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With its long thin fields and straggling rows of farmhouses stretching along either bank of the St Lawrence river for two hundred miles and more, the landscape of rural Canada toward the end of the French regime presented a distinctive charm and drew later writers to construct idyllic portraits of the social and legal system which, they believed, had shaped it.
This was the seigneurial system of land tenure, whose legal structure was transferred alsmot unaltered from France to the New World. Although the system was old and effete in seventeenth-century France, scholars have considered that it shaped much of the life of early Canada. Harris argues in this classic study, now available in paper for the first time, that such was not the case. If the seigneurial system were central to the development of early Canadian society, the patterns of settlement, land use, and trade in the colony would have borne the imprint of the system. Through inspection of such records as deeds of land concession and sale, statements of vassalage, and wills, Harris reconstructs the geography of Canada before the British conquest. This evidence leads to novel and interesting conclusions: that the seigneurie was not an important unit on the land and the seigneur was not a dominant figure in the life of the community. With remarkable clarity, Harris unfolds a detailed picture of the landscape of early Canada and of the people who created it. The reissue of this important volume will be welcomed by all interested in early European societies in North America.
According to Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential work on the Old Regime and the French Revolution, royal centralisation had so weakened the feudal power of the nobles that their remaining privileges became glaringly intolerable to commoners. This book challenges the theory by showing that when Louis XVI convened assemblies of landowners in the late 1770s and 1780s to discuss policies needed to resolve the budgetary crisis, he faced widespread opposition from lords and office holders. These elites regarded the assemblies as a challenge to their hereditary power over commoners. The king’s government comprised seigneurial jurisdictions and venal offices. Lordships and offices upheld inequality on behalf of the nobility and bred the discontent motivating the people to make the French Revolution.
Offers a new reading of the history of the colonization of North America and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples.
Feudal system of landholding, instituted in Canada by the French and its part in Canadian history.