CHAPTER 18
1663-1763

CANADIAN FEUDALISM.

CANADIAN society was beginning to form itself, and at its base was the feudal tenure.  European feudalism was the indigenous and natural growth of political and social conditions which preceded it.  Canadian feudalism was an offshoot of the feudalism of France, modified by the lapse of centuries, and further modified by the royal will.
In France, as in the rest of Europe, the system had lost its vitality.  The warrior nobles who placed Hugh Capet on the throne, and began the feudal monarchy, formed an aristocratic republic; and the King was one of their number, whom they chose to be their chief.  But through the struggles and vicissitudes of many succeeding reigns royalty had waxed and oligarchy had waned.  The fact had changed, and the theory had changed with it.  The King, once powerless among a host of turbulent nobles, was now a king indeed.  Once a chief, because his equals had made him so, he was now the anointed of the Lord.  This triumph of royalty had culminated in Louis XIV.  The stormy energies and bold individualism of the old feudal nobles had ceased to exist.  They who had held his predecessors in awe had become his obsequious servants.  He no longer feared his nobles: he prized them as gorgeous decorations of his court and satellites of his royal person.

It was Richelieu who first planted feudalism in Canada.  The King would preserve it there, because with its teeth drawn he was fond of it; and because, as the feudal tenure prevailed in Old France, it was natural that it should prevail also in the New.  But he continued as Richelieu had begun, and moulded it to the form that pleased him.  Nothing was left which could threaten his absolute and undivided authority over the colony.  In France, a multitude of privileges and prescriptions still clung, despite its fall, about the ancient ruling class.  Few of these were allowed to cross the Atlantic, while the old lingering abuses, which had made the system odious, were at the same time lopped away.  Thus retrenched, Canadian feudalism was made to serve a double end,  to produce a faint and harmless reflection of French aristocracy, and simply and practically to supply agencies for distributing land among the settlers.  

The nature of the precautions which it was held to require appear in the plan of administration which Talon and Tracy laid before the minister.  They urge that, in view of the distance from France, special care ought to be taken to prevent changes and revolutions, aristocratic or otherwise, in the colony, whereby in time sovereign jurisdictions might grow up, as formerly occurred in various parts of France.  And in respect to grants already made an inquiry was ordered, to ascertain "if seigniors in distributing lands to their vassals have exacted any conditions injurious to the rights of the Crown and the subjection due solely to the King." In the same view the seignior was denied any voice whatever in the direction of government; and it is scarcely necessary to say that the essential feature of feudalism in the day of its vitality, the requirement of military service by the lord from the vassal, was utterly unknown in Canada.  The royal governor called out the militia whenever he saw fit, and set over it what officers he pleased.

The seignior was usually the immediate vassal of the Crown, from which he had received his land gratuitously.  In a few cases he made grants to other seigniors inferior in the feudal scale, and they, his vassals, granted in turn to their vassals,  the habitants, or cultivators of the soil.  Sometimes the habitant held directly of the Crown, in which case there was no step between the highest and lowest degrees of the feudal scale.  The seignior held by the tenure of faith and homage, the habitant by the inferior tenure en censive.  Faith and homage were rendered to the Crown or other feudal superior whenever the seigniory changed hands, or, in the case of seigniories held by corporations, after long stated intervals.  The following is an example, drawn from the early days of the colony, of the performance of this ceremony by the owner of a fief to the seignior who had granted it to him.  It is that of Jean Guion, vassal of Giffard, seignior of Beauport.

The act recounts how, in presence of a notary, Guion presented himself at the principal door of the manor house of Beauport; how, having knocked, one Boulle", farmer of Giffard, opened the door, and in reply to Guion's question if the seignior was at home, replied that he was not, but that he, Boulle’, was empowered to receive acknowledgments of faith and homage from the vassals in his name.  "After the which reply," proceeds the act, "the said Guion, being at the principal door, placed himself on his knees on the ground, with head bare, and without sword or spurs, and said three times these words: ' Monsieur de Beauport, Monsieur de Beauport, Monsieur de Beauport! I bring you the faith and homage which I am bound to bring you on account of my fief Du Buisson, which I hold as a man of faith of your seigniory of Beauport, declaring that I offer to pay my seigniorial and feudal dues in their season, and demanding of you to accept me in faith and homage as aforesaid.' "

The following instance is the more common one of a seignior holding directly of the Crown.  It is widely separated from the first in point of time, having occurred a year after the army of Wolfe entered Quebec.

