The Seigneurs of Old Canada Part 3

This rather peculiar configuration of the farms arose wholly from the way in which the colony was first settled.

For over a century after the French came to the St Lawrence all the seigneuries were situated directly on the sh.o.r.es of the river. This was only natural, for the great waterway formed the colony's carotid artery, supplying the life-blood of all New France so far as communications were concerned.

From seigneury to seigneury men traversed it in canoes or bateaux in summer, and over its frozen surface they drove by carriole during the long winters. Every one wanted to be in contact with this main highway, so that the demand for farms which should have some river frontage, however small, was brisk from the outset. Near the river the habitant began his clearing and built his house.

Farther inland, as the lands rose from the sh.o.r.e, was the pasture; and behind this again lay the still uncleared woodland. When the colony built its first road, this thoroughfare skirted the north sh.o.r.e of the St Lawrence, and so placed an even greater premium on farms contiguous to the river. It was only after all the best lands with river frontage had been taken up that settlers resorted to what was called 'the second range' farther inland.

Now it happened that in thus adapting the shape of grants to the immediate convenience and caprice of the habitants a curious handicap was in the long run placed upon agricultural progress. By the terms of the Custom of Paris, which was the common law of the colony, all the children of a habitant's family, male and female, inherited equal shares of his lands. When, therefore, a farm was to be divided at its owner's decease each partic.i.p.ant in the division wanted a share in the river frontage. With large families the rule, it can easily be seen that this demand could only be met by shredding the farm into mere ribbons of land with a frontage of only fifty or a hundred feet and a depth of a mile or more. That was the usual course pursued; each child had his strip, and either undertook to get a living out of it or sold his land to an adjoining heir. In any case, the houses and barns of the one who came into owners.h.i.+p of these thin oblongs were always situated at or near the water-front, so that the work of farming the land necessitated a great deal of travelling back and forth. Too many of the habitants, accordingly, got into the habit of spending all their time on the fields nearest the house and letting the rear grow wild. The situation militated against proper rotation of crops, and in many ways proved an obstacle to progress.

The trouble was not that the farms were too small to afford the family a living. In point of area they were large enough; but their abnormal shape rendered it difficult for the habitant to get from them their full productive power with the rather short season of cultivation that the climate allowed.

So important a handicap did this situation place upon the progress of agriculture that in 1744 the governor and the intendant drew the attention of the home authorities to it, and urged that some remedy be provided. With simple faith in the healing power of a royal edict, the king promptly responded with a decree which ordered that no habitant should thenceforth build his house and barn on any plot of land which did not have at least one and one-half lineal arpents of frontage (about three hundred feet). Any buildings so erected were to be demolished.

What a crude method of dealing with a problem which had its roots deep down in the very law and geography of the colony! But this royal remedy for the ills of New France went the way of many others. The authorities saw that it would work no cure, and only one attempt was ever made to punish those habitants who showed defiance. The intendant Bigot, in 1748, ordered that some houses which various habitants had erected at L'Ange-Gardien should be pulled down, but there was a great hue and cry from the owners, and the order remained unenforced. The practice of parcelling lands in the old way continued, and in time these cotes, as the habitants termed each line of houses along the river, stretched all the way from Quebec to Montreal. From the St Lawrence the whole colony looked like one unending, straggling village-street.

But let us outline the dues and services which the habitant, by the terms of his t.i.tle-deed, must render to his seigneur. First among these were the annual payments commonly known as the cens et rentes. To the habitant this was a sort of annual rental, although it was really made up of two separate dues, each of which had a different origin and nature. The cens was a money payment and merely nominal in amount. Back in the early days of feudalism it was very probably a greater burden; in Canada it never exceeded a few sous for a whole farm. The rate of cens was not uniform: each seigneur was ent.i.tled to what he and the habitant might agree upon, but it never amounted to more than the merest pittance, nor could it ever by any stretch of the imagination be deemed a burden. With the cens went the rentes, the latter being fixed in terms of money, poultry, or produce, or all three combined.

