Show I THE CANADIAN SEIGNIORIES ACurios Survival of Customs of the Old Feudal Times The other day I happened to be at the house of a FrenchCanadian landed proprietor between here and Three Rivers when one of his tenants came to pay the rent Rents are usually paid in French Canada at Martinmas the St Martin as people call itwhich is the 11th of November but the tenant ten-ant in question had business elsewhere about that time and being in the village vil-lage wh re he had sold some hemlock bark to an American he brought the rent in advance It amounted to 682 for a years tenancy for 132 arpents acres of land Having signed the receipt re-ceipt the landlord according to custom cus-tom ordered in brandy and he and the tenant drank each others health with much bowing and handshaking The smallness of the rent was not the only curious feature of the affair The rent was a rent fixed in theory by the customs cus-toms of Paris and imposed when the feudal tenure was transplanted in a modified form to this colony It was strange to find in America at this time of day a landlord and tenant transacting transact-ing bxfsiness upon principles laid down Ih France as long ago as 1505 and repealed re-pealed as long ago as the French revolution revo-lution Parkman and others have told us all about the mild feudal system which prevailed in French Canada down to 1854 The seignior received a grant of wild land from the king on condition that he should put settlers upon it He had to preserve the oak timber for shipbuilding and the red pine for the manufacture of tar and to notify the kings agents if he found minerals on the seigniory In 1854 the parliament of Canada bought out the seigniors There were 160 of them in possession of 120 fiefs embracing 6000000 acres of cultivated land The censitaire was given his choice or two things the cens et rentes were capitalized and he could either pay the Capital sum to the seignior In which case of course he got a clear title to his holdintr or continue on as a tenant at a rental equal to 6 per cent of the capitalization The tenant I came across or his father before him had like many more chosen the latter course The other seigniorial rights were settled for by the government at a cost of about 5000000 The system would have been abolished before 1854 only the Roman Catholic church was afraid that in the debacle as timid souls called it the tithes and fabrique taxes which she collected by authority of law might be abolished tooNew York Evening Post |