
With its long thin fields and straggling rows of farmhouses stretching along either bank of the St Lawrence river for two hundred miles and more, the landscape of rural Canada toward the end of the French regime presented a distinctive charm and drew later writers to construct...

This was the seigneurial system of land tenure, whose legal structure was transferred alsmot unaltered from France to the New World. Although the system was old and effete in seventeenth-century France, scholars have considered that it shaped much of the life of early Canada...