The obligations imposed upon the seigneurs were not burdensome. No initial payment was asked, and there were no annual rentals to be paid to the Crown. Each seigneur had to render the ceremony of fealty and homage to the royal representative at Quebec. Each was liable for military service, although that obligation was not written into the grant. When a seigneury changed owners otherwise than by inheritance in direct succession, a payment known as the _quint_ (being, as the name connotes, one-fifth of the reported value) became payable to the royal treasury, but this was rarely collected. The most important obligation imposed upon the Canadian seigneur, and one which did not exist at all in France, was that of getting settlers established upon his lands. This obligation the authorities insisted upon above all others. The Canadian seigneur was expected to live on his domain, to gather dependents around him, to build a mill for grinding their grain, to have them level the forest, clear the fields, and make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. In other words, the Canadian seigneur was to be a royal immigration and land agent combined. He was not given his generous landed patrimony in order that he should sit idly by and wait for the unearned increment to come. Many of the seigneurs fulfilled this trust to the letter. Robert Giffard, who received the seigneury of Beauport just below Quebec, was one of these; Charles Le Moyne, Sieur de Longueuil, was another. Both brought many settlers from France and saw them safely through the years of pioneering. Others, however, did no more than flock to Quebec when ships were expected, like so many real estate agents explaining to the new arrivals what they had to offer in the way of lands fertile and well situated. Still others did not even do so much, but merely put forth one excuse after another to explain why their tracts remained without settlements at all. From time to time the authorities prodded these seigneurial drones and threatened them with the forfeiture of their estates; but some of the laggards had friends among the members of the Sovereign Council or possessed other means of warding off action, so that final decrees of forefeiture were rarely issued. Occasionally there were seigneurs whose estates were so favorably situated that they could exact a bonus from intending settlers, but the King very soon put a stop to this practice. By the Arrêts of Marly in 1711 he decreed that no bonus or _prix d'entrée_ should be exacted by any seigneur, but that every settler was to have land for the asking and at the rate of the annual dues customary in the neighborhood.