This toll was often exorbitant and the service poor. In
Canada, however, there was only one droit de banalite--the
grist-mill right. The Canadian seigneur had the exclusive
milling privilege; his habitants were bound by their
title-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 banal 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 coarse
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 fashion,
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.
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