or office of the greffier, at Quebec. In general the
notaries were men of rather meagre education; their work
on deeds and marriage settlements was too often very
poorly done, and lawsuits were all the more common in
consequence. But the colony managed to get along with
this system of conveyancing, crude and undependable as
it was.

In the title-deeds of lands granted by the seigneurs to
the habitants the situation and area are first set forth.
The grants were of all shapes and sizes. As a rule,
however, they were in the form of a parallelogram, with
the shorter end fronting the river and the longer side
extending inland. The usual river frontage was from five
to ten lineal arpents, and the depth ranged from ten to
eighty arpents. It should be explained that the arpen de
Paris, in terms of which colonial land measurements were
invariably expressed, served both as a unit of length
and as a unit of area. The lineal arpent was the equivalent
of one hundred and ninety-two English feet. The superficial
arpent, or arpent of area, contained about five-sixths
of an acre. The habitant's customary frontage on the
river was, accordingly, from about a thousand to two
thousand feet, while his farm extended rearwards a distance
of anywhere from under a half-mile to three miles.

This rather peculiar configuration of the farms arose
wholly from the way in which the colony was first settled.
For over a century after the French came to the St Lawrence
all the seigneuries were situated directly on the shores