Crusaders of New France by William Bennett Munro

Author:William Bennett Munro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackmask Online
Published: 2010-11-09T15:48:35.484000+00:00

CHAPTER VIII. SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA

From the beginning of the colony there ran in the minds of French officialdom the idea that the social order should rest upon a seigneurial basis. Historians have commonly attributed to Richelieu the genesis of New World feudalism, but without good reason, for its beginnings antedated the time of the great minister. 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. Several seigneurial grants in the region of Quebec had, in fact, been made before Richelieu first turned his attention to the colony.

Nor was the adoption of this policy at all unnatural. Despite its increasing obsolescence, the seigneurial system was still strong in France and dominated the greater part of the kingdom. The nobility and even the throne rested upon it. The Church, as suzerain of enormous landed estates, sanctioned and supported it. The masses of the French people were familiar with no other system of landholding. No prolonged quest need accordingly be made to explain why France transplanted feudalism to the shores of the great Canadian waterway; in fact, an explanation would have been demanded had any other policy been considered. No one asks why the Puritans took to Massachusetts Bay the English system of freehold tenure. They took the common law of England and the tenure that went with it. Along with the fleur-de-lis, likewise, went the Custom of Paris and the whole network of social relations based upon a hierarchy of seigneurs and dependents.

The seigneurial system of land tenure, as all students of history know, was feudalism in a somewhat modernized form. During the chaos which came upon Western Europe in the centuries following the collapse of Roman imperial supremacy, every local magnate found himself forced to depend for existence upon the strength of his own castle, under whose walls he gathered as many vassals as he could induce to come. To these he gave the surrounding lands free from all rents, but on condition of aid in time of war. The lord gave the land and promised to protect his vassals, who, on their part, took the land and promised to pay for it not in money or in kind, but in loyalty and service. Thus there was created a close personal relation, a bond of mutual wardship and fidelity which bound liegeman and lord with hoops of steel. The whole social order rested upon this bond and upon the gradations in privilege which it involved in a sequence which became stereotyped. In its day feudalism was a great institution and one which shared with the Christian Church the glory of having made mediaeval life at all worth living. It helped to keep civilization from perishing utterly in a whirl of anarchy, and it enabled Europe to recover inch by inch its former state of order, stability, and law.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.