the cens went the rentes, the latter being fixed in terms
of money, poultry, or produce, or all three combined.
'One fat fowl of the brood of the month of May or twenty
sols (sous) for each lineal arpent of frontage'; or 'one
minot of sound wheat or twenty sols for each arpent of
frontage' is the way in which the obligation finds record
in some title-deeds which are typical of all the rest.
The seigneur had the right to say whether he wanted his
rentes in money or in kind, and he naturally chose the
former when prices were low and the latter when prices
were high.

It is a little difficult to estimate just what the ordinary
habitant paid each year by way of cens et rentes to his
seigneur, but under ordinary conditions the rental would
amount to about ten or twelve sous and a half-dozen
chickens or a bushel of grain for the average farm. Not
a very onerous annual payment for fifty or sixty acres
of land! Yet this was the only annual emolument which
the seigneur of Old Canada drew each year from his
tenantry. With twenty-five allotments in his seigneury
the yearly income would be perhaps thirty or forty livres
if translated into money, that is to say, six or eight
dollars in our currency. Allowing for changes in the
purchasing power of money during the last two hundred
years, a fair idea of the burden placed on the habitant
by his payment of the cens et rentes may be given by
estimating it, in terms of present-day agricultural
rentals, at, say, fifty cents yearly per acre. This is,
of course, a rough estimate, but it conveys an idea that