Note 89 — Chapter XIV

Two of these were "travailleurs ou volontaires," or day labourers. In his ordinance of November 4, 1662, Maisonneuve showed no favour to these who, for the most part, were rather a charge on the young colony than a benefit. At Three Rivers they early became a considerable nuisance. In 1653, on January 14, Pierre Boucher, the local governor, ordered them to become habitants, or servants of habitants, and on March 2, 1668, he made a new ordinance conceived in these terms: "On the advice which has been given us that there are still labourers who are neither habitants, nor servants of habitants, and who live under the name of 'volontaires' (free workers), we forbid them to take more than twenty sous a day and fifteen livres a month with their food, under penalty of prison and of the cat-o'-nine tails (fouet) at the hands of the hangman, and it is forbidden them to trade any peltry with the savages." At Montreal at this date the labourers were not so troublesome, but out of them later developed many of the restless "coureurs de bois."