Philippe Noel had lately died, and Jean Noel, his son, inherited his seigniory of Tilly and Bonsecours.  To make the title good, faith and homage must be renewed.  Jean Noel was under the bitter necessity of rendering this duty to General Murray, governor for the King of Great Britain.  The form is the same as in the case of Guion, more than a century before.  Noel repairs to the Government House at Quebec, and knocks at the door.  A servant opens it.  Noel asks if the governor is there.  The servant replies that he is.  Murray, informed of the visitor's object, comes to the door, and Noel then and there, "without sword or spurs, with bare head, and one knee on the ground," repeats the acknowledgment of faith and homage for his seigniory.  He was compelled, however, to add a detested innovation,  the oath of fidelity to his Britannic Majesty, coupled with a pledge to keep his vassals in obedience to the new sovereign.

The seignior was a proprietor holding that relation to the feudal superior which, in its pristine character, has been truly described as servile in form, proud and bold in spirit.  But in Canada this bold spirit was very far from being strengthened by the changes which the policy of the Crown had introduced into the system.  The reservation of mines and minerals, oaks for the royal navy, roadways, and a site (if needed) for royal forts and magazines, had in it nothing extraordinary.  The great difference between the position of the Canadian seignior and that of the vassal proprietor of the Middle Ages lay in the extent and nature of the control which the Crown and its officers held over him.  A decree of the King, an edict of the council, or an ordinance of the intendant, might at any moment change old conditions, impose new ones, interfere between the lord of the manor and his grantees, and modify or annul his bargains, past or present.  He was never sure whether or not the government would let him alone; and against its most arbitrary intervention he had no remedy.

One condition was imposed on him which may be said to form the distinctive feature of Canadian feudalism,  that of clearing his land within a limited time on pain of forfeiting it.  The object was the excellent one of preventing the lands of the colony from lying waste.  As the seignior was often the penniless owner of a domain three or four leagues wide and proportionably deep, he could not clear it all himself, and was therefore under the necessity of placing the greater part in the hands of those who could.  But he was forbidden to sell any part of it which he had not cleared.  He must grant it without price, on condition of a small perpetual rent; and this brings us to the cultivator of the soil, the censitaire, the broad base of the feudal pyramid.

The tenure en censive, by which the censitaire held of the seignior, consisted in the obligation to make annual payments in money, produce, or both.  In Canada these payments, known as cens et rente, were strangely diverse in amount and kind; but in all the early period of the colony they were almost ludicrously small.  A common charge at Montreal was half a sou and half a pint of wheat for each arpent.  The rate usually fluctuated in the early times between half a sou and two sous; so that a farm of a hundred and sixty arpents would pay from four to sixteen francs, of which a part would be in money and the rest in live capons, wheat, eggs, or all three together, in pursuance of contracts as amusing in their precision as they are bewildering in their variety.  Live capons, estimated at twenty sous each, though sometimes not worth ten, form a conspicuous feature in these agreements; so that on payday the seignior's barnyard presented an animated scene.  Later in the history of the colony grants were at somewhat higher rates.  Payment was commonly made on Saint Martin's day, when there was a general muster of tenants at the seigniorial mansion, with a prodigious consumption of tobacco and a corresponding retail of neighborhood gossip, joined to the outcries of the captive fowls bundled together for delivery, with legs tied, but throats at full liberty.

A more considerable but a very uncertain source of income to the seignior were the lods et ventcs, or mutation fines.  The land of the censitaire passed freely to his heirs; but if he sold it, a twelfth part of the purchase money must be paid to the seignior.  The seignior, on his part, was equally liable to pay a mutation fine to his feudal superior if he sold his seigniory; and for him the amount was larger,  being a quint, or a fifth of the price received, of which, however, the greater part was deducted for immediate payment.  This heavy charge, constituting as it did a tax on all improvements, was a principal cause of the abolition of the feudal tenure in 1854.

The obligation of clearing his land and living on it was laid on seignior and censitaire alike; but the latter was under a variety of other obligations to the former, partly imposed by custom and partly established by agreement when the grant was made.  To grind his grain at the seignior's mill, bake his bread in the seignior's oven, work for him one or more days in the year, and give him one fish in every eleven, for the privilege of fishing in the river before his farm,  these were the most annoying of the conditions to which the censitaire was liable.  Few of them were enforced with much regularity.  That of baking in the seignior's oven was rarely carried into effect, though occasionally used for purposes of extortion.  It is here that the royal government appears in its true character, so far as concerns its relations with Canada,  that of a well meaning despotism.  It continually intervened between censitaire and seignior, on the principle that "as his Majesty gives the land for nothing, he can make what conditions he pleases, and change them when he pleases." 

