SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
From the beginning of the colony there ran in the minds of French
officialdom the idea that the social order should rest upon a
seigneurial basis. Historians have commonly attributed to Richelieu
the genesis of New World feudalism, but without good reason, for its
beginnings antedated the time of the great minister. The charter
issued to the ill-starred La Roche in 1598 empowered him "to grant
lands to gentlemen in the forms of fiefs and seigneuries," and the
different viceroys who had titular charge of the colony before the
Company of One Hundred Associates took charge in 1627 had similar
powers. Several seigneurial grants in the region of Quebec had, in
fact, been made before Richelieu first turned his attention to the
colony.
Nor was the adoption of this policy at all unnatural. Despite its
increasing obsolescence, the seigneurial system was still strong in
France and dominated the greater part of the kingdom. The nobility and
even the throne rested upon it. The Church, as suzerain of enormous
landed estates, sanctioned and supported it. The masses of the French
people were familiar with no other system of landholding. No prolonged
quest need accordingly be made to explain why France transplanted
feudalism to the shores of the great Canadian waterway; in fact,
an explanation would have been demanded had any other policy been
considered. No one asks why the Puritans took to Massachusetts Bay the
English system of freehold tenure. They took the common law of England
and the tenure that went with it. Along with the fleur-de-lis,
likewise, went the Custom of Paris and the whole network of social
relations based upon a hierarchy of seigneurs and dependents.
The seigneurial system of land tenure, as all students of history
know, was feudalism in a somewhat modernized form. During the chaos
which came upon Western Europe in the centuries following the collapse
of Roman imperial supremacy, every local magnate found himself forced
to depend for existence upon the strength of his own castle, under
whose walls he gathered as many vassals as he could induce to come.
To these he gave the surrounding lands free from all rents, but on
condition of aid in time of war. The lord gave the land and promised
to protect his vassals, who, on their part, took the land and promised
to pay for it not in money or in kind, but in loyalty and service.
Thus there was created a close personal relation, a bond of mutual
wardship and fidelity which bound liegeman and lord with hoops of
steel. The whole social order rested upon this bond and upon the
gradations in privilege which it involved in a sequence which became
stereotyped. In its day feudalism was a great institution and one
which shared with the Christian Church the glory of having made
mediaeval life at all worth living. It helped to keep civilization
from perishing utterly in a whirl of anarchy, and it enabled Europe to
recover inch by inch its former state of order, stability, and law.
But, having done its service to humanity, feudalism did not quietly
make way for some other system more suited to the new conditions. It
hung on grimly long after the forces which had brought it into being
ceased to exist, long after the growth of a strong monarchy in France
with a powerful standing army had removed the necessity of mutual
guardianship and service. To meet the new conditions the system merely
changed its incidents, never its general form. The ancient obligation
of military service, no longer needed, gave place to dues and
payments. The old personal bond relaxed; the feudal lord became the
seigneur, a mere landlord. The vassal became the _censitaire_, a mere
tenant, paying heavy dues each year in return for protection which,
he no longer received nor required. In a word, before 1600 the feudal
system had become the seigneurial system, and it was the latter which
was established in the French colony of Canada.
In the new land there was reason to hope, however, that this system of
social relations based upon landholding would soon work its way back
to the vigor which it had displayed in mediaeval days. Here in the
midst of an unfathomed wilderness was a small European settlement with
hostile tribes on every hand. The royal arm, so strong in affording
protection at home, could not strike hard and promptly in behalf
of subjects a thousand leagues away. New France, accordingly must
organize itself for defense and repel her enemies just as the earldoms
and duchies of the crusading centuries had done. And that is just
what the colony did, with the seigneurial system as the groundwork of
defensive strength. Under stress of the new environment, which was not
wholly unlike that of the former feudal days, the military aspects of
the system revived and the personal bond regained much of its
ancient vigor. The sordid phases of seigneurialism dropped into the
background. It was this restored vitality that helped, more than
all else, to turn New France into a huge armed camp which hordes of
invaders, both white and red, strove vainly to pierce time after time
during more than a full century.
