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