are known to have occurred. This method of land division confers obvious advantages in terms of easy access to transportation and cheap surveying, but also allowed socagers to live remarkably close to families on neighboring plots—often within a few hundred yards—creating something of a proto-neighborhood. Although legislation and enforcement varied depending on the period and administration, a socager’s rights of entitlement to their villeinage could not be revoked as long as they paid their duties and fees to the lord of the manor and satisfied the requirements of tenir feu et lieu. This stipulated that they were obliged to improve their landholdings or these would be confiscated. By ordinance of the Intendant in 1682, a socager could not hold more than two villeinages. Types of tenure The lord of the manor rented most of the land to tenants, known as censitaires or habitants, who cleared the land, built houses and other buildings, and farmed the land. A smaller portion of the land was kept as a demesne (land owned by the manorial lord and farmed by his family or by hired labour) which was economically significant in the early days of settlement, though less thereafter. Manorial land tenure in New France differed somewhat from its counterpart in France; the manorial lords of New France were not always nobles, though many were. Fiefs in North America were granted to military officers and – as in France – many were owned by the Catholic clergy. However, the system was feudal in the sense that there was a clear displacement of wealth happening from tenants to their landlords, which was not at all based on market forces (as land was plentiful and labor was not), but rather a system institutionalized by the crown. Villein socagers were able to divide their land for their children according to the Custom of Paris once they had families of their own, meaning that in the event of the death of a spouse, half the estate went to the surviving spouse, with the other half divided among the children (both male and female). This could lead to an unusual (for the time period) number of women, generally widows, who were in charge of large amounts of property. However, it is also worth noting that most widows remarried within a short time of their spouse’s death and often the meticulous splitting of estates demanded by the Custom of Paris