Quebec Travel Guide

In the seventeenth century, the agricultural settlement of New France - now Québec - was conceived as an extension of European-style feudalism with the granting of seigneuries to religious orders, nobleman, merchants and, in a break from tradition, others of humble birth. The average seigneury covered around fifty square kilometres and part of the land was owned by the seigneurs, the rest rented by habitants , who were secure in their tenancy (they could sell the land and pass it on to their children) provided they met certain obligations. They had to pay a yearly tithe for the upkeep of the parish church, pay rent in kind (usually grain, as the seigneurs had a monopoly on milling), work on the roads and make themselves available for the militia.

In the early days the waterways provided the easiest form of transportation and so each habitant's farm had a riverfrontage of around a couple of hundred metres in length, with the rest of his land extending back in a narrow strip. One result of this was that habitants lived near their neighbours and, content with this decentralized way of life, long resisted the development of nuclear settlements. You can still see these ribbon farms and villages, which are very much in evidence along the St Lawrence today.The seigneurial system was abolished in Ottawa in 1854 by legislation that passed land ownership rights to the habitants .