The intendant Bigot, in 1748, ordered that some houses which various habitants had erected at L’Ange-Gardien should be pulled down, but there was a great hue and cry from the owners, and the order remained unenforced.  The practice of parcelling lands in the old way continued, and in time these cotes, as the habitants termed each line of houses along the river, stretched all the way from Quebec to Montreal.  From the St Lawrence the whole colony looked like one unending, straggling village-street.

But let us outline the dues and services which the habitant, by the terms of his title-deed, must render to his seigneur.  First among these were the annual payments commonly known as the cens et rentes.  To the habitant this was a sort of annual rental, although it was really made up of two separate dues, each of which had a different origin and nature.  The cens was a money payment and merely nominal in amount.  Back in the early days of feudalism it was very probably a greater burden; in Canada it never exceeded a few sous for a whole farm.  The rate of cens was not uniform:  each seigneur was entitled to what he and the habitant might agree upon, but it never amounted to more than the merest pittance, nor could it ever by any stretch of the imagination be deemed a burden.  With the cens went the rentes, the latter being fixed in terms of money, poultry, or produce, or all three combined.  ’One fat fowl of the brood of the month of May or twenty sols (sous) for each lineal arpent of frontage’; or ’one minot of sound wheat or twenty sols for each arpent of frontage’ is the way in which the obligation finds record in some title-deeds which are typical of all the rest.  The seigneur had the right to say whether he wanted his rentes in money or in kind, and he naturally chose the former when prices were low and the latter when prices were high.

It is a little difficult to estimate just what the ordinary habitant paid each year by way of cens et rentes to his seigneur, but under ordinary conditions the rental would amount to about ten or twelve sous and a half-dozen chickens or a bushel of grain for the average farm.  Not a very onerous annual payment for fifty or sixty acres of land!  Yet this was the only annual emolument which the seigneur of Old Canada drew each year from his tenantry.  With twenty-five allotments in his seigneury the yearly income would be perhaps thirty or forty livres if translated into money, that is to say, six or eight dollars in our currency.  Allowing for changes in the purchasing power of money during the last two hundred years, a fair idea of the burden placed on the habitant by his payment of the cens et rentes may be given by estimating it, in terms of present-day agricultural rentals, at, say, fifty cents yearly per acre.  This is, of course, a rough estimate, but it conveys an idea that is approximately correct and, indeed, about as near the mark as one can come after a study of the seigneurial system in all its phases.  The payment constituted a burden, and the habitants doubtless would have welcomed its abolition; but it was not a heavy tax upon their energies; it was less than the Church demanded from them; and they made no serious complaints regarding its imposition.