The cens et rentes were paid each year on St Martin's Day, early in November. By that time the harvest had been flailed and safely stowed away; the poultry had fattened among the fields of stubble. One and all, the habitants came to the manor-house to give the seigneur his annual tribute. Carrioles and celeches filled his yard. Women and children were brought along, and the occasion became a neighbourhood holiday. The manor-house was a lively place throughout the day, the seigneur busily checking off his lists as the habitants, one after another, drove in with their grain, their poultry, and their wallets of copper coins. The men smoked assiduously; so did the women sometimes. Not infrequently, as the November air was damp and chill, the seigneur passed his flagon of brandy among the thirsty brotherhood, and few there were who allowed this token of hospitality to pass them by. With their tongues thus loosened, men and women glibly retailed the neighbourhood gossip and the latest tidings which had filtered through from Quebec or Montreal. There was an incessant clatter all day long, to which the captive fowls, with their feet bundled together but with throats at full liberty, contributed their noisy share. As dusk drew near there was a general handshaking, and the carrioles scurried off along the highway. Every one called his neighbour a friend, and the people of each seigneury were as one great family.
The cens et rentes made up the only payment which the seigneur received each year, but there was another which became due at intervals. This was the payment known as the lods et ventes, a mutation fine which the seigneur had the right to demand whenever a farm changed hands by sale or by descent, except to direct heirs. One-twelfth of the value was the seigneur's share, but it was his custom to rebate one-third of this amount. Lands changed hands rather infrequently, and in any case the seigneur's fine was very small. From this source he received but little revenue and it came irregularly. Only in the days after the conquest, when land rose in value and transfers became more frequent, could the lods et ventes be counted among real sources of seigneurial income.
Then there were the so-termed banalites. In France their name was legion; no one but a seigneur could own a grist-mill, wine-press, slaughter-house, or even a dovecot. The peasant, when he wanted his grain made into flour or his grapes made into wine, was required to use his seigneur's mill, or press, and to pay the toll demanded. This toll was often exorbitant and the service poor. In Canada, however, there was only one droit de banalite—the grist-mill right. The Canadian seigneur had the exclusive milling privilege; his habitants were bound by their title-deed to bring their grist to his mill, and his legal toll was one-fourteenth of their grain. This obligation did not bear heavily on the people of the seigneuries; most of the complaints concerning it came rather from the seigneurs, who claimed that the toll was too small and did not suffice, in the average seigneury, to pay the wages of the miller. Many seigneurs declined to build mills until the royal authorities stepped in with a decree commanding that those who did not do so should lose their banal right for all time. Then they bestirred themselves.
The seigneurial mills were not very efficient, from all accounts. Crude, clumsy, poorly built affairs, they sometimes did little more than crack the wheat into coarse meal—it could hardly be called flour. The bakers of Quebec complained that the product was often unfit to use. The mills were commonly built in tower-like fashion, and were at times loop-holed in order that they might be used if necessary in the defence of seigneuries against Indian attack. The mill of the Seminary of St Sulpice at Montreal, for example, was a veritable stronghold, rightly counted upon as a place of sure refuge for the settlers in time of need. Racked and decayed by the ravages of time, some of those old walls still stand in their loneliness, bearing to an age of smoke-belching industry their message of more modest achievement in earlier days. Most of these banal mills were fitted with clumsy wind-wheels, somewhat after the Dutch fashion. But nature would not always hearken to the miller's command, and often for days the habitants stood around with their grist waiting in patience for the wind to come up and be harnessed.
Some Canadian seigneurs laid claim to the oven right (droit de four banal) as well. But the intendant, ever the tribune of his people, sternly set his foot on this pretension. In France the seigneur insisted that the peasantry should bake their bread in the great oven of the seigneury, paying the customary toll for its use. But in Canada, as the intendant explained, this arrangement was utterly impracticable. Through the long months of winter some of the habitants would have to bring their dough a half-dozen miles, and it would be frozen on the way. Each was therefore permitted to have a bake-oven of his own, and there was, of course, plenty of wood near by to keep it blazing.
Many allusions have been made, in writings on the old regime, to the habitant's corvee or obligation to give his seigneur so many days of free labour in each year. In France this incident of seigneurial tenure cloaked some dire abuses. Peasants were harried from their farms and forced to spend weeks on the lord's domain, while their own grain rotted in the fields. But there was nothing of this sort in Canada. Six days of corvee per year was all that the seigneur could demand; and he usually asked for only three, that is to say, one day each in the seasons of ploughing, seedtime, and harvest. And when the habitant worked for his seigneur in this way the latter had to furnish him with both food and tools, a requirement which greatly impaired the value of corvee labour from the seigneur's point of view. So far as a painstaking study of the records can disclose, the corvee obligation was never looked upon as an imposition of any moment. It was apparently no more generally resented than is the so-termed statute-labour obligation which exists among the farming communities of some Canadian provinces at the present day.
As for the other services which the habitant had to render his seigneur, they were of little importance. When he caught fish, one fish in every eleven belonged to his chief. But the seigneur seldom claimed this share, and received it even less often. The seigneur was entitled to take stone, sand, and firewood from the land of any one within his estate; but when he did this it was customary to give the habitant something of equal value in return. Few seigneurs of New France ever insisted on their full pound of flesh in these matters; a generous spirit of give and take marked most of their dealings with the men who worked the land.
Then there was the maypole obligation, quaintest among seigneurial claims. By the terms of their tenure the habitants of the seigneury were required to appear each May Day before the main door of the manor-house, and there to plant a pole in the seigneur's honour.
Le premier jour de mai,
Labourez,
J'm'en fus planter un mai,
Labourez,
A la porte a ma mie.
Bright and early in the morning, as Gaspe tells us, the whole neighbourhood appeared, decked out fantastically, and greeted the manor-house with a salvo of blank musketry. With them they bore a tall fir-tree, its branches cut and its bark peeled to within a few feet of the top. There the tuft of greenery remained. The pole, having been gaudily embellished, was majestically reared aloft and planted firmly in the ground. Round it the men and maidens danced, while the seigneur and his family, enthroned in chairs brought from the manor-house, looked on with approval. Then came a rattling feu de joie with shouts of 'Long live the King!' and 'Long live our seigneur!' This over, the seigneur invited the whole gathering to refreshments indoors. Brandy and cakes disappeared with great celerity before appetites whetted by an hour's exercise in the clear spring air. They drank to the seigneur's health, and to the health of all his kin. At intervals some guest would rush out and fire his musket once again at the maypole, returning for more hospitality with a sense of duty well performed. Before noon the merry company, with the usual round of handshaking, went away again, leaving the blackened pole behind. The echoes of more musket-shots came back through the valleys as they passed out of sight and hearing. The seigneur was more than a mere landlord, as the occasion testified.