United States or Guam ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Nicolet had passed into the hands of the Courvals, a trading family of Three Rivers, and Becancour was held by Pierre Robineau, the son of his famous father, Rene Robineau de Becancour. On all of these seigneuries some progress had been made, but often it amounted to very little. Better results had been obtained both eastward and westward of the region.
Hence it was that many of them got into debt, mortgaged their seigneuries to Quebec or Montreal merchants, soon lost their lands, and finally drifted back to France. When Talon arranged to have the Carignans disbanded in Canada he decided that they should be given lands in that section of the colony where they would be most useful in guarding New France at its most vulnerable point.
So the intendant proposed to the king that the regiment should be disbanded at Quebec, and that all its members should be given inducements to make their homes in the colony. Once more the king assented. He agreed that the officers of the regiment should be offered seigneuries, and provided with funds to make a start in improving them.
Forty-one parishes were created in the Quebec district; thirteen in the district of Three Rivers; and twenty-eight in the region round Montreal. These eighty-two parishes were roughly coterminous with the existing seigneuries, but not always so. Some few seigneuries had six or eight parishes within their bounds. In other cases, two or three seigneuries were merged into a single great parish.
A city was an assembly of a thousand seigneuries, which divided it into compartments of all shapes and sizes. Hence, a thousand conflicting establishments of police; that is to say, no police at all.
A royal decree therefore ordered that for the future these grants should he made by the governor and intendant jointly. Thenceforth they were usually so made, although in some cases the intendant disregarded the royal instructions and signed the title-deeds alone; and it appears that in all cases he was the main factor in determining who should get seigneuries and who should not.
The incessant wars that swept France, its dismemberment into duchies and counties and seigneuries, practically independent, and above all the English domination in Guyenne for three hundred years, enabled the petty nobles to shake off the very semblance of submission to their liege lords, and to prosecute their private feuds without hindrance.
Three of these pioneers of the seigneuries have been singled out for special attention in this chapter, because each prefigures a type of seigneur who did what was expected of him, although not always in the prescribed way. Their work was far from being showy, and offers a writer no opportunity to make his pages glow. The priest and the trader afford better themes.
If a contractor for the yearly sale of the woods was bankrupt and did not pay, how could I get my interest? Answer me that, Gandrin." "Certainly you must run the risk of that chance." "Of course the chance occurs, and then I foreclose, seize, Rochebriant and its seigneuries are mine."
At the least, Alain would be at Paris in the social position which would afford him the opportunities of a marriage, in which his birth and rank would be readily accepted as an equivalent to some ample fortune that would serve to redeem the endangered seigneuries.
Word Of The Day