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The Crown gave up all taxation except commercial duties, which were to be applied solely for the benefit of the provinces. Lands outside the seigneuries were to be in free and common socage, while seigneurial tenure itself could be converted into freehold on petition. One-seventh of the Crown lands was reserved for the endowment of the Church of England.
Not unnaturally the habitant came to feel it odious and humiliating to be obliged thus to give his labour at another's order. The seigneuries too were often broken up. In Canada there is no law of primogeniture and, at a seigneur's death, the land went to daughters as well as to sons. Few of the old seigniorial families remained on their original estates.
Il a donné de grandes seigneuries; mais il peut les retirer
In keeping with the same precedent, Talon located the military seigneuries in that section of the colony where they would be most useful as a barrier against the enemy; that is to say, he placed them in the colony's most vulnerable region. This was the area along the Richelieu from Lake Champlain to its confluence with the St. Lawrence at Sorel.
Many of the seigneurs, when Canada passed under British control, sold their seigneuries and went home to France. How great this hegira was can scarcely be estimated with exactness, but it is certain that the emigres included all the military and most of the civil officials, together with a great many merchants, traders, and landowners.
Most of the officers gradually grew tired of their rôle as gentlemen of the wilderness, and eventually sold or mortgaged their seigneuries and made their way back to France. Many of the soldiers succumbed to the lure of the western fur traffic and became coureurs-de-bois. But many others stuck valiantly to the soil, and today their descendants by the thousand possess this fertile land.
The Frenchman in all ages has proved abundantly his love of danger and adventure. Along the St Lawrence from Tadoussac to the Sault St Louis seigneuries fringed the great river, as they fringed the banks of its tributary, the Richelieu. This was the zone of cultivation, in which log-houses yielded, after a time, to white-washed cottages.
The people of the seigneuries paid a tithe or ecclesiastical tax for the support of their parish church. In origin, as its name implies, this payment amounted to one-tenth of the land's annual produce; but in New France the tithe was first fixed in 1663 at one-thirteenth, but in 1679 this was reduced to one twenty-sixth. At this figure it has remained to the present day.
The charter issued to the ill-starred La Roche in 1598 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.
Courcelle had asked for his own recall; his request was also granted and the Comte de Frontenac was named in his stead. No intendant was appointed to fill Talon's place. One of Talon's last official acts was the allotment, under authority of a decree of the King's Council of State, of a large number of seigneuries a matter of the highest importance for the development of the colony.