empowered him "to grant
lands to gentlemen in the forms of fiefs and seigneuries," and the
different viceroys who had titular charge of the colony before the
Company of One Hundred Associates took charge in 1627 had similar
powers. Several seigneurial grants in the region of Quebec had, in
fact, been made before Richelieu first turned his attention to the
colony.

Nor was the adoption of this policy at all unnatural. Despite its
increasing obsolescence, the seigneurial system was still strong in
France and dominated the greater part of the kingdom. The nobility and
even the throne rested upon it. The Church, as suzerain of enormous
landed estates, sanctioned and supported it. The masses of the French
people were familiar with no other system of landholding. No prolonged
quest need accordingly be made to explain why France transplanted
feudalism to the shores of the great Canadian waterway; in fact,
an explanation would have been demanded had any other policy been
considered. No one asks why the Puritans took to Massachusetts Bay the
English system of freehold tenure. They took the common law of England
and the tenure that went with it. Along with the fleur-de-lis,
likewise, went the Custom of Paris and the whole network of social
relations based upon a hierarchy of seigneurs and dependents.

The seigneurial system of land tenure, as all students of history
know, was feudalism in a somewhat modernized form. During the chaos
which came upon Western Europe in the centuries following the collapse
of Roman imperial supremacy, every local magnate found himself forced
to depend for existence upon the strength of his own castle, under
whose walls he gathered as many vassals as he could induce to come.
To these he gave the surrounding lands free from all rents, but on
condition of aid in time of war. The lord gave the land and promised
to protect his vassals, who, on their part, took the land and promised
to pay for it not in money or in kind, but in loyalty and service.
Thus there was created a close personal relation, a bond of mutual
wardship and fidelity which bound liegeman and lord with hoops of
steel. The whole social order rested upon this bond and upon the
gradations in privilege which it involved in a sequence which became
stereotyped. In its day feudalism was a great institution and one
which shared with the Christian Church the glory of having made
mediaeval life at all worth living. It helped to keep civilization