The royal recognition was officially promulgated as follows:  ’The Queen has been graciously pleased to recognize the right of Charles Colmore Grant, Esquire, to the title of Baron de Longueuil, of Longueuil, in the province of Quebec, Canada.  This title was conferred on his ancestor, Charles Le Moyne, by letters-patent of nobility signed by King Louis XIV in the year 1700.’- (London Gazette, December 7, 1880.)]

The barony of Longueuil at one time included an area of about one hundred and fifty square miles, much of it heavily timbered and almost all fit for cultivation.  The thriving towns of Longueuil and St Johns grew up within its limits in the century following the conquest.  As population increased, much of the land was sold into freehold; and when the seigneurial system was abolished in 1854 what had not been sold was entailed.  An entailed estate, though not now of exceeding great value, it still remains.

No family of New France maintained more steadily its favourable place in the public view than the house of Longueuil.  The sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of the Dieppe innkeeper’s boy were leaders of action in their respective generations.  Soldiers, administrators, and captains of industry, they contributed their full share to the sum of French achievement, alike in war and peace.  By intermarriage also the Le Moynes of Longueuil connected themselves with other prominent families of French Canada, notably those of Beaujeu, Lanaudiere, and Gaspe.  Unlike most of the colonial noblesse, they were well-to-do from the start, and the barony of Longueuil may be rightly regarded as a good illustration of what the seigneurial system could accomplish at its best.

These three seigneurs, Hebert, La Durantaye, and Le Moyne, represent three different, yet not so very dissimilar types of landed pioneer.  Hebert, the man of humble birth and limited attainments, made his way to success by unremitting personal labour under great discouragements.  He lived and died a plain citizen.  He had less to show for his life-work than the others, perhaps; but in those swaddling days of the colony’s history his task was greater.  Morel de la Durantaye, the man-at-arms, well born and bred, took his seigneurial rank as a matter of course, and his duties without much seriousness.  His seigneury had his attention only when opportunities for some more exciting field of action failed to present themselves.  Interesting figure though he was—­an excellent type of a hundred others—­it was well for the colony that not all its seigneurs were like him in temperament and ways.  Le Moyne, the nearest Canadian approach to the seigneur of Old France in the days before the Revolution, combined the best qualities of the other two.  There was plenty of red blood in his veins, and to some of his progeny went more of it than was good for them.  He was ready with his sword when the occasion called.  An arm shot off by an Iroquois flintlock in 1687 gave