, it was arranged that the
valid rights of each seigneur should be trans-
lated 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
rota to the reduction of the annual rentals
payable by the habitants. It was arranged,
furthermore, that any habitant might com-
mute 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 ques-
tions arose, and a special court had to be
created to deal with them.1 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
1 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 FEUDALISM 149
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 constitute as did
their fathers before them. With due adher-
ence 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 emolu-
ments, but the honours attaching to this rank.
But traditions live long in isolated com-
munities, 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.
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
s.o.C. K 2
150 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 Sei-
gniorial 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 Gaspd's Les
anclens Canadiens (Quebec, 1863) ; Professor C.
W. Colby's Canadian Types of the Old R6gime
(New York, 1908), especially chapter iv; W. P.
Greenough's Canadian Folk Life and Folk Lore
(New York, 1897); the Abbe* H. R. Casgrain's
Paroisse Canadienne au XVHe Slecle (Quebec,
1880) ; Benjamin Suite's articles on ' La Tenure
Seigneuriale* in the Revue Canadiennet July-
August, 1882 ; and Le*on Ge"rin's paper on ' L'habi-
tant de Saint- J ustin ' in the Proceedings and
m
152 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
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 Regime 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,
Bigot, Francois, last intendant
of New France, 23.
Brandy Traffic, the, effect of
on the Indians, 123.
Canada. See New France.
Carignan-Salieres, 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, Abbe, on neigh-
bourhood government in New
France, 129.
Catalogue, Ge"de"on de, his
report on the seigneunes of
New France, 49-52, 57-9 ; on
the habitant, 113, 116; on
the relations between sei-
gneurs 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 build-
ings 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 sei-
gneurial 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 administra-
tion, 5-6. See New France.
Frontenac, Count, governor of
New France, 24.
163
154 THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
Fur trade in New France, fas-
cination of, 30 ; some evils
of, 31.
Giffard, Robert, seigneur of
New France, 41, 59.
Grant, Captain David Alex-
ander, marries into the house
of Longueuil, 83.
Grant, Charles Colmore, Baron
de Longueuil, his title recog-
nized by Queen Victoria,
83-4.
Great Britain, and the sei-
gneurial system, 139-50-
Habitants, the, their origin,
37 ; the wives of early settlers,
36-7; and the Arrets of
Marly, 45-8 ; under the sei-
gneurial system, 87-94, 133 ;
their dues and services : ' cens
et rentes,' 94-7; 'lods et
ventes,'98, 144; 'banalites,'
98-100; 'corvees,' 101, 117,
and the maypole obligation,
102-3 ; their homes, 105-8 ;
clothing, 108-10 ; their daily
fare, uo-n ; 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 thatot United
Empire Loyalists, 145 ; after
abolition of seigneunal sys-
tem, 149.
Hubert, Louis, first seigneur in
New France, 62-9 ; his de-
scendants, 69-70.
Hocquart, Giles, on the habit-
ant, 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 travel-
ler, 32; on agriculture in
New France, 114-15.
La Hontan, Louis Armand,
Baron, on the habitants, in
and note, 117; on the judicial
system of New France, 136.
Laval, Francois de, Bishop of
Quebec, 127 ; and style of
church building, 131 ; and pat-
ronage, 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 de-
scendants, 82-5.
Louis XI 1 1 and colonization in
New France, 10-11, 14-
Louis XIV, his interest in New
France, 21-3, 25-6, 35; his
generosity, 28, 36.
Marie, Mere, de 1' Incarnation,
37.
Marly, Arrets of,
INDEX
155
New France, Champlain's col-
ony, 8-10, 16 ; administered
by Company of One Hun-
dred Associates, 17-20 ; under
royal government, 21 ; early
administration of, 28-9 ; emi-
gration to, 29 ; population in
1673 and 1760, 30; in 1759,
33.
Raudot, intendant of New
France, and evasion of royal
decree, 27 ; complains of the
mercenary spirit shown by
seigneurs, 44-5 ; on the habit-
ant, 1 1 8.
Richelieu, Cardinal, organizes
Company of One Hundred
Associates, 17.
St Louis, Chateau de, sei-
gneurs 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,
1.39-45 J. 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 ; obliga-
tions of, 39-41 ; and new
settlers, 42-3 ; complaints re-
garding the, 44-5 ; and the
Arrets 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 re-
lations with the curds, 129 ;
Church patronage and their
prerogatives, 131-3; courts
of, 135.
Sovereign (or Superior) Coun-
cil, its powers, 21-2: and
royal decrees, 26-8, oo ; 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-Salieres 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 con-
tinuity 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
The Chronicles of Canada
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 Mont calm
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
1 6. 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
The Chronicles of Canada
PART VI. PIONEERS OF THE NORTH AND WEST
1 8. 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 Verendrye 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
The Chronicles of Canada
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
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