Many of the seigneurs, when Canada passed under British control, sold their seigneuries and went home to France.  How great this hegira was can scarcely be estimated with exactness, but it is certain that the emigres included all the military and most of the civil officials, together with a great many merchants, traders, and landowners.  The colony lost those who could best afford to go; in other words, those whom it could least afford to let go.  The priests, true to their traditions, stood by the colony in its hours of trial.  But whatever the extent and character of the out-going, it is true that many seigneuries changed hands during the years 1763-64.  Englishmen bought these lands at very low figures.  Between them and the habitants there were no bonds of race, religion, language, or social sympathy.  The new English seigneur looked upon his estate as an investment, and proceeded to deal with the habitants as though they were his tenantry.  All this gave the seigneurial system a rude shock.

There was still another feature which caused the system to work much less smoothly after 1760 than before.  The English did not retain the office of intendant.  Their frame of government had no place for such an official.  Yet the intendant had been the balance-wheel of the whole feudal machine in the days before the conquest.  He it was who kept the seigneurial system from developing abuses; it was his praetorian power ’to order all things as may seem just and proper’ that kept the seigneur’s exactions within rigid bounds.  The administration of New France was a government of men; that of the new regime was a government of laws.  Hence it was that the British officials, although altogether well-intentioned, allowed grave wrongs to arise.

The new English judges, not unnaturally, misunderstood the seigneurial system.  They stumbled readily into the error that tenure en censive was simply the old English tenure in copyhold under another name.  Now the English copyholder held his land subject to the customs of the manor; his dues and services were fixed by local custom both as regards their nature and amount.  What more easy, then, than to seek the local custom in Canada, and apply its rules to the decision of all controversies respecting seigneurial claims?

Unfortunately for this simple solution, there was a great and fundamental difference between these two tenures.  The Canadian censitaire had a written title-deed which stated explicitly the dues and services he was bound to give his seigneur; the copyholder had nothing of the kind.  The habitant, moreover, had various rights guaranteed to him by royal decrees.  No custom of the manor or seigneury could prevail against written contracts and statute-law.  But the judges do not seem to have grasped this distinction; when cases involving disputed obligations came before them they called in notaries to establish what the local customs were, and rendered judgment accordingly.  This gave the seigneur a great advantage, for the notaries usually took their side.  Moreover, the new judicial system was more expensive than the old, so that when a seigneur chose to take his claims into court the habitants often let him have judgment by default rather than incur heavy costs.