The Christie Seigneuries: Estate Management and Settlement in the Upper Richelieu Valley, 1760-1854

James Pritchard is a history professor at Queen’s University.

This is a useful but limited contribution to a growing body of local
historical studies of the early social and economic development of
Quebec. During the mid-1760s, Lieutenant-Colonel Gabriel Christie of the
British Army acquired five seigneuries in the upper Richelieu Valley,
which remained in the Christie family until after the commutation of
seigneurial tenure in 1854. This study examines how Christie and his
heirs and successors administered them by focusing on the impact of
estate management on settlement, the exploitation of natural resources,
and the development of the local economy. These same features also
indicate the limits of this local study, for by its nature it contains
little about the evolving social life on these properties.

In the course of examining the chief topics over nearly a century, the
author successfully challenges the views of those who explain the early
development of Lower Canada in nationalist, ethnic, or materialist
terms. Differences in management, she argues, were largely due to the
character and changing economic circumstances of the owners rather than
to any peculiarities arising from seigneurial tenure or class struggle.
Although seigneurial rights included a legal right to discretionary
land-granting power, which enabled seigneurs and their agents to control
access to timber and power reserves and significantly influenced local
settlement patterns, the author concludes that this was not very
different from elsewhere in British North America where entrepreneurial
landowners sought to monopolize resources. Paternalism and patronage
(modified by personality and idiosyncratic behavior), not feudalism,
governed social relations between seigneurs and their censitaires. At
the same time English support for the seigneurial system was economic
rather than social. It was the quest for monopolization of resources,
rather than a search for rentier income or social status, that made
seigneuries attractive to investors.

While the study stresses the claim that individual behavior chiefly
influenced management practices, the account is very sparse owing to the
sources employed. Because Noлl relies chiefly on acts of land
concession and surviving account books, few details of daily life emerge
to enliven the text or support more fully the author’s claims. Given
the paucity of sources, she has probably done her best, for she is able
to show that the deterioration of seigneur–censitaire relations after
1815 was due to perceived favoritism and unfair practices, not to any
structural feature of the seigneurial system. Although the study does
not examine the nature or significance of the seigneurial burden on the
habitants of Lower Canada, or adequately acknowledge the role of the
censitaires from the Christie seigneuries in the rebellions of Lower
Canada, it occupies a useful place in the growing literature on early
Quebec history.