These interventions were usually favorable to the censitaire.  On one occasion an intendant reported to the minister, that in his opinion all rents ought to he reduced to one sou and one live capon for every arpent of front, equal in most cases to forty superficial arpents.  Everything, he remarks, ought to be brought down to the level of the first grants " made in days of innocence,"  a happy period which he does not attempt to define.  The minister replies that the diversity of the rent is, in fact, vexatious, and that for his part he is disposed to abolish it altogether.  Neither he nor the intendant gives the slightest hint of any compensation to the seignior.

Though these radical measures were not executed, many changes were decreed from time to time in the relations between seignior and censitaire,  sometimes as a simple act of sovereign power, and sometimes on the ground that the grants had been made with conditions not recognized by the Coutume de Paris.  This was the code of law assigned to Canada; but most of the contracts between seignior and censitaire had been agreed upon in good faith by men who knew as much of the Coutume de Paris as of the Capitularies of Charlemagne, and their conditions had remained in force unchallenged for generations.  These interventions of government sometimes contradicted one another, and often proved a dead letter.  They are more or less active through the whole period of the French rule.

The seignior had judicial powers, which, however, were carefully curbed and controlled.  His jurisdiction, when exercised at all, extended in most cases only to trivial causes.  He very rarely had a prison, and seems never to have abused it.  The dignity of a seigniorial gallows with Jiigh justice or jurisdiction over heinous offences was granted only in three or four instances.

Four arpents in front by forty in depth were the ordinary dimensions of a grant en censive.  These ribbons of land, nearly a mile and a half long, with one end on the river and the other on the uplands behind, usually combined the advantages of meadows for cultivation, and forests for timber and firewood.  So long as the censitaire brought in on Saint Martin's day his yearly capons and his yearly handful of copper, his title against the seignior was perfect.  There are farms in Canada which have passed from father to son for two hundred years.  The condition of the cultivator was incomparably better than that of the French peasant, crushed by taxes, and oppressed by feudal burdens far heavier than those of Canada.  In fact, the Canadian settler scorned the name of peasant, and then, as now, was always called the habitant'.  The government held him in wardship, watched over him, interfered with him, but did not oppress him or allow others to oppress him.  Canada was not governed to the profit of a class; and.  if the King wished to create a Canadian noblesse, he took care that it should not bear hard on the country.

Under a genuine feudalism, the ownership of land conferred nobility; but all this was changed.  The King and not the soil was now the parent of honor.  France swarmed with landless nobles, while roturier land holders grew daily more numerous.  In Canada half the seigniories were in roturier or plebeian hands, and in course of time some of them came into possession of persons on very humble degrees of the social scale.  A seigniory could be bought and sold, and a trader or a thrifty habitant might, and often did, become the buyer.  If the Canadian noble Was always a seignior, it is far from being true that the Canadian seignior was always a noble.

In France, it will be remembered, nobility did not in itself imply a title.  Besides its titled leaders, it had its rank and file, numerous enough to form a considerable army.  Under the later Bourbons, the penniless young nobles were, in fact, enrolled into regiments,  turbulent, difficult to control, obeying officers of high rank, but scorning all others, and conspicuous by a fiery and impetuous valor which on more than one occasion turned the tide of victory.  The genttthomme, or untitled noble, had a distinctive character of his own,  gallant, punctilious, vain; skilled in social and sometimes in literary and artistic accomplishments, but usually ignorant of most things except the handling of his rapier.  'Yet there were striking exceptions; and to say of him, as has been said, that " he knew nothing but how to get himself killed," is hardly just to a body which has produced some of the best writers and thinkers of France.  Sometimes the origin of his nobility was lost in the mists of time; sometimes he owed it to a patent from the King.  In either case, the line of demarcation between him and the classes below him was perfectly distinct; and in this lies an essential difference between the French noblesse and the English gentry, a class not separated from others by a definite barrier.  The French nobesse, unlike the English gentry, constituted a caste.

