Parkman Vol. 4, Chapter 15

With such treatment the weaker sort died but the strong survived, and out of this rugged nursing sprang the hardy Canadian race of bush-rangers and bush-fighters.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Continuing chapter 14.

The neighboring shores of the island of Orleans were also edged with houses and clearings. The promontory of Quebec now towered full in sight, crowned with church, fort, chateau, convents, and seminary. There was little else on the rock. Priests, nuns, government officials, and soldiers, were the denizens of the Upper Town; while commerce and the trades were cabined along the strand beneath. [1] From the gallery of the chateau, you might toss a pebble far down on their shingled roofs. In the midst of them was the magazine of the company, with its two round towers and two projecting wings. It was here that all the beaver-skins of the colony were collected, assorted, and shipped for France. The so-called chateau St. Louis was an indifferent wooden structure planted on a site truly superb; above the Lower Town, above the river, above the ships, gazing abroad on a majestic panorama of waters, forests, and mountains. [2] Behind it was the area of the fort, of which it formed one side. The governor lived in the chateau, and soldiers were on guard night and day in the fort. At some little distance was the convent of the Ursulines, ugly but substantial, [3] where Mother Mary of the Incarnation ruled her pupils and her nuns; and a little further on, towards the right, was the Hôtel Dieu. Between them were the massive buildings of the Jesuits, then as now facing the principal square. At one side was their church, newly finished; and opposite, across the square, stood and still stands the great church of Notre Dame. Behind the church was Laval’s seminary, with the extensive enclosures belonging to it. The sénéchaussée or court-house, the tavern of one Jacques Boisdon on the square near the church, and a few houses along the line of what is now St. Louis Street, comprised nearly all the civil part of the Upper Town. The ecclesiastical buildings were of stone, and the church of Notre Dame and the Jesuit College were marvels of size and solidity in view of the poverty and weakness of the colony. [4]

[1: According to Juchereau, there were seventy houses at Quebec about the time of Tracy’s arrival.]

[2: In 1660, an exact inventory was taken of the contents of the fort and chateau; a beggarly account of rubbish. The chateau was then a long low building roofed with shingles.]

[3: There is an engraving of it in Abbé Casgrain’s interesting Vie de Marie de l’Incarnation. It was burned in 1686.]

[4: The first stone of Notre Dame de Quebec was laid in September, 1647, and the first mass was said in it on the 24th of December, 1650. The side walls still remain as part of the present structure. The Jesuit college was also begun in 1647. The walls and roof were finished in 1649. The church connected with it, since destroyed, was begun in 1666. Journal des Jésuites.]

Proceeding upward along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, one found a cluster of houses at Cap Rouge, and, further on, the frequent rude beginnings of a seigniory. The settlements thickened on approaching Three Rivers, a fur-trading hamlet enclosed with a square palisade. Above this place, a line of incipient seigniories bordered the river, most of them granted to officers: Laubia, a captain; Labadie, a sergeant; Moras, an ensign; Berthier, a captain; Raudin, an ensign; La Valterie, a lieutenant. [5] Under their auspices, settlers, military and civilian, were ranging themselves along the shore, and ugly gaps in the forest thickly set with stumps bore witness to their toils. These settlements rapidly extended, till in a few years a chain of houses and clearings reached with little interruption from Quebec to Montreal. Such was the fruit of Tracy’s chastisement of the Mohawks, and the influx of immigrants that followed.

[5: Documents on the Seigniorial Tenure; Abstracts of Titles. Most of these grants, like those on the Richelieu, were made by Talon in 1672; but the land had, in many cases, been occupied and cleared in anticipation of the title.]

As you approached Montreal, the fortified mill built by the Sulpitians at Point aux Trembles towered above the woods; and soon after the newly built chapel of the Infant Jesus. More settlements followed, till at length the great fortified mill of Montreal rose in sight; then the long row of compact wooden houses, the Hôtel Dieu, and the rough masonry of the seminary of St. Sulpice. Beyond the town, the clearings continued at intervals till you reached Lake St. Louis, where young Cavelier de la Salle had laid out his seigniory of La Chine, and abandoned it to begin his hard career of western exploration. Above the island of Montreal, the wilderness was broken only by a solitary trading station on the neighboring Isle Perot.

Now cross Lake St. Louis, shoot the rapids of La Chine, and follow the southern shore downward. Here the seigniories of Longueuil, Boucherville, Yarennes, Verchères, and Contrecoeur were already begun. From the fort of Sorel one could visit the military seigniories along the Richelieu or descend towards Quebec, passing on the way those of Lussaudière, Becancour, Lobinière, and others still in a shapeless infancy. Even far below Quebec, at St. Anne de la Pocatière, River Ouelle, and other points, cabins and clearings greeted the eye of the passing canoeman.

For a year or two, the settler’s initiation was a rough one; but when he had a few acres under tillage he could support himself and his family on the produce, aided by hunting, if he knew how to use a gun, and by the bountiful profusion of eels which the St. Lawrence never failed to yield in their season, and which, smoked or salted, supplied his larder for months. In winter he hewed timber, sawed planks, or split shingles for the market of Quebec, obtaining in return such necessaries as he required. With thrift and hard work he was sure of comfort at last; but the former habits of the military settlers and of many of the others were not favorable to a routine of dogged industry. The sameness and solitude of their new life often became insufferable; nor, married as they had been, was the domestic hearth likely to supply much consolation. Yet, thrifty or not, they multiplied apace.

