the intendant disregarded the royal instructions and signed the title-deeds alone; and it appears that in all cases he was the main factor in determining who should get seigneuries and who should not.  The intendant, moreover, made himself the chief guardian of the relations between the seigneurs and their seigneurial tenants.  When the seigneurs tried to exact in the way of honours, dues, and services any more than the laws and customs of the land allowed, the watchful intendant promptly checkmated them with a restrictive decree.  Or when some seigneurial claim, even though warranted by law or custom, seemed to be detrimental to the general wellbeing of the people, he regularly brought the matter to the attention of the home government and invoked its intervention.  In all such matters he was praetor and tribune combined.  Without the intendancy the seigneurial system would soon have become an agent of oppression, for some Canadian seigneurs were quite as avaricious as their friends at home.

The heyday of Canadian feudalism was the period from 1663 to about 1750.  During this interval nearly three hundred fiefs were granted.  Most of them went to officials of the civil administration, many to retired military officers, many others to the Church and its affiliated institutions, and some to merchants and other lay inhabitants of the colony.  Certain seigneurs set to work with real zeal, bringing out settlers from France and steadily getting larger portions of their fiefs under cultivation.  Others showed far less enterprise, and some no enterprise at all.  From time to time the king and his ministers would make inquiry as to the progress being made.  The intendant would reply with a memoire often of pitiless length, setting forth the facts and figures.  Then His Majesty would respond with an edict ordering that all seigneurs who did not forthwith help the colony by putting settlers on their lands should have their grants revoked.  But the seigneurs who were most at fault in this regard were usually the ones who had most influence in the little administrative circle at Quebec.  Hence the king’s orders were never enforced to the letter, and sometimes not enforced at all.  Unlike the Parliament of Paris, the Sovereign Council at Quebec never refused to register a royal edict.  What would have happened in the event of its doing so is a query that legal antiquarians might find difficult to answer.  Even a sovereign decree bearing the Bourbon sign-manual could not gain the force of law in Canada except by being spread upon the council’s records.  In France the king could come clattering with his escort to the council hall and there, by his so termed ‘bed of justice,’ compel the registration of his decrees.  But the Chateau of St Louis at Quebec was too far away for any such violent procedure.