The gentilhomme had no vocation for emigrating.  He liked the army and he liked the court.  If he could not be of it, it was something to live in its shadow.  The life of a backwoods settler had no charm for him.  He was not used to labor; and he could not trade, at least in retail, without becoming liable to forfeit his nobility.  When Talon came to Canada, there were but four noble families in the colony.  Young nobles in abundance came out with Tracy; but they went home with him.  Where, then, should be found the material of a Canadian noblesse? First, in the regiment of Carignan, of which most of the officers were gentilshommes; secondly, in the issue of patents of nobility to a few of the more prominent colonists.  Tracy asked for four such patents; Talon asked for five more; and such requests were repeated at intervals by succeeding governors and intendants, in behalf of those who had gained their favor by merit or otherwise.  Money smoothed the path to advancement, so far had noblesse already fallen from its old estate.  Thus Jacques Le Ber, the merchant, who had long kept a shop at Montreal, got himself made a "gentleman" for six thousand livres.

All Canada soon became infatuated with noblesse; and country and town, merchant and seignior, vied with each other for the quality of gentilhomme.  If they could not get it, they often pretended to have it, and aped its ways with the zeal of Monsieur Jourdain himself.  "Everybody here," writes the intendant Meules, "calls himself Esquire, and ends with thinking himself a gentleman." Successive intendants repeat this complaint.  The case was worst with roturiers who had acquired seigniories.  Thus Noel Langlois was a good carpenter till he became owner of a seigniory, on which he grew lazy and affected to play the gentleman.  The real gentilshommes, as well as the spurious, had their full share of official stricture.  The governor Denonville speaks of them thus: "Several of them have come out this year with their wives, who are very much cast down; but they play the fine lady, nevertheless.  I had much rather see good peasants; it would be a pleasure to me to give aid to such, knowing, as I should, that within two years their families would have the means of living at ease; for it is certain that a peasant who can and will work is well off in this country, while our nobles with nothing to do can never be anything but beggars.  Still they ought not to be driven off or abandoned.  The question is how to maintain them.”

The intendant Duchesneau writes to the same effect: "Many of our gentilshommes, officers, and other owners of seigniories, lead what in France is called the life of a country gentleman, and spend most of their time in hunting and fishing.  As their requirements in food and clothing are greater than those of the simple habitants, and as they do not devote themselves to improving their land, they mix themselves up in trade, run in debt on all hands, incite their young habitants to range the woods, and send their own children there to trade for furs in the Indian villages and in the depths of the forest, in spite of the prohibition of his Majesty.  Yet, with all this, they are in miserable poverty."

Their condition, indeed, was often deplorable.  "It is pitiful," says the intendant Champigny, "to see their children, of which they have great numbers, passing all summer with nothing on them but a shirt, and their wives and daughters working in the fields." In another letter he asks aid from the King for Repentigny with his thirteen children, and for Tilly with his fifteen.  "We must give them some corn at once," he says, "or they will starve." These were two of the original four noble families of Canada.  The family of Ailleboust, another of the four, is described as equally destitute.  " Pride and sloth," says the same intendant, "are the great faults of the people of Canada, and especially of the nobles and those who pretend to be such.  I pray you grant no more  letters  of   nobility,   unless you want   to multiply beggars."

The governor Denonville is still more emphatic: "Above all things, Monseigneur, permit me to say that the nobles of this new country are everything that is most beggarly, and that to increase their number is to increase the number of do nothings.  A new country requires hard workers, who will handle the axe and mattock.  The sons of our councillors are no more industrious than the nobles; and their only resource is to take to the woods, trade a little with the Indians, and, for the most part, fall into the disorders of which I have had the honor to inform you.  I shall use all possible means to induce them to engage in regular commerce; but as our nobles and councillors are all very poor and weighed down with debt, they could not get credit for a single crown piece." "Two days ago," he writes in another letter, "Monsieur de Saint-Ours, a gentleman of Dauphiny, came to me to ask leave to go back to France in search of bread.  He says that he will put his ten children into the charge of any who will give them a living, and that he himself will go into the army again.  His wife and he are in despair; and yet they do what they can.  I have seen two of his girls reaping grain and holding the plough.  Other families are in the same condition.  They come to me with tears in their eyes.  All our married officers are beggars; and I entreat you to send them aid.  There is need that the King should provide support for their children, or else they will be tempted to go over to the English." Again he writes that the sons of the councillor D'Amours have been arrested as coureurs de bois, or outlaws in the bush; and that if the minister does not do something to help them, there is danger that all the sons of the noblesse, real or pretended, will turn bandits, since they have no other means of living.