'One fat fowl of the brood of the month of May or twenty sols (sous) for each lineal arpent of frontage'; or 'one minot of sound wheat or twenty sols for each arpent of frontage' is the way in which the obligation finds record in some t.i.tle-deeds which are typical of all the rest.

The seigneur had the right to say whether he wanted his rentes in money or in kind, and he naturally chose the former when prices were low and the latter when prices were high.

It is a little difficult to estimate just what the ordinary habitant paid each year by way of cens et rentes to his seigneur, but under ordinary conditions the rental would amount to about ten or twelve sous and a half-dozen chickens or a bushel of grain for the average farm. Not a very onerous annual payment for fifty or sixty acres of land! Yet this was the only annual emolument which the seigneur of Old Canada drew each year from his tenantry. With twenty-five allotments in his seigneury the yearly income would be perhaps thirty or forty livres if translated into money, that is to say, six or eight dollars in our currency. Allowing for changes in the purchasing power of money during the last two hundred years, a fair idea of the burden placed on the habitant by his payment of the cens et rentes may be given by estimating it, in terms of present-day agricultural rentals, at, say, fifty cents yearly per acre. This is, of course, a rough estimate, but it conveys an idea that is approximately correct and, indeed, about as near the mark as one can come after a study of the seigneurial system in all its phases. The payment const.i.tuted a burden, and the habitants doubtless would have welcomed its abolition; but it was not a heavy tax upon their energies; it was less than the Church demanded from them; and they made no serious complaints regarding its imposition.

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 a.s.siduously; so did the women sometimes. Not infrequently, as the November air was damp and chill, the seigneur pa.s.sed his flagon of brandy among the thirsty brotherhood, and few there were who allowed this token of hospitality to pa.s.s 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 ba.n.a.lites. 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 ba.n.a.lite--the grist-mill right. The Canadian seigneur had the exclusive milling privilege; his habitants were bound by their t.i.tle-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 ba.n.a.l 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 coa.r.s.e 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 ba.n.a.l mills were fitted with clumsy wind-wheels, somewhat after the Dutch fas.h.i.+on. 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 ba.n.a.l) 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 ent.i.tled 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 appet.i.tes 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 pa.s.sed out of sight and hearing. The seigneur was more than a mere landlord, as the occasion testified.

CHAPTER V

HOW THE HABITANT LIVED

The seigneurs of New France were not a privileged order.

Between them and the habitants there was no great gulf fixed, no social impa.s.se such as existed between the two cla.s.ses in France. The seigneur often lived and worked like a habitant; his home was not a great deal better than theirs; his daily fare was much the same. The habitant, on the other hand, might himself become a seigneur by saving a little money, and this is what frequently happened. By becoming a seigneur, however, he did not change his mode of life, but continued to work as he had done before. There were some, of course, who took their social rank with great seriousness, and proved ready to pay out good money for letters-patent giving them minor t.i.tles of n.o.bility. Thus Jacques Le Ber, a bourgeois of Montreal who made a comfortable fortune out of the fur trade, bought a seigneury and then acquired the rank of gentilhomme by paying six thousand livres for it. But the possession of an empty t.i.tle, acquired by purchase or through the influence of official friends at Quebec, did not make much impression on the ma.s.ses of the people. The first citizens in the hearts of the community were the men of personal courage, talent, and worldly virtues.

Sur cette terre encor sauvage Les vieux t.i.tres sont inconnus; La n.o.blesse est dans le courage, Dans les talents, dans les vertus.

Nevertheless, to be a seigneur was always an honour, for the manor-house was the recognized social centre of every neighbourhood.

The manor-house was not a mansion. Built sometimes of rough-hewn timber, but more commonly of stone, it was roomy and comfortable, although not much more pretentious than the homes of well-to-do habitants. Three or four rooms on the ground floor with a s.p.a.cious attic made up the living quarters. The furniture often came from France, and its quality gave the whole interior an air of distinction. As for the habitants, their homes were also of stone or timber--long and rather narrow structures, heavily built, and low. They were whitewashed on the outside with religious punctuality each spring. The eaves projected over the walls, and high-peaked little dormer windows thrust themselves from the roof here and there.

