These lands came from the king or his colonial representatives by royal patent.  They were given sometimes in frankalmoigne or sometimes as ordinary seigneuries.  The distinction was of little account however, for when land once went into the ‘dead hand’ it was likely to stay there for all time.  The Church and its institutions, as seigneurs of the land, granted farms to habitants on the usual terms, gave them their deeds duly executed by a notary, received their annual dues, and assumed all the responsibilities of a lay seigneur.  And as a rule the Church made a good seigneur.  Settlers were brought out from France, and a great deal of care was taken in selecting them.  They were aided, encouraged, and supported through the trying years of pioneering.  As early as 1667 Laval was able to point with pride to the fact that his seigneuries of Beaupre and Isle d’Orleans contained over eleven hundred persons—­more than one-quarter of the colony’s entire population.  These ecclesiastical seigneuries, moreover, were among the best in point of intelligent cultivation.  With funds and knowledge at its disposal, the Church was better able than the ordinary lay seigneur to provide banal mills and means of communication.  These seigneuries were therefore kept in the front rank of agricultural progress, and the example which they set before the eyes of the people must have been of great value.

The seigneurial system was also strengthened by the fact that the boundaries of seigneuries and parishes were usually the same.  The chief reason for this is that the parish system was not created until most of the seigneuries had been settled.  There were parishes, so-termed, in the colony from the very first; but not until 1722 was the entire colony set off into parish divisions.  Forty-one parishes were created in the Quebec district; thirteen in the district of Three Rivers; and twenty-eight in the region round Montreal.  These eighty-two parishes were roughly coterminous with the existing seigneuries, but not always so.  Some few seigneuries had six or eight parishes within their bounds.  In other cases, two or three seigneuries were merged into a single great parish.  In the main, however, the two units of civil and spiritual power were alike.

From this identification of the parish and seigneury came some interesting results.  The seigneurial church became the parish church; where no church had been provided the manor-house was commonly used as a place of worship.  Not infrequently the parish cure took up his abode in the seigneur’s home and the two grew to be firm friends, each aiding the other with the weight of his own special authority and influence.  The whole system of neighbourhood government, as the late Abbe Casgrain once pointed out, was based upon the authority of two men, the cure and the seigneur, ’who walked side by side and extended mutual help to each other.  The censitaire, who was at the same time parishioner, had his two rallying-points—­the church and the manor-house.  The interests of the two were identical.’  From this close alliance with the parish the seigneurial system naturally derived a great deal of its strong hold upon the people, for their fidelity to the priest was reflected in loyalty to the seigneur who ranked as his chief local patron and protector.