In the new land there was reason to hope, however, that this system of social relations based upon landholding would soon work its way back to the vigor which it had displayed in mediaeval days. Here in the midst of an unfathomed wilderness was a small European settlement with hostile tribes on every hand. The royal arm, so strong in affording protection at home, could not strike hard and promptly in behalf of subjects a thousand leagues away. New France, accordingly must organize itself for defense and repel her enemies just as the earldoms and duchies of the crusading centuries had done. And that is just what the colony did, with the seigneurial system as the groundwork of defensive strength. Under stress of the new environment, which was not wholly unlike that of the former feudal days, the military aspects of the system revived and the personal bond regained much of its ancient vigor. The sordid phases of seigneurialism dropped into the background. It was this restored vitality that helped, more than all else, to turn New France into a huge armed camp which hordes of invaders, both white and red, strove vainly to pierce time after time during more than a full century. The first grant of a seigneury in the territory of New France was made in 1623 to Louis Hébert, a Paris apothecary who had come to Quebec with Champlain some years before this date. His land consisted of a tract upon the height above the settlement, and here he had cleared the fields and built a home for himself. By this indenture feudalism cast its first anchor in New France, and Hébert became the colony's first patron of husbandry. Other grants soon followed, particularly during the years when the Company of One Hundred Associates was in control of the land, for, by the terms of its charter, this organization was empowered to grant large tracts as seigneuries and also to issue patents of nobility. It was doubtless assumed by the King that such grants would be made only to persons who would actually emigrate to New France and who would thus help in the upbuilding of the colony, but the Company did not live up to this policy. Instead, it made lavish donations, some of them containing a hundred square miles or more, to directors and friends of the Company in France who neither came to the colony themselves nor sent representatives to undertake the clearing of these large estates. One director took the entire Island of Orleans; others secured generous slices of the best lands on both shores of the St. Lawrence; but not one of them lifted a finger in the way of redeeming these huge concessions from a state of wilderness primeval. The tracts were merely held in the hope that some day they would become valuable. Out of sixty seigneuries which were granted by the Company during the years from 1632 to 1663 not more than a half-dozen grants were made to _bona fide_ colonists. At the latter date the total area of cleared land was scarcely four thousand _arpents_.[1]