The houses stood very near the roadway, with scarcely ever a gra.s.s plot or single shade tree before them. In midsummer the sun beat furiously upon them; in winter they stood in all their bleakness full-square to the blasts that drove across the river.

Behind the house was a storeroom built in 'lean-to'

fas.h.i.+on, and not far away stood the barn and stable, made usually of timbers laid one upon the other with c.h.i.n.ks securely mortared. Somewhat aloof was the root-house, half dug in the ground, banked generously with earth round about and overhead. Within convenient distance of the house, likewise, was the bake-oven, built of boulders, mortar, and earth, with the wood-pile near by. Here with roaring fires once or twice each week the family baking was done. Round the various buildings ran some sort of fence, whether of piled stones or rails, and in a corner of the enclosed plot was the habitant's garden. Viewed by the traveller who pa.s.sed along the river this straggling line of whitewashed structures stood out in bold relief against the towering background of green hills beyond. The whole colony formed one long rambling village, each habitant touching elbows with his neighbour on either side.

Within the habitant's abode there were usually not more than three regular rooms. The front door opened into a capacious living room with its great open fireplace and hearth. This served as dining-room as well. A gaily coloured woollen carpet or rug, made in the colony, usually decked the floor. There was a table and a couch; there were chairs made of pine with seats of woven underbark, all more or less comfortable. Often a huge side-board rose from the floor to the low, open-beamed ceiling. Pictures of saints adorned the walls. A spinning-wheel stood in the corner, sharing place perhaps with a musket set on the floor stock downward, but primed for ready use. Adjoining this room was the kitchen with its fireplace for cooking, its array of pots and dishes, its cupboards, shelves, and other furnis.h.i.+ngs. All of these latter the habitant and his sons made for themselves.

The economic isolation of the parish made its people versatile after their own crude fas.h.i.+on. The habitant was a handy man, getting pretty good results from the use of rough material and tools. Even at the present day his descendants retain much of this facility. At the opposite end of the house was a bedroom. Upstairs was the attic, so low that one could scarcely stand upright in any part of it, but running the full length and breadth of the house. Here the children, often a round dozen of them, were stowed at night. A shallow iron bowl of tallow with a wick protruding gave its dingy light. Candles were not unknown, but they were a luxury. Every one went to bed when darkness came on, for there was nothing else to do. Windows were few, and to keep out the cold they were tightly battened down. The air within must have been stifling; but, as one writer has suggested, the habitant and his family got along without fresh air in his dwelling just as his descendant of to-day manages to get along without baths.

For the most part the people of Old Canada were comfortably clothed and well fed. Warm cloth of drugget--etoffe du pays, as it was called--came from the hand-looms of every parish. It was all wool and stood unending wear. It was cheap, and the women of the household fas.h.i.+oned it into clothes. Men, women, and children alike wore it in everyday use; but on occasions of festivity they liked to appear in their brighter plumage of garments brought from France.

In the summer the children went nearly unclothed and bare-footed always. A single garment without sleeves and reaching to the knees was all that covered their nakedness.

In winter every one wore furs outdoors. Beaver skins were nearly as cheap as cloth, and the wife of the poorest habitant could have a winter wardrobe that it would nowadays cost a small fortune to provide. Heavy clogs made of hide--the bottes sauvages as they were called--or moccasins of tanned and oiled skins, impervious to the wet, were the popular footwear in winter and to some extent in summer as well. They were laced high up above the ankles, and with a liberal supply of coa.r.s.e-knitted woollen socks the people managed to trudge anywhere without discomfort even in very cold weather. Plaited straw hats were made by the women for ordinary summer use, but hats of beaver, made in the fas.h.i.+on of the day, were always worn on dress occasions. Every man wore one to Ma.s.s each Sunday morning. In winter the knitted cap or toque was the favourite. Made in double folds of woollen yarn with all the colours of the rainbow, it could be drawn down over the ears as a protection from the cold; with its ta.s.sel swinging to and fro this toque was worn by everybody, men, women, and children alike.

