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Updated: June 18, 2025
The Sulpicians had, at the time the colony passed into English hands, an estate of about a quarter of a million arpents, including the most valuable seigneury of New France, on the island of Montreal. The Ursulines of Quebec and of Three Rivers possessed about seventy-five thousand arpents, while other orders and institutions, a half-dozen in all, had estates of varying acreage.
At the close of French dominion in 1760 the amount of cultivated land was only about three hundred thousand arpents, or about five acres for every head of population not a very satisfactory showing for a century of Bourbon imperialism in the St Lawrence valley. Yet the colony, when the English conquerors came upon it in 1759, was far from being on its last legs.
Landry dying in 1848 bequeathed liberty to his slave wife and her seven children and left them eighty-nine slaves and 4,500 arpents of land as well as notes and mortgages to a value of $46,000. In rural Virginia and Maryland also there were free colored slaveholders in considerable numbers.
At the latter date the total area of cleared land was scarcely four thousand arpents. With the royal action of 1663 which took the colony from the Company and reconstructed its government, the seigneurial system was galvanized at once with new energy.
"And perhaps reign a duly fat Bourbon," interrupted Quinet over his salad. "We shall re-unite at last again with France! The affection of this remnant of her children, turned adrift in their few arpents of snow, has never died towards the land so changed from the time of our forefathers. It is still to us the Palestine of our speech, our history and our faith of St. Louis!
Its nearest neighbour, Bellechasse, contained two hundred and twenty-seven persons, living upon three hundred and twenty arpents of cultivable land. With an arsenal of sixty-two muskets it was better equipped for self-defence.
Seigneurs stipulated that their lands would be forfeited unless so many arpents were put under crop each year. But all to little avail. So far as developing the permanent resources of the colony were concerned these coureurs de bois might just as well have remained in France.
The report certainly is a very inconsistent one, as it fully admits the justice of his claim to eleven thousand arpents of land, and recommends Congress to give him the miserable pittance of one thousand arpents, to which he was entitled in common with all the other emigrants to Upper Louisiana! The act for the confirmation of the title passed on the 10th of February, 1814.
From that time the system was regulated by the Coutume de Paris, by royal edicts, or by ordinances of the intendant. The greater part of the soil of Canada was accordingly held en fief or en seigneurie. Each grant varied from sixteen arpents an arpent being about five-sixths of an English acre by fifty, to ten leagues by twelve.
In addition to the ten thousand arpents of land thus lost, he had been entitled as a citizen to one thousand arpents of land according to the usage in other cases; but he appears not to have complied with the condition of actual residence on this land, and it was lost in consequence. In 1812, Colonel Boone sent a petition to Congress, praying for a confirmation of his original claims.
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