The seigneuries too were often broken up.  In Canada there is no law of primogeniture and, at a seigneur’s death, the land went to daughters as well as to sons.  Few of the old seigniorial families remained on their original estates.  In time those who held the property came to think that a rental of about a cent an acre was not enough.  In the days of French rule they could not have increased it; but the old custom, they claimed, did not apply under British sovereignty.  So these charges were often increased; in time instead of a penny the habitant had to pay three-pence, six-pence, and even eight-pence, an acre; the seigneurs, as a judge put it, showed an excellent knowledge of arithmetical progression.  Thus the cens et rentes began to bring in a real income.  So did the lods et ventes, the tax of one-twelfth of the price of whatever land the habitant sold.  In early days land was rarely sold.  But when towns and villages had grown up on seigniorial estates, a good deal of buying and selling took place and there stood always the seigneur demanding in every transaction his share of the selling price.  If the land was sold two or three times in a year, as might well happen, each time the seigneur got his share of one-twelfth.  If the occupier had built on the land a house at his own cost, none the less did the seigneur, who had done nothing, get his large percentage on the selling value of these improvements.  This was a real grievance.  To avoid paying the seigneur’s claim a price, lower than that really paid, was sometimes named in the deed, and this led to perjury.  To protect themselves the seigneur used his droit de retrait the right for forty days of himself taking the property at the price named.  This involved vexation and delay and increased discontent.  Moreover the seigneur’s right to lods et ventes stood in the way of a ready transfer of property between members of the same family.

There were other causes of discontent.  The seigneur had the droit de banalite, the banal rights, under which in France the habitant must use the seigneur’s wine-press, his oven and his mill.  In Canada no wine was made, so the seigneur’s winepress did not exist.  Some attempts were made to force the habitant to bake his bread in the seigneur’s oven but what would do in a compact French village, where fuel was scarce, became absurd in Canada; the picture is ludicrous of a habitant carrying a dozen miles, over rough roads, to the seigneur’s oven, unbaked dough which might be hard frozen en route.  Moreover new inventions made ovens common and cheap so that the habitant could afford to have his own.  The seigneur’s oven thus caused no grievance.  Not so however the seigneur’s mill.  In the early days when the seigneur had the sole right to build a mill this became for him, in truth, a duty sometimes burdensome; for, whether it would pay or not, the government forced him to build a mill or else abandon the right.  But in time the mill proved