The Seigneur of New France
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 Hebert, 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 Hebert
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".
|
Arpent Any of various French units of land
measurement, especially one used in parts of Canada and the
southern United States and equal to about 0.4 hectare (0.85
acre). Source: American Heritage Dictionary at Answers.com |
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 Arrets of Marly in 1711 he decreed that no
bonus or "prix d'entree" 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, Gedeon 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-Salieres 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 role 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 "banalite", 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 "corvee", 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 "corvee" 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.
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