Civilization.ca - VMNF - The Seigneurs

Around the Seigneur's Manor House

Robert Giffard was to prove the ideal seigneur. He provided for his newly arrived engagés (volunteers) in his manor house, which some of them had helped to build while others cleared the land of trees and sowed the soil. The very next year they were able to harvest their first grain: too little of it to sell, not quite enough to subsist on.

Robert Giffard's manor house, seigneury of Beauport

"I have been asked," wrote Father Paul LeJeune in the Jesuit Relations (annual missionary report) for 1636, "whether by clearing the lands for cultivation and tilling them they will produce enough for the subsistence of their inhabitants... I would reply in the affirmative; that at least is the consensus feeling. His lordship Giffard, who has only been clearing his land for two years and has still left many tree stumps, hopes this year, if the amount of grain lives up to it present showing, to harvest enough to feed twenty people. Already last year he garnered eight puncheons [barrels] of wheat, two of peas, and three of corn. His land is fertile, but that is not so of all of them."

Well before their contracts were due to expire, the engagés worked at building their own dwellings, often with the help of their fellows. At the Beauport seigneurie, the engagés were formally ceded their lands three years after they arrived. Promoted from the rank of colon (immigrant) to that of habitant (free farmer), they could get married. This they would do at the church in Quebec. At least for the first generation of habitants, the marriage contract might well have been signed at the very same manor house which was the centre of life at the Seigneurie of Beauport.

It was at the door of this manor house, every year on the appointed day, that the habitant had to pay his money for the cens (seigneurial dues), or else deliver produce of equal value in kind. Likewise it was there that the holders of arrière-fiefs (sub-fiefs) rendered their fealty and homage to the seigneur. There too all the habitants gathered amid great festivities for the plantation du mai (planting the maypole), at which the seigneur was treated with honour.

Planting the maypole

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