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Their annual payment of cens et rentes rarely amounted to more than a very few dollars. When it fell due in the autumn they were given abundant notice.
Each autumn at Michaelmas they gathered at the seigneur's house, their carryalls filling his yard. One by one they handed over their quota of grain or poultry and counted out their cens in copper coins. The occasion became a neighborhood festival to which the women came with the men. There was a general retailing of local gossip and a squaring-up of accounts among the neighbors themselves.
The amount was small, a few sous together with a stated donation in grain or poultry to be delivered each autumn. Reckoned in terms of present-day rentals, the cens et rentes amounted to half a dozen chickens or a bushel of grain for each fifty or sixty acres of land. Yet this was the only payment which the habitants of New France regularly made in return for their lands.
The cens was a money payment and merely nominal in amount. Back in the early days of feudalism it was very probably a greater burden; in Canada it never exceeded a few sous for a whole farm.
The seignior received his land gratuitously from the crown, and granted them to his vassals, who were generally known as habitants, or cultivators of the soil, on condition of their making small annual payments in money or produce known as cens et rente. This system had some advantages in a new country like Canada, where the government managed everything, and colonisation was not left to chance.
Cy commence le voyage de Bertrandon de la Brocquière en la Terre d'Oultre Mer l'an de grace mil quatre cens et trente deux. Pour animer et enflammer le coeur des nobles hommes qui desirent voir le monde;
What of their right of grinding the last liard of taxation out of the people to maintain their own opulent estate; the cens, the lods-et-ventes, which absorb a fifth of the value of the land, the blairee, which must be paid before herds can feed on communal lands, the pulverage to indemnify them for the dust raised on their roads by the herds that go to market, the sextelage on everything offered for sale in the public markets, the etalonnage, and all the rest?
He jumped up and flung out his hands. 'Look here Look here Censure! Censure! Cens ! "Dropped back on his seat like he was shot. Twisted himself up. Sat rocking. "Court cleared in less than no time. Me left in my corner. This Lady Tybar. Sabre, twisted up. Bobby or two. I began to come forward. Sabre looks up. Looks round. Gets his hat. Collects his old stick. Starts to hobble out.
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