In size these seigneuries varied greatly.  The social rank and the reputed ability of the seigneur were the determining factors.  Men who had been members of the noblesse in France received tracts as large as a Teutonic principality, comprising a hundred square miles or more.  Those of less pretentious birth and limited means had to be content with a few thousand arpents.  In general, however, a seigneury comprised at least a dozen square miles, almost always with a frontage on the great river and rear limits extending up into the foothills behind.  The metes and bounds of the granted lands were always set forth in the letters-patent or title-deeds; but almost invariably with utter vagueness and ambiguity.  The territory was not surveyed; each applicant, in filing his petition for a seigneury, was asked to describe the tract he desired.  This description, usually inadequate and inaccurate, was copied in the deed, and in due course hopeless confusion resulted.  It was well that most seigneurs had more land than they could use; had it not been for this their lawsuits over disputed boundaries would have been unending.

Liberal in the area of land granted to the new seigneurs, the crown was also liberal in the conditions exacted.  The seigneur was asked for no initial money payment and no annual land dues.  When his seigneury changed owners by sale or by inheritance other than in direct descent, a mutation fine known as the quint was payable to the public treasury.  This, as its name implies, amounted to one-fifth of the seigneury’s value; but it rarely accrued, and even when it did the generous monarch usually rebated a part or all of it.  Not a single sou was ever exacted by the crown from the great majority of the seigneurs.  If agriculture made slow headway in New France it was not because officialdom exploited the land to its own profit.  Never were the landowners of a new country treated more generously or given greater incentive to diligence.

But if the king did not ask the seigneurs for money he asked for other things.  He required, in the first place, that each should render fealty and homage with due feudal ceremony to his official representative at Quebec.  Accordingly, the first duty of the seigneur, after taking possession of his new domain, was to repair without sword or spur to the Chateau of St Louis at Quebec, a gloomy stone structure that frowned on the settlement from the heights behind.  Here, on bended knee before the governor, the new liegeman swore fealty to his lord the king and promised to render due obedience in all lawful matters.  This was one of the things which gave a tinge of chivalry to Canadian feudalism, and helped to make the social life of a distant colony echo faintly the pomp and ceremony of Versailles.  The seigneur, whether at home or beyond the seas, was never allowed to forget the obligation of personal fidelity imposed upon him by his king.