Families going out in the 1660s and 1670s to clear farms from the forests along the river did so within a system of land ownership known as the seigneurial regime, a system that shaped New France and continues to shape the historical image of it. In France, the tradition of nulle terre sans seigneur (no land without its lord) went back to medieval times, when a lord with his castle and retinue controlled and protected a territory, and its people supported him by their labour. Even as the political and military aspects of feudalism receded, a society of landlords and tenants remained the common one in France and most of Europe, and its transfer from France to New France went almost without debate. France simply took for granted that the land of the colony belonged to the King (and in any case the wars in the St. Fawrence valley had left only a small Native population there), and seigneuries were the natural way for the King to grant land, through his representatives, to his subjects.
The seigneurial regime granted lands of two essential kinds: seigneuries and rotures. Whether their land was granted directly by the King or from another seigneur, holders of seigneuries owed fealty to their lord, but they paid no rent. Those who held rotures, on the other hand, were tenants. On the land they received from a seigneur, they would pay rent forever. Tenancy also imposed a range of duties, notably to patronize the seigneur’s gristmill and to pay a fee on the sale of land leases. A seigneurie was normally large enough to include dozens of rotures, but a roture was rarely larger than a single family farm.
Because the Cent-Associes wanted help in recruiting settlers when it was administering New France, the company granted seigneuries to anyone who seemed likely to bring them. Robert Giffard, a surgeon who had visited New France in the 1620s, became one of the first to participate in this system. In 1634 he received the seigneurie of Beauport just east of Quebec. Giffard came from the town of Mortagne in Perche, and it was he and a couple of friends who recruited the early rush of Perche settlers to the colony. Few seigneurs imitated Giffard’s efforts, and most seigneuries developed slowly, but by the 1650s there were three distinct clusters of active seigneuries around Quebec, Montreal, and Trois-Rivieres. Already the characteristic look of the land of New France was being established. Nearly all seigneuries were long, narrow blocks set almost at right angles to the riverfront, and the rotures in them were also long and narrow. Settlers wanted to be close to neighbours, and river access was precious to all because it was essential for travel and trade.
The seigneurs were not necessarily aristocrats: one did not need to be a nobleman to acquire a seigneurie, and getting one did not confer noble status. But the colonial aristocracy took the lead in landholding. In 1663 half the seigneurs were noblemen (or noblewomen, usually widows who had acquired their husbands’ estates), and they held three-quarters of all the land the King had granted. The proportion of seigneuries held by aristocrats would grow as officers of the Regiment de Carignan and later the Ministry of Marine companies acquired the lands that helped bind them to the New World. Pierre de Saurel, for instance, came to New France as a captain in the Carignan regiment. To defend the colony against Iroquois raiders, Saurel’s troops built a fort where the Richelieu River joins the St. Lawrence near Montreal. When the regiment was disbanded, the outpost became the seigneurie of Saurel (later Sorel), and many of Pierre de Saurel’s soldiers became his first tenants there. For the seigneurial elite to be a military caste seemed natural, for the aristocracy had always defined itself as “those who command,” and as leaders they expected to be supported by their lands and tenants.
“Those who pray,” the clergy, also expected to be supported by the third estate, “those who labour,” and the church was a leading landlord throughout the history of New France. Granting seigneuries to orders of priests and nuns was not simply a charitable gesture, for many of the religious orders had the money and skill to develop their estates. Perhaps the most successful example was the seigneurie of Montreal Island, where the Sulpician order had replaced the faltering missionary society that had founded the community with such high ideals. A wealthy and well-connected order, the Sulpicians appointed able managers and spent money developing their lands. They were rewarded with rapid growth and expansion, and they would own much of Montreal Island well into the nineteenth century. Not all church seigneuries were held by religious orders. Bishop Francois de Laval, an aristocrat as well as a clergyman, was personally the seigneur of the He d’Orleans near Quebec. Like the aristocracy, the church would expand its landholdings over the years.
The familiar seigneurial landscape of narrow farms running back from the riverfront took shape with the earliest rural settlements in the St. Lawrence River valley. Gedeon de Catalogue and Jean-Baptiste de Couagne’s 1709 map of the densely populated Quebec City region charts the system’s early development.