The first grant of a seigneury in the territory of New France was made
in 1623 to Louis Hébert, a Paris apothecary who had come to Quebec
with Champlain some years before this date. His land consisted of a
tract upon the height above the settlement, and here he had cleared
the fields and built a home for himself. By this indenture feudalism
cast its first anchor in New France, and Hébert became the colony's
first patron of husbandry. Other grants soon followed, particularly
during the years when the Company of One Hundred Associates was
in control of the land, for, by the terms of its charter, this
organization was empowered to grant large tracts as seigneuries and
also to issue patents of nobility. It was doubtless assumed by the
King that such grants would be made only to persons who would actually
emigrate to New France and who would thus help in the upbuilding of
the colony, but the Company did not live up to this policy. Instead,
it made lavish donations, some of them containing a hundred square
miles or more, to directors and friends of the Company in France who
neither came to the colony themselves nor sent representatives to
undertake the clearing of these large estates. One director took the
entire Island of Orleans; others secured generous slices of the best
lands on both shores of the St. Lawrence; but not one of them lifted a
finger in the way of redeeming these huge concessions from a state of
wilderness primeval. The tracts were merely held in the hope that some
day they would become valuable. Out of sixty seigneuries which were
granted by the Company during the years from 1632 to 1663 not more
than a half-dozen grants were made to _bona fide_ colonists. At the
latter date the total area of cleared land was scarcely four thousand
_arpents_.[1]
[Footnote 1: An _arpent_ was about five-sixths of an acre.]
With the royal action of 1663 which took the colony from the Company
and reconstructed its government, the seigneurial system was
galvanized at once with new energy. The uncleared tracts which the
officials of the Company had carved out among themselves were declared
to be forfeited to the Crown and actual occupancy was held to be,
for the future, the essential of every seigneurial grant. A vigorous
effort was made to obtain settlers, and with considerable success, for
in the years 1665-1667 the population of the colony more than doubled.
Nothing was left undone by the royal authorities in securing and
transporting emigrants. Officials from Paris scoured the provinces,
offering free passage to Quebec and free grants of land upon arrival.
The campaign was successful, and many shiploads of excellent
colonists, most of them hardy peasants from Normandy, Brittany,
Perche, and Picardy, were sent during these banner years.
On their arrival at Quebec the incoming settlers were taken in hand by
officials and were turned over to the various seigneurs who were ready
to provide them with lands and to help them in getting well started.
If the newcomer happened to be a man of some account at home, and
particularly if he brought some money with him, he had the opportunity
to become a seigneur himself. He merely applied to the intendant,
who was quite willing to endow with a seigneury any one who appeared
likely to get it cleared and ready for future settlers. In this matter
the officials, following out the spirit of the royal orders, were
prone to err on the side of liberality. Too often they gave large
seigneurial grants to men who had neither the energy nor the funds to
do what was expected of a seigneur in the new land.
As for extent, the seigneuries varied greatly. Some were as large as
a European dukedom; others contained only a few thousand _arpents_.
There was no fixed rule; within reasonable limits each applicant
obtained what he asked for, but it was generally understood that men
who had been members of the French _noblesse_ before coming to the
colony were entitled to larger areas than those who were not. In any
case little attention was paid to exact boundaries, and no surveys
were made. In making his request for a seigneury each applicant set
forth what he wanted, and this he frequently did in such broad terms
as, "all lands between such-and-such a river and the seigneury of the
Sieur de So-and-So." These descriptions, rarely adequate or accurate,
were copied into the patent, causing often hopeless confusion of
boundaries and unneighborly squabbles. It was fortunate that most
seigneurs had more land than they could use; otherwise there would
have been as many lawsuits as seigneuries.