“A poor man,” says Mother Mary, “will have eight children and more, who run about in winter with bare heads and bare feet, and a little jacket on their backs, live on nothing but bread and eels, and on that grow fat and stout.” With such treatment the weaker sort died but the strong survived and out of this rugged nursing sprang the hardy Canadian race of bush-rangers and bush-fighters.

Chapter 15

Canadian society was beginning to form itself, and at its base was the feudal tenure. European feudalism was the indigenous and natural growth of political and social conditions which preceded it. Canadian feudalism was an offshoot of the feudalism of France, modified by the lapse of centuries, and further modified by the royal will.

In France, as in the rest of Europe, the system had lost its vitality. The warrior-nobles who placed Hugh Capet on the throne, and began the feudal monarchy, formed an aristocratic republic, and the king was one of their number, whom they chose to be their chief. But, through the struggles and vicissitudes of many succeeding reigns, royalty had waxed and oligarchy had waned. The fact had changed and the theory had changed with it. The king, once powerless among a host of turbulent nobles, was now a king indeed. Once a chief, because his equals had made him so, he was now the anointed of the Lord. This triumph of royalty had culminated in Louis XIV. The stormy energies and bold individualism of the old feudal nobles had ceased to exist. They who had held his predecessors in awe had become his obsequious servants. He no longer feared his nobles; he prized them as gorgeous decorations of his court, and satellites of his royal person.

It was Richelieu who first planted feudalism in Canada. [6] The king would preserve it there, because with its teeth drawn he was fond of it, and because, as the feudal tenure prevailed in Old France, it was natural that it should prevail also in the New. But he continued as Richelieu had begun, and molded it to the form that pleased him. Nothing was left which could threaten his absolute and undivided authority over the colony. In France, a multitude of privileges and prescriptions still clung, despite its fall, about the ancient ruling class. Few of these were allowed to cross the Atlantic, while the old, lingering abuses, which had made the system odious, were at the same time lopped away. Thus retrenched, Canadian feudalism was made to serve a double end; to produce a faint and harmless reflection of French aristocracy, and simply and practically to supply agencies for distributing land among the settlers.

[6: By the charter of the Company of the Hundred Associates, 1627.]

The nature of the precautions which it was held to require appear in the plan of administration which Talon and Tracy laid before the minister.

They urge that, in view of the distance from France, special care ought to be taken to prevent changes and revolutions, aristocratic or otherwise, in the colony, whereby in time sovereign jurisdictions might grow up, as formerly occurred in various parts of France. [7] And, in respect to grants already made, an inquiry was ordered, to ascertain “if seigniors in distributing lands to their vassals have exacted any conditions injurious to the rights of the Crown and the subjection due solely to the king.” In the same view the seignior was denied any voice whatever in the direction of government; and it is scarcely necessary to say that the essential feature of feudalism in the day of its vitality, the requirement of military service by the lord from the vassal, was utterly unknown in Canada. The royal governor called out the militia whenever he saw fit, and set over it what officers he pleased.

[7: Projet de Réglement fait par MM. de Tracy et Talon pour la justice et la distribution des terres du Canada, Jan. 24, 1667.]

The seignior was usually the immediate vassal of the Crown, from which he had received his land gratuitously. In a few cases, he made grants to other seigniors inferior in the feudal scale, and they, his vassals, granted in turn to their vassals, the habitants or cultivators of the soil. [8] Sometimes the habitant held directly of the Crown, in which case there was no step between the highest and lowest degrees of the feudal scale. The seignior held by the tenure of faith and homage, the habitant by the inferior tenure en censive. Faith and homage were rendered to the Crown or other feudal superior whenever the seigniory changed hands, or, in the case of seigniories held by corporations, after long stated intervals. The following is an example, drawn from the early days of the colony, of the performance of this ceremony by the owner of a fief to the seignior who had granted it to him. It is that of Jean Guion, vassal of Giffard, seignior of Beauport. The act recounts how, in presence of a notary, Guion presented himself at the principal door of the manor-house of Beauport; how, having knocked, one Boullé, farmer of Giffard, opened the door, and in reply to Guion’s question if the seignior was at home, replied that he was not, but that he, Boullé, was empowered to receive acknowledgments of faith and homage from the vassals in his name. “After the which reply,” proceeds the act, the said Guion, being at the principal door, placed himself on his knees on the ground, with head bare, and without sword or spurs, and said three times these words: “Monsieur de Beauport, Monsieur de Beauport, Monsieur de Beauport, I bring you the faith and homage which I am bound to bring you on account of my fief Du Buisson, which I hold as a man of faith of your seigniory of Beauport, declaring that I offer to pay my seigniorial and feudal dues in their season, and demanding of you to accept me in faith and homage as aforesaid.” [9]

[8: Most of the seigniories of Canada were simple fiefs; but there were some exceptions. In 1671, the king, as a mark of honor to Talon, erected his seigniory Des Islets into a barony; and it was soon afterwards made an earldom, comté. In 1676, the seigniory of St. Laurent, on the island of Orleans, once the property of Laval, and then belonging to François Berthelot, councillor of the king, was erected into an earldom. In 1681, the seigniory of Portneuf, belonging to Réné Robineau, chevalier, was made a barony. In 1700, three seigniories on the south side of the St. Lawrence were united into the barony of Lcngueuil. See Papers on the Feudal Tenure in Canada, Abstract of Titles.]

[9: Ferland, Notes sur les Registres de Notre Dame de Québec, 65. This was a fief en roture, as distinguished from a fief noble, to which judicial powers and other privileges were attached.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 15 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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