was disregarded in favor of quickly solidifying the new union. In order to preserve each of the heirs' access to the river or road, the land would be divided lengthwise, resulting in narrower and narrower lots. In response to these increasingly subdivided farm plots and the issues of diminishing agricultural productivity associated with them, the Governor and the Intendant of New France petitioned the King in 1744 to issue a new ordinance rectifying the matter. The King responded by requiring the minimum plot size which a villein socager might cultivate or reside to be one arpent and a half of frontage by 30–40 arpents in depth. A final characteristic of villeinage is that the size of the fief typically varied in direct proportion with its distance from the nearest town, while its population density varied inversely. Elsewhere this kind of property inheritance law often led to fragmentation of estates. However, the subsistence level farming of many of the villein socagers in New France made fragmentation impossible and so it was common practice for one heir to buy out the others’ land, keeping estates in more or less one piece. It is also worth noting that anything but direct inheritance meant the property might be subject to the entry fine of 1/12th of the value of the property due to the lord. Economic impact on New France Some historians suggest that the structure of feudal land tenure itself might have caused delays in economic growth for New France. Morris Altman, for example, argued that by shifting disposable wealth and therefore spending power from the villein socagers to the manorial lords (crown vassals), the system deeply altered the economy of New France. Furthermore, since the manorial lords rarely had their estates as their chief source of income, the relatively insignificant sums of money from the feu-duties were used largely in the purchase of luxury items which were almost always imported from France. Altman theorizes that since the villein socagers would have either re-invested this money or bought goods produced locally, this limited growth and was damaging to the economy of New France. Though Altman later altered the precise estimates he made (based on annual outputs) of how much disposable income the socagers might have been deprived of (and therefore the amount of local investment lost), he confirmed his original thesis that the feudal fees reduced growth through wealth transfer. Other historians such