With
the growth of population the banal right became very
valuable to the seigneurs and an equally great inconvenience
to the habitants. Many seigneurs made no attempt to
provide adequate milling facilities. They gave the
habitants a choice between bringing their grain to the
half-broken-down windmill of the seigneury or paying the
seigneur a money fine for his permission to take their
grist elsewhere. New seigneurial demands, unheard of in
earlier days, were often put forth and enforced.
The grievances of the habitants were not mitigated,
moreover, by the way in which the authorities of the
province gave lands to the United Empire Loyalists. These
exiles from the revolted seaboard colonies came by
thousands during the years following the war, and they
were given generous grants of land. And these lands were
not made subject to any seigneurial dues. They were given
in freehold, in free and common socage. The new owners
of these lands paid no annual dues and rendered no regular
services to any superior authority. Their tenure seemed
to the habitants to be very attractive. Hence the influx
of the Loyalists gave strength to a movement for the
abolition of seigneurial tenure--a movement which may be
said to have had its first real beginning about 1790.
It was in that year that the solicitor-general of the
province, in response to a request of the legislative
council, presented a long report on the land-tenure
situation.
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