boorishness."

I ought to add that the whole parish spoke with indignation of the
conduct of the young man. The delinquent had committed a double
offence. He had been rude to their benefactress, and besides,
violating a French Canadian custom, he had passed a carriage
without asking permission.[33]

This must have been before 1813 for in that year this good Madame Tache
died: even so early was youth restive under the old traditions of
deference and subordination. Already some even of the seigneurs were
saying that the system retarded settlement. It would have suited the
seigneurs to have their holdings converted into freehold, for then they
could have held the unsettled land as their own property instead of
being under obligation to grant it for a nominal rental to
_censitaires_. But to make this conversion would have been too kind to
the seigneurs; so the matter dragged on for a long time.

The grievances of the habitant against the seigneurs were numerous, some
of them real, some fanciful. It seemed anomalous that, in a British
colony in the nineteenth century, there should be men holding great
tracts of land with rights over their tenants, as some authors have
seriously claimed, extending from the power of trying them for petty
offences to that of inflicting the death penalty. This last right was,
in any case, only nominal and was never exercised by any seigneur in
Canada; but even the claim that it existed shows how high were the
authority and privilege of the seigneur. A right like the _corvee_ had a
sinister meaning. One of the greatest hardships of the old regime, in
France it meant that, on demand, the peasant must drop his own work to
join in making highways, in carrying from one place to another the
effects of a regiment, and other unwelcome tasks, all without pay. In
Canada it was milder. The seigneur levied a _corvee_ of so many days'
labour, which he employed on the useful task of improving the highway.
Some seigneurs required that at the times they chose, the habitants
should work for them a certain number of days, usually six, in each
year. They could even make the habitants work without pay at building a
manor house; a few of the massive stone mansions still fairly numerous
in the Province of Quebec were constructed by such labour. Not
unnaturally the habitant came to feel it odious and humiliating to be
obliged thus to give his labour at another's order.

The seigneuries to