The scarcity of aristocrats in New France’s early years encouraged social mobility, and many commoners had a chance to become seigneurs. Charles Le Moyne, a Dieppe innkeeper’s son, came to New France in 1641 as a fifteen-year-old engage to serve the Jesuits among the Huron. The experience he gained there would help him grow wealthy in the fur trade, but his first seigneurie, Longueuil, across the river from Montreal, was a reward for bravery against the Iroquois in the wars of the 1650s. Later, securely established as one of the leading men of Montreal, Le Moyne was ennobled by the King. By the time he died in 1685, the innkeeper’s son was Charles Le Moyne, Sieur de Longueuil et de Chateauguay, and he left a fortune and several seigneuries to his family of fourteen, several of whom would become even more distinguished. Similar progress was achieved by others of obscure birth and background
Labours d’automne d Saint-Hilaire, by Ozias Leduc (1864-1955); though painted in 1901, this canvas evokes the unchanging endurance of the three-century-old stripfarming pattern. In the interim, however, husbandmen had switched from oxen to draft horses—Percherons for preference—to pull their ploughs.
Who distinguished themselves in the Iroquois wars or in commerce, and acquiring seigneuries was just one sign of their success. A few seigneurs began and remained commoners, but their estates were small and their numbers shrank over the years. On the whole, landholding, power, and social standing were closely linked.
In theory, a seigneur was not just a landlord but also the leader of his community. As a soldier, he would organize and command its defences. He would be patron of the parish church, which he personally might have had built. As owner of the land, as builder of the mill, and as the richest man around, he would be the economic power of the community. His imposing manor house would reflect and confirm his status as the head of his people, the rural squire around whom the seigneurie revolved. Later historians of New France took this image to be the truth of the seigneurial regime. Whether they saw the regime as benevolent, paternal, and cooperative, or backward, oppressive, and stifling, they assumed it to be the pillar of New France’s essentially feudal social system.
Close attention to the actual workings of the seigneurial system has shattered that view. After Robert Giffard’s day, at least, seigneurs learned there was little to be earned collecting rents from subsistence farmers, and so they did little to recruit tenants. They did not develop their estates into cohesive economic communities, they rarely lived on them, and they mostly drew an insignificant income from their rents. Tenant farmers moved frequently from one seigneurie to another and showed little deference or attachment to their supposed leaders. In many ways the typical farm, and the rural landscape, would have looked little different had the seigneurial regime never existed.
Nevertheless, the central reality of the system—the seigneurs’ property rights— made the seigneurial regime important, not as a social system, but simply as a
Few New World subjects gave European artists more difficulty than the indispensable Castor canadensis, whose pelts long remained the basis of Canadian exports. In the corner of Nicolas de Fer’s 1698 map of the Americas, an accurate sketch by Nicolas Guerard of the recently discovered Niagara Falls, copied from the famous drawing by missionary Louis Hennepin published in 1697, becomes the backdrop for scores of doglike and oddly unaquatic beavers.
Financial burden on the tenant farmers. In early New France, when populations were small and tenants scarce, seigneurs
May have earned little money from their tenants and paid little attention to their estates, but they still demanded their rents and services, and they awaited better returns as the tenant population grew. Seigneurial revenues rarely made the clerical orders or military aristocrats who received them much richer, but they surely made the habitants poorer. In the Sulpicians’ Montreal seigneurie, 10 to 14 per cent of farm revenue passed from the tenants to their landlord. For most farmers in the lower Richelieu valley, payments to seigneurs took half or more of whatever surplus they produced. Little of this money ever returned to the land. It was sent off to the clerical orders in France or spent maintaining the aristocratic style of life in the towns. Seigneurs may have been distant and uninvolved in the life of their seigneuries, but for the habitants the consequence was not independence. They not only owed these rents but were also obliged to tithe (that is, to pay one twenty-sixth of their crop) to support the parish priest, to do militia service in wartime, and to give unpaid labour to the Crown when roads, fortifications, and other public works were undertaken.
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