Attached to the coat was often a hood, known as a capuchin, which might be pulled over the toque as an additional head-covering on a journey through the storm. Knitted woollen gloves were also made at home, likewise mitts of sheepskin with the wool left inside. The apparel of the people was thus adapted to their environment, and besides being somewhat picturesque it was thoroughly comfortable.

The daily fare of New France was not of limitless variety, but it was nouris.h.i.+ng and adequate. Bread made from wheat flour and cakes made from ground maize were plentiful.

Meat and fish were within the reach of all. Both were cured by smoke after the Indian fas.h.i.+on and could be kept through the winter without difficulty. Vegetables of various kinds were grown, but peas were the great staple.

Peas were to the French what maize was to the redskin.

In every rural home soupe aux pois came daily to the table. Whole families were reared to vigorous manhood on it. Even to-day the French Canadian has not by any means lost his liking for this nouris.h.i.+ng and palatable food.

Beans, too, were a favourite vegetable in the old days; not the tender haricots of the modern menu, but the feves or large, tough-fibred beans that grew in Normandy and were brought by its people to the New World. There were potatoes, of course, and they were patates, not pommes de terre. Cuc.u.mbers were plentiful, indeed they were being grown by the Indians when the French first came to the St Lawrence. As they were not indigenous to that region it is for others than the student of history to explain how they first came there. Fruits there were also, such as apples, plums, cherries, and French gooseberries, but not in abundance. Few habitants had orchards, but most of them had one or two fruit-trees grown from seedlings which came from France. Wild fruits, especially raspberries, cranberries, and grapes, were to be had for the picking, and the younger members of each family gathered them all in season. Even in the humbler homes of the land there was no need for any one to go hungry. More than one visitor to the colony, indeed, was impressed by the rude comfort in which the habitants lived. 'The boors of these manours,' wrote the voluble La Hontan, [Footnote: Louis Armand, Baron La Hontan, came to Canada in 1683, and lived for some time among the habitants of Beaupre, below Quebec, and afterwards in the neighbourhood of Montreal. He also journeyed in the Far West and wrote a fantastic account of his travels, of which an English edition was published in 1703.] 'live with greater comfort than an infinity of the gentry in France.' And for once he was probably right.

As for drink, there were both tea and coffee to be had from the traders; but they were costly and not in very general use. Milk was cheap and plentiful. Brandy and wine came from France in s.h.i.+ploads, but brandy was largely used in the Indian trade, and wine appeared only on the tables of the well-to-do; the ordinary habitant could not afford it save on state occasions. Cheap beer, brewed in the colony, was within easier range of his purse.

There were several breweries in the colony, although they do not appear to have been very profitable to their owners. Home-brewed ale was much in use. When duly aged it made a fine beverage, although insidious in its effects sometimes. But no guest ever came to any colonial home without a proffer of something to drink. Hospitality demanded it. The habitant, as a rule, was very fond of the flagon. Very often, as the records of the day lead us to believe, he drank not wisely but too well. Idleness had a hand in the development of this trait, for in the long winters the habitant had little to do but visit his neighbours.

The men of New France smoked a great deal, and the women sometimes followed their example. Children learned to smoke before they learned to read or write. Tobacco was grown in the colony, and every habitant had a patch of it in his garden; and then as now this tabac canadien was fierce stuff with an odour that scented the whole seigneury. The art of smoking a pipe was one of the first lessons which the Frenchman acquired from his Indian friends, and this became the national solace through the long spells of idleness. Such as it was, the tobacco of the colony was no luxury, for every one could grow enough and to spare to serve his wants. The leaves were set in the sun to cure, and were then put away till needed.

As to the methods of farming, neither the contemporary records nor the narratives of travel tell us much. But it is beyond doubt that the habitant was not a very scientific cultivator. Catalogne remarks in his valuable report that if the fields of France were cultivated like the farms of Canada three-fourths of the people would starve. Fertilization of the land was rare. All that was usually done in this direction was to burn the stubble in the spring before the land went under the plough.

