Intellectually, the people of New France comprised on the one hand a small elite and on the other a great unlettered mass.  There was no middle class between.  Yet the population of the colony always contained, especially among its officials and clergy, a sprinkling of educated and scholarly men.  These have given us a literature of travel and description which is extensive and of high, quality.  No other American colony of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries put so much, of its annals into print; the Relations of the Jesuits alone were sufficient to fill forty-one volumes, and they form but a small part of the entire literary output.

CHAPTER VIII

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