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Frontenac was intelligent and would have recommended the establishment of posts whether he expected profit from them or not, but he weakened his case by attacking the Jesuits on wrong grounds. During Frontenac's first term the settled part of Canada was limited to the shores of the St Lawrence from Lachine downward, with a cluster of seigneuries along the lower Richelieu.
Likewise the islands in the river and the land on both sides of the Richelieu in the region toward Lake Champlain had been allotted. Many of the seigneuries in this latter belt had been given to officers of the Carignan-Salières regiment which had come out with Tracy in 1665 to chastise the Mohawks.
All the governors expatiate on the vast amount of forest wealth and remind the home government that under the French regime the king, when making out patents for the seigneurs, reserved the right of taking wood for ship-building and fortifications from any of the seigneuries. Agriculture was found to be in a very backward state.
Jeanne's power extended over Lower Navarre, Bearn, the land of Albret, Foix, Armagnac, and other great seigneuries. Through her husband, Antoine de Bourbon, she could rule and torture Perigord, the Bourbonais, and the Vendomois.
By this indenture feudalism cast its first anchor in New France, and Hébert became the colony's first patron of husbandry. Other grants soon followed, particularly during the years when the Company of One Hundred Associates was in control of the land, for, by the terms of its charter, this organization was empowered to grant large tracts as seigneuries and also to issue patents of nobility.
Two or three thousand men of British stock, many of them men of substance, had gone to the new colony; warehouses and foundries were being built; and many of the principal seigneuries had passed into English hands. All that was needed, he concluded, was persistence along the old path.
Too often they gave large seigneurial grants to men who had neither the energy nor the funds to do what was expected of a seigneur in the new land. As for extent, the seigneuries varied greatly. Some were as large as a European dukedom; others contained only a few thousand arpents.
But Le Moyne's ambition to provide for a rapidly growing family led him to petition the intendant for an enlargement of his holdings, and in 1672 the intendant Talon gave him the land which lay between the seigneuries of Varennes and La Prairie de la Magdelaine. This with his other tract was united to form the seigneury of Longueuil.
Across the stream lay Chateauguay and Longueuil, the patrimony of the Le Moynes; likewise the seigneuries of Varennes, Vercheres, Contrecoeur, St Ours, and Sorel. All of these were among the so-termed military seigneuries, having been originally given to retired officers of the Carignan regiment.
In a couple of notable royal decrees he read the directors a severe lecture upon their avarice and inaction, took away all the company's powers, confiscated to the crown all the seigneuries which the directors had granted to themselves, and ordered that the colony should thenceforth be administered as a royal province. By his later actions the king showed that he meant what his edicts implied.
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