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.