The seigneurial mills were not very efficient, from all accounts.  Crude, clumsy, poorly built affairs, they sometimes did little more than crack the wheat into coarse meal—­it could hardly be called flour.  The bakers of Quebec complained that the product was often unfit to use.  The mills were commonly built in tower-like fashion, and were at times loop-holed in order that they might be used if necessary in the defence of seigneuries against Indian attack.  The mill of the Seminary of St Sulpice at Montreal, for example, was a veritable stronghold, rightly counted upon as a place of sure refuge for the settlers in time of need.  Racked and decayed by the ravages of time, some of those old walls still stand in their loneliness, bearing to an age of smoke-belching industry their message of more modest achievement in earlier days.  Most of these banal mills were fitted with clumsy wind-wheels, somewhat after the Dutch fashion.  But nature would not always hearken to the miller’s command, and often for days the habitants stood around with their grist waiting in patience for the wind to come up and be harnessed.

Some Canadian seigneurs laid claim to the oven right (droit de four banal) as well.  But the intendant, ever the tribune of his people, sternly set his foot on this pretension.  In France the seigneur insisted that the peasantry should bake their bread in the great oven of the seigneury, paying the customary toll for its use.  But in Canada, as the intendant explained, this arrangement was utterly impracticable.  Through the long months of winter some of the habitants would have to bring their dough a half-dozen miles, and it would be frozen on the way.  Each was therefore permitted to have a bake-oven of his own, and there was, of course, plenty of wood near by to keep it blazing.

Many allusions have been made, in writings on the old regime, to the habitant’s corvee or obligation to give his seigneur so many days of free labour in each year.  In France this incident of seigneurial tenure cloaked some dire abuses.  Peasants were harried from their farms and forced to spend weeks on the lord’s domain, while their own grain rotted in the fields.  But there was nothing of this sort in Canada.  Six days of corvee per year was all that the seigneur could demand; and he usually asked for only three, that is to say, one day each in the seasons of ploughing, seedtime, and harvest.  And when the habitant worked for his seigneur in this way the latter had to furnish him with both food and tools, a requirement which greatly impaired the value of corvee labour from the seigneur’s point of view.  So far as a painstaking study of the records can disclose, the corvee obligation was never looked upon as an imposition of any moment.  It was apparently no more generally resented than is the so-termed statute-labour obligation which exists among the farming communities of some Canadian provinces at the present day.