long grants, made in
the original settlement of the province, became narrower still as the
original occupants died and their property was divided among the heirs
under the civil law. Consequently at the present day the traveller who
visits French Canada sees the whole country divided into extremely
long and narrow parallelograms each with fences and piles of stones as
boundaries in innumerable cases.

The conditions on which the _censitaire_ held his land from the
seignior were exceedingly easy during the greater part of the French
regime. The _cens et rentes_ which he was expected to pay annually, on
St. Martin's day, as a rule, varied from one to two _sols_ for each
superficial _arpent_, with the addition of a small quantity of corn,
poultry, and some other article produced on the farm, which might be
commuted for cash, at current prices. The _censitaire_ was also
obliged to grind his corn at the seignior's mill (_moulin banal_), and
though the royal authorities at Quebec were very particular in
pressing the fulfilment of this obligation, it does not appear to have
been successfully carried out in the early days of the colony on
account of the inability of the seigniors to purchase the machinery,
or erect buildings suitable for the satisfactory performance of a
service clearly most useful to the people of the rural districts. The
obligation of baking bread in the seigniorial oven was not generally
exacted, and soon became obsolete as the country was settled and each
_habitant_ naturally built his own oven in connection with his home.
The seigniors also claimed the right to a certain amount of statute
labour (_corvee_) from the _habitants_ on their estates, to one fish
out of every dozen caught in seigniorial waters, and to a reservation
of wood and stone for the construction and repairs of the manor house,
mill, and church in the parish or seigniory. In case the _censitaire_
wished to dispose of his holding during his lifetime, it was subject
to the _lods et ventes_, or to a tax of one-twelfth of the purchase
money, which had to be paid to the seignior, who usually as a favour
remitted one-fourth on punctual payment. The most serious restriction
on such sales was the _droit de retraite_, or right of the seignior to
preempt the same property himself within forty days from the date of
the sale.

There was no doubt, at the establishment of the seigniorial tenure, a
disposition to create in Canada, as far as possible, a