The obligations imposed upon the seigneurs were not burdensome. No
initial payment was asked, and there were no annual rentals to be paid
to the Crown. Each seigneur had to render the ceremony of fealty and
homage to the royal representative at Quebec. Each was liable for
military service, although that obligation was not written into the
grant. When a seigneury changed owners otherwise than by inheritance
in direct succession, a payment known as the _quint_ (being, as the
name connotes, one-fifth of the reported value) became payable to the
royal treasury, but this was rarely collected. The most important
obligation imposed upon the Canadian seigneur, and one which did not
exist at all in France, was that of getting settlers established upon
his lands. This obligation the authorities insisted upon above all
others. The Canadian seigneur was expected to live on his domain,
to gather dependents around him, to build a mill for grinding their
grain, to have them level the forest, clear the fields, and make
two blades of grass grow where one grew before. In other words,
the Canadian seigneur was to be a royal immigration and land agent
combined. He was not given his generous landed patrimony in order that
he should sit idly by and wait for the unearned increment to come.
Many of the seigneurs fulfilled this trust to the letter. Robert
Giffard, who received the seigneury of Beauport just below Quebec, was
one of these; Charles Le Moyne, Sieur de Longueuil, was another. Both
brought many settlers from France and saw them safely through the
years of pioneering. Others, however, did no more than flock to Quebec
when ships were expected, like so many real estate agents explaining
to the new arrivals what they had to offer in the way of lands fertile
and well situated. Still others did not even do so much, but merely
put forth one excuse after another to explain why their tracts
remained without settlements at all. From time to time the authorities
prodded these seigneurial drones and threatened them with the
forfeiture of their estates; but some of the laggards had friends
among the members of the Sovereign Council or possessed other means of
warding off action, so that final decrees of forefeiture were rarely
issued. Occasionally there were seigneurs whose estates were so
favorably situated that they could exact a bonus from intending
settlers, but the King very soon put a stop to this practice. By the
Arrêts of Marly in 1711 he decreed that no bonus or _prix d'entrée_
should be exacted by any seigneur, but that every settler was to have
land for the asking and at the rate of the annual dues customary in
the neighborhood.
At this date there were some ninety seigneuries in the colony, about
which we have considerable information owing to a careful survey which
was made in 1712 at the King's request. This work was entrusted to an
engineer, Gedéon de Catalogne, who had come to Quebec a quarter of a
century earlier to help with the fortifications. Catalogne spent two
years in his survey, during which time he visited practically all the
colonial estates. As a result he prepared and sent to France a full
report giving in each case the location and extent of the seigneury,
the name of its owner, the nature of the soil, and its suitability
for various uses, the products, the population, the condition of the
people, the provisions made for religious instruction, and various
other matters.[1] With the report he sent three maps, one of which has
disappeared. The others show the location of all seigneuries in the
regions of Quebec and Three Rivers.
[Footnote 1: This report was printed for the first time in the
author's _Documents relating to the Seigniorial Tenure in Canada_
(Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1908).]
From Catalogne's survey we know that before 1712 nearly all the
territory on both shores of the St. Lawrence from below Quebec to
above Montreal had been parceled into seigneuries. Likewise the
islands in the river and the land on both sides of the Richelieu
in the region toward Lake Champlain had been allotted. Many of the
seigneuries in this latter belt had been given to officers of the
Carignan-Salières regiment which had come out with Tracy in 1665
to chastise the Mohawks. After the work of the regiment had been
finished, Talon suggested to the King that it be disbanded in Canada,
that the officers be persuaded to accept seigneuries, and that the
soldiers be given lands within the estates of their officers. The
Grand Monarque not only assented but promised a liberal money bonus to
all who would remain. Accordingly, more than twenty officers, chiefly
captains or lieutenants, and nearly four hundred men, agreed to stay
in New France under these arrangements.