The King, dispenser of charity for all Canada, came promptly to the rescue.  He granted an alms of a hundred crowns to each family, coupled with a warning to the recipients of his bounty that " their misery proceeds from their ambition to live as persons of quality and without labor." At the same time, the minister announced that no more letters of nobility would be granted in Canada; adding, "to relieve the country of some of the children of those who are really noble, I send you (the governor) six commissions of Gardes de la Marine, and recommend you to take care not to give them to any who are not actually gentilshommes." The Garde de la Marine answered to the midshipman of the English or American service.  As the six commissions could bring little relief to the crowd of needy youths, it was further ordained that sons of nobles or persons living as such should be enrolled into companies at eight sous a day for those who should best conduct themselves, and six sous a day for the others.  Nobles in Canada were also permitted to trade, even at retail, without derogating from their rank.

They had already assumed this right, without waiting for the royal license; but thus far it had profited them little.  The gentilhomme was not a good shopkeeper, nor, as a rule, was the shopkeeper's vocation very lucrative in Canada.  The domestic trade of the colony was small; and all trade was exposed to such vicissitudes from the intervention of intendants, ministers, and councils, that at one time it was almost banished.  At best, it was carried on under conditions auspicious to a favored few and withering to the rest.  Even when most willing to work, the position of the gentilhomme was a painful one.  Unless he could gain a post under the Crown, which was rarely the case, he was as complete a political cipher as the meanest habitant.  His rents were practically nothing, and he had no capital to improve his seigniorial estate.  By a peasant's work he could gain a peasant's living, and this was all.  The prospect was not inspiring.  His long initiation of misery was the natural result of his position and surroundings; and it is no matter of wonder that he threw himself into the only field of action which in time of peace was open to him.  It was trade, but trade seasoned by adventure and ennobled by danger, defiant of edict and ordinance, outlawed, conducted in arms among forests and savages; in short, it was the Western fur trade.  The tyro was likely to fail in it at first, but time and experience formed him to the work.  On the Great Lakes, in the wastes of the Northwest, on the Mississippi and the plains beyond, we find the roving gentilhomme, chief of a gang of bush rangers, often his own habitants,  sometimes proscribed by the government, sometimes leagued in contraband traffic with its highest officials; a hardy vidette of civilization, tracing unknown streams, piercing unknown forests, trading, fighting, negotiating, and building forts.  Again we find him on the shores of Acadia or Maine, surrounded by Indian retainers, a menace and a terror to the neighboring English colonist.  Saint-Castin, Du Lhut, La Durantaye, La Salle, La Mothe-Cadillac, Iberville, Bienville, La V’erendrye, are names that stand conspicuous on the page of half savage romance that refreshes the hard and practical annals of American colonization.  But a more substantial debt is due to their memory.  It was they, and such as they, who discovered the Ohio, explored the Mississippi to its mouth, discovered the Rocky Mountains, and founded Detroit, Saint Louis, and New Orleans.

Even in his earliest day, the gentilhomme was not always in the evil plight where we have found him.  
There were a few exceptions to the general misery, and the chief among them is that of the Le Moynes of Montreal.  Charles Le Moyne, son of an inn keeper of Dieppe and founder of a family the most truly eminent in Canada, was a man of sterling qualities who had been long enough in the colony to learn how to live there.  Others learned the same lesson at a later day, adapted themselves to soil and situation, took root, grew, and became more Canadian than French.  As population increased, their seigniories began to yield appreciable returns, and their reserved domains became worth cultivating.  A future dawned upon them; they saw in hope their names, their seigniorial estates, their manor houses, their tenantry, passing to their children and their children's children.  The beggared noble of the early time became a sturdy country gentleman, poor, but not wretched; ignorant of books, except possibly a few scraps of rusty Latin picked up in a Jesuit school; hardy as the hardiest woodsman, yet never forgetting his quality of gentilhomme; scrupulously wearing its badge, the sword, and copying as well as he could the fashions of the court, which glowed on his vision across the sea in all the effulgence of Versailles, and beamed with reflected ray from the Chateau of Quebec.  He was at home among his tenants, at home' among the Indians, and never more at home than when, a gun in his hand and a crucifix on his breast, he took the war path with a crew of painted savages and Frenchmen almost as wild, and pounced like a lynx from the forest on some lonely farm or outlying hamlet of New England.  How New England hated him, let her records tell.  The reddest blood streaks on her old annals mark the track of the Canadian gentilhomme.