We have ample testimony concerning the relations of seigneur and habitant in early Canada, and it comes from many quarters.  First of all there are the title-deeds of lands, thousands of which have been preserved in the various notarial archives.  It ought to be explained, in passing, that when a seigneur wished to make a grant of land the services of a notary were enlisted.  Notaries were plentiful; the census of 1681 enumerated twenty-four of them in a population of less than ten thousand.  The notary made his documents in the presence of the parties, had them signed, witnessed, and sealed with due formality.  The seigneur kept one copy, the habitant another, and the notary kept the original.  In the course of time, therefore, each notary accumulated quite a collection or cadastre of legal records which he kept carefully.  At his death they were passed over to the general registry, or office of the greffier, at Quebec.  In general the notaries were men of rather meagre education; their work on deeds and marriage settlements was too often very poorly done, and lawsuits were all the more common in consequence.  But the colony managed to get along with this system of conveyancing, crude and undependable as it was.

In the title-deeds of lands granted by the seigneurs to the habitants the situation and area are first set forth.  The grants were of all shapes and sizes.  As a rule, however, they were in the form of a parallelogram, with the shorter end fronting the river and the longer side extending inland.  The usual river frontage was from five to ten lineal arpents, and the depth ranged from ten to eighty arpents.  It should be explained that the arpen de Paris, in terms of which colonial land measurements were invariably expressed, served both as a unit of length and as a unit of area.  The lineal arpent was the equivalent of one hundred and ninety-two English feet.  The superficial arpent, or arpent of area, contained about five-sixths of an acre.  The habitant’s customary frontage on the river was, accordingly, from about a thousand to two thousand feet, while his farm extended rearwards a distance of anywhere from under a half-mile to three miles.

This rather peculiar configuration of the farms arose wholly from the way in which the colony was first settled.  For over a century after the French came to the St Lawrence all the seigneuries were situated directly on the shores of the river.  This was only natural, for the great waterway formed the colony’s carotid artery, supplying the life-blood of all New France so far as communications were concerned.  From seigneury to seigneury men traversed it in canoes or bateaux in summer, and over its frozen surface they drove by carriole during the long winters.  Every one wanted to be in contact with this main highway, so that the demand for farms which should have some river frontage, however small, was brisk from the outset.  Near the river the habitant began his clearing and built his house.  Farther inland,