What were the obligations of the settler who took a grant of land within a seigneury?  On the whole they were neither numerous nor burdensome, and in no sense were they comparable with those laid upon the hapless peasantry in France during the days before the great Revolution.  Every habitant had a written title-deed from his seigneur and the terms of this deed were explicit.  The seigneur could exact nothing that was not stipulated therein.  These title-deeds were made by the notaries, of whom there seem to have been plenty in New France; the census of 1681 listed no fewer than twenty-four of them in a population which had not yet reached ten thousand.  When the deed had been signed, the notary gave one copy to each of the parties; the original he kept himself.  These scribes were men of limited education and did not always do their work with proper care, but on the whole they rendered useful service.

The deed first set forth the situation and area of the habitant’s farm.  The ordinary extent was from one hundred to four hundred arpents, usually in the shape of a parallelogram with a narrow frontage on the river, and extending inland to a much greater distance.  Every one wanted to be near the main road which ran along the shore; it was only after all this land had been taken up that the incoming settlers were willing to have farms in the “second range” on the uplands away from the stream.  At any rate, the habitant took his land subject to yearly payments known as the cens et rentes.  The amount was small, a few sous together with a stated donation in grain or poultry to be delivered each autumn.  Reckoned in terms of present-day rentals, the cens et rentes amounted to half a dozen chickens or a bushel of grain for each fifty or sixty acres of land.  Yet this was the only payment which the habitants of New France regularly made in return for their lands.  Each autumn at Michaelmas they gathered at the seigneur’s house, their carryalls filling his yard.  One by one they handed over their quota of grain or poultry and counted out their cens in copper coins.  The occasion became a neighborhood festival to which the women came with the men.  There was a general retailing of local gossip and a squaring-up of accounts among the neighbors themselves.

But while this was the only regular payment made by the habitant, it was not the only obligation imposed upon him.  In New France the seigneur had the exclusive right of grinding all grain, and the habitants were bound by their title-deeds to bring their grist to his mill and to pay the legal toll for milling.  This banalite, as it was called, did not bear heavily upon the people; most of the complaints concerning it came rather from the seigneurs who claimed that the legal toll, which amounted to one-fourteenth of the grain, did not suffice to pay expenses.  Some of the seigneurs did not build mills at all, but the authorities eventually moved them to action by ordering that those who did not provide mills at once would not be allowed to enforce the obligation of toll at any future date.  Most of the seigneurial mills were crude, wind-driven affairs which made poor flour and often kept the habitants waiting for days to get it.  Usually built in tower-like fashion, they were loopholed in order to afford places of refuge and defense against Indian attack.