Here was an experiment in the system of imperial Rome repeated in the
New World. When the empire of the Caesars was beginning to give way
before the oncoming Goths and Huns, the practice of disbanding the
legions on the frontier so that they might settle there and form an
iron ring against the invaders was adopted and served its purpose for
a time. It was from these _praedia militaria_ that Talon got the idea
which he now transmitted to the French King with the suggestion
that "the practice of these sagacious and warlike Romans might be
advantageously followed in a land which, being so far away from its
sovereign, must trust for existence to the strength, of its own
arms." In keeping with the same precedent, Talon located the military
seigneuries in that section of the colony where they would be most
useful as a barrier against the enemy; that is to say, he placed them
in the colony's most vulnerable region. This was the area along the
Richelieu from Lake Champlain to its confluence with the St. Lawrence
at Sorel. It was by this route that the Mohawks had already come more
than once on their errands of massacre, and it was by this portal
that the English were likely to come if they should ever attempt
to overwhelm New France by an overland assault. The region of the
Richelieu was therefore made as strong against incursion as this
colonizing measure could make it.
All who took lands in this region, whether seigneurs or habitants,
were to assemble in arms at the royal call. Their uniforms and muskets
they kept for service, and never during subsequent years was such a
call without response. These military settlers and their sons after
them were only too ready to rally around the royal _oriflamme_ at any
opportunity. It was from the armed seigneuries of the Richelieu that
Hertel de Rouville, St. Ours, and others quietly slipped forth and
leaped with all the advantage of surprise upon the lonely hamlets
of outlying Massachusetts or New York. How the English feared these
_gentilshommes_ let their own records tell, for there these French
colonials put many a streak of blood and fire.
But not all of the seigneuries were settled in this way, and it was
well for the best interests of the colony that they were not. Too
often the good soldier made only an indifferent yeoman. First in war,
he was last in peace. The task of hammering spears into ploughshares
and swords into pruning-hooks was not altogether to his liking. Most
of the officers gradually grew tired of their rôle as gentlemen of the
wilderness, and eventually sold or mortgaged their seigneuries and
made their way back to France. Many of the soldiers succumbed to the
lure of the western fur traffic and became _coureurs-de-bois_. But
many others stuck valiantly to the soil, and today their descendants
by the thousand possess this fertile land.
What were the obligations of the settler who took a grant of land
within a seigneury? On the whole they were neither numerous nor
burdensome, and in no sense were they comparable with those laid upon
the hapless peasantry in France during the days before the great
Revolution. Every habitant had a written title-deed from his seigneur
and the terms of this deed were explicit. The seigneur could exact
nothing that was not stipulated therein. These title-deeds were made
by the notaries, of whom there seem to have been plenty in New France;
the census of 1681 listed no fewer than twenty-four of them in a
population which had not yet reached ten thousand. When the deed had
been signed, the notary gave one copy to each of the parties; the
original he kept himself. These scribes were men of limited education
and did not always do their work with proper care, but on the whole
they rendered useful service.
The deed first set forth the situation and area of the habitant's
farm. The ordinary extent was from one hundred to four hundred
_arpents_, usually in the shape of a parallelogram with a narrow
frontage on the river, and extending inland to a much greater
distance. Every one wanted to be near the main road which ran along
the shore; it was only after all this land had been taken up that the
incoming settlers were willing to have farms in the "second range" on
the uplands away from the stream. At any rate, the habitant took his
land subject to yearly payments known as the _cens et rentes_. The
amount was small, a few sous together with a stated donation in
grain or poultry to be delivered each autumn. Reckoned in terms of
present-day rentals, the _cens et rentes_ amounted to half a dozen
chickens or a bushel of grain for each fifty or sixty acres of land.
Yet this was the only payment which the habitants of New France
regularly made in return for their lands. Each autumn at Michaelmas
they gathered at the seigneur's house, their carryalls filling his
yard. One by one they handed over their quota of grain or poultry
and counted out their _cens_ in copper coins. The occasion became a
neighborhood festival to which the women came with the men. There was
a general retailing of local gossip and a squaring-up of accounts
among the neighbors themselves.
