e same precedent, Talon located the military
seigneuries in that section of the colony where they would be most
useful as a barrier against the enemy; that is to say, he placed them
in the colony's most vulnerable region. This was the area along the
Richelieu from Lake Champlain to its confluence with the St. Lawrence
at Sorel. It was by this route that the Mohawks had already come more
than once on their errands of massacre, and it was by this portal
that the English were likely to come if they should ever attempt
to overwhelm New France by an overland assault. The region of the
Richelieu was therefore made as strong against incursion as this
colonizing measure could make it.

All who took lands in this region, whether seigneurs or habitants,
were to assemble in arms at the royal call. Their uniforms and muskets
they kept for service, and never during subsequent years was such a
call without response. These military settlers and their sons after
them were only too ready to rally around the royal _oriflamme_ at any
opportunity. It was from the armed seigneuries of the Richelieu that
Hertel de Rouville, St. Ours, and others quietly slipped forth and
leaped with all the advantage of surprise upon the lonely hamlets
of outlying Massachusetts or New York. How the English feared these
_gentilshommes_ let their own records tell, for there these French
colonials put many a streak of blood and fire.

But not all of the seigneuries were settled in this way, and it was
well for the best interests of the colony that they were not. Too
often the good soldier made only an indifferent yeoman. First in war,
he was last in peace. The task of hammering spears into ploughshares
and swords into pruning-hooks was not altogether to his liking. Most
of the officers gradually grew tired of their role as gentlemen of the
wilderness, and eventually sold or mortgaged their seigneuries and
made their way back to France. Many of the soldiers succumbed to the
lure of the western fur traffic and became _coureurs-de-bois_. But
many others stuck valiantly to the soil, and today their descendants
by the thousand possess this fertile land.

What were the obligations of the settler who took a grant of land
within a seigneury? On the whole they were neither numerous nor
burdensome, and in no sense were they comparable with those laid upon
the hapless peasantry in France during the days before the great
Revolution. Every habitant had a written title-dee