Rotation of crops was practically unknown. A portion of each farm was allowed to lie fallow once in a while, but as these fallow fields were rarely ploughed and weeds might grow without restraint, the rest from cultivation was of little value. Even the cultivated fields were ploughed but once a year and rather poorly at that, for the land was ploughed in ridges and there was a good deal of waste between the furrows. When Peter Kalm, the famous Scandinavian naturalist and traveller, paid his visit to the colony in 1748 he found 'white wheat most commonly in the fields.' But oats, rye, and barley were also grown.

Some of the habitants grew maize in great quant.i.ties, while nearly all raised vegetables of various sorts, chiefly cabbages, pumpkins, and coa.r.s.e melons. Some gave special attention to the cultivation of flax and hemp.

The meadows of the St Lawrence valley were very fertile, and far superior, in Kalm's opinion, to those of the New England colonies; they furnished fodder in abundance.

Wild hay could be had for the cutting, and every habitant had his conical stack of it on the river marshes. Hence the raising of cattle and horses became an important branch of colonial husbandry. The cattle and sheep were of inferior breed, undersized, and not very well cared for. The horses were much better. The habitant had a particular fondness for horses; even the poorest tried to keep two or three. This, as Catalogne pointed out, was a gross extravagance, for there was no work for the horses to do during nearly half the year.

The implements of agriculture were as crude as the methods.

Most of them were made in the colony out of inferior materials and with poor workmans.h.i.+p. Kalm saw no drains in any part of the colony, although, as he naively remarked, 'they seemed to be much needed in places.' The fields were seldom fenced, and the cattle often made their way among the growing grain. The women usually worked with the men, especially at harvest time, for extra labour was scarce. Even the wife and daughters of the seigneur might be seen in the fields during the busy season. Each habitant had a clumsy, wooden-wheeled cart or wagon for workaday use. In this he trundled his produce to town once or twice a year. For pleasure there was the celeche and the carriole. The celeche was a quaint two-wheeled vehicle with its seat set high in the air on springs of generous girth; the carriole, a low-set sleigh on solid wooden runners, with a high back to give protection from the cold. Both are still used in various parts of Quebec to-day. The habitant made his own harness, often decorating it gaily and taking great pride in his workmans.h.i.+p.

The feudal folk of New France did not spend all their time or energies in toil. They had numerous holidays and times of recreation. Loyal to his Church, the habitant kept every jour de fete with religious precision. These days came frequently, so much so, according to Catalogne's report, that during the whole agricultural season from May to October, only ninety clear days were left for labour. On these numerous holidays were held the various festivals, religious or secular. Sunday, also, was a day of general rendezvous. Every one came to Ma.s.s, whatever the weather. After the service various announcements were made at the church door by the local capitaine de la milice, who represented the civil government in the parish. Then the rest of the day was given over to visiting and recreation. There was plenty of time, moreover, for hunting and fis.h.i.+ng; and the average habitant did both to his heart's content. In the winter there was a great deal of visiting back and forth among neighbours, even on week-days. Dancing was a favourite diversion and card-playing also. Gambling at cards was more common among the people than suited either the priests or the civil authorities, as the records often attest. Less objectionable amus.e.m.e.nts were afforded by the corvees recreatives or gatherings at a habitant's home for some combination of work and play. The corn-husking corvee, for reasons which do not need elucidation, was of course the most popular of these. Of study or reading there was very little, for only a very small percentage of the people could read. Save for a few manuals of devotion there were no books in the home, and very few anywhere in the colony.

Two or three chroniclers of the day have left us pen- pictures of the French Canadians as they were before the English came. As a race, Giles Hocquart says, they were physically strong, well set-up, with plenty of stamina.

They impressed La Hontan also as vigorous and untiring at anything that happened to gain their interest. They were fond of honours and sensitive to the slightest affront. This in part accounts for their tendency to litigiousness, which various intendants mentioned with regret. The habitant went to law with his neighbour at every opportunity. His att.i.tude toward questions of public policy was one of rare self-control; but when anything touched his own personal interests he always waxed warm immediately. Pretexts for squabbling there were in plenty.