But while this was the only regular payment made by the habitant,
it was not the only obligation imposed upon him. In New France the
seigneur had the exclusive right of grinding all grain, and the
habitants were bound by their title-deeds to bring their grist to his
mill and to pay the legal toll for milling. This _banalité_, as it was
called, did not bear heavily upon the people; most of the complaints
concerning it came rather from the seigneurs who claimed that the
legal toll, which amounted to one-fourteenth of the grain, did not
suffice to pay expenses. Some of the seigneurs did not build mills at
all, but the authorities eventually moved them to action by ordering
that those who did not provide mills at once would not be allowed
to enforce the obligation of toll at any future date. Most of the
seigneurial mills were crude, wind-driven affairs which made poor
flour and often kept the habitants waiting for days to get it. Usually
built in tower-like fashion, they were loopholed in order to afford
places of refuge and defense against Indian attack.
Another seigneurial obligation was that of giving to the seigneur
certain days of _corvée_, or forced labor, in each year. In France
this was a grievous burden; peasants were taken from their own lands
at inconvenient seasons and forced to work for weeks on the seigneur's
domain. But there was nothing of this sort in Canada. The amount of
_corvée_ was limited to six days at the most in any year, of which
only two days could be asked for at seed-time and two days at harvest.
The seigneur, for his part, did not usually exact even this amount,
because the neighborhood custom required that he should furnish both
food and tools to those whom he called upon to work for him.
Besides, there were various details of a minor sort incidental to the
seigneurial system. If the habitant caught fish in the river, one fish
in every eleven belonged to the seigneur. But seldom was any attention
paid to this stipulation. The seigneur was entitled to take firewood
and building materials from the lands of his habitants if he desired,
but he rarely availed himself of this right. On the morning of every
May Day the habitants were under strict injunction to plant a Maypole
before the seigneur's house, and this they never failed to do, because
the seigneur in return was expected to dispense hospitality to all who
came. Bright and early in the morning the whole community appeared and
greeted the seigneur with a salvo of blank musketry. With them they
carried a tall fir-tree, pulled bare to within a few feet of the top
where a tuft of green remained. Having planted this Maypole in the
ground, they joined in dancing and a _feu de joie_ in the seigneur's
honor, and then adjourned for cakes and wine at his table. There is no
doubt that such good things disappeared with celerity before appetites
whetted by an hour's exercise in the clear spring air. After drinking
to the seigneur's health and to the health of all his kin, the merry
company returned to their homes, leaving behind them the pole as a
souvenir of their homage. That the seigneur was more than a mere
landlord such an occasion testified.
The seigneurs of New France had the right to hold courts for the
settlement of disputes among their tenantry, but they rarely availed
themselves of this privilege because, owing to the sparseness of the
population in most of the seigneuries, the fines and fees did not
produce enough income to make such a procedure worth while. In a few
populous districts there were seigneurial courts with regular judges
who held sessions once or twice each week. In some others the seigneur
himself sat in judgment behind the living-room table in his own home
and meted out justice after his own fashion. The Custom of Paris
was the common law of the land, and all were supposed to know its
provisions, though few save the royal judges had any such knowledge.
When the seigneur himself heard the suitors, his decision was
not always in keeping with the law but it usually satisfied the
disputants, so that appeals to the royal courts were not common. These
latter tribunals, each with a judge of its own, sat at Quebec, Three
Rivers, and Montreal. Their procedure, like that of the seigneurial
courts, was simple, free from chicane, and inexpensive. A lawsuit in
New France did not bring ruinous costs. "I will not say," remarks the
facetious La Hontan, "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."
Throughout the French period there was no complaint from the habitants
concerning the burdens of the seigneurial tenure. Here and there
disputes arose as to the exact scope and nature of various
obligations, but these the intendant adjusted with a firm hand and
an eye to the general interest. On the whole, the system rendered a
highly useful service, by bringing the entire rural population into
close and neighborly contact, by affording a firm foundation for
the colony's social structure, and by contributing greatly to the
defensive unity of New France. So long as the land was weak and
depended for its very existence upon the solidarity of its people, so
long as the intendant was there to guide the system with a praetorian
hand and to prevent abuses, so long as strength was more to be desired
than opulence, the seigneurial system served New France better than
any other scheme of landholding would have done. It was only when
the administration of the country came into new and alien hands that
Canadian seigneurialism became a barrier to economic progress and an
obsolete system which had to be abolished.