Additional information and discussions not included in the published book

Police regulations in towns and villages (supplements page 32)

The new attitude towards morality is evident in some of the rules and regulations for the towns and villages in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Thus, 1804 regulations for Boucherville reproduced the clause of the 1803 Montreal regulations concerning amusements on Sundays; and the 1806 regulations for Saint-Denis went even further, imposing fines not only on those who kept billiard tables and so on and allowed play on them on Sunday, but also on those who took part in such play, and included a clause regulating behaviour in the parish church, targeting "tous ceux qui au mépris du bon ordre et du culte divin, sortiront de l'église pendant les offices sans aucune nécessité, mais pour visiter leurs chevaux ou voitures ou se promener, ou qui se tiendront pendant les offices divins du Dimanche hors de l'église … et toute personne qui se tiendra indécemment dans l'église ou qui y fera quellequ'insulte, ou y entrera yvre".

[QSR 30/4/1804 and 23/10/1806]

Formal requirements for holding Quarter Sessions (supplements page 35)

Legislative and other requirements as to where and when Quarter Sessions were to be held, and by how many justices, were increasingly formalized. Initially, the justices were simply permitted to hold Quarter Sessions every three months; from 1777, the justices were required to hold them in Quebec City and Montreal on the second Tuesday of every January, April, July, and October; finally, from 1794, the Quarter Sessions were to be held in the three main towns from January 10 to 19, April 21 to 30, July 10 through 19, and October 21 through 30. As for the number of justices, in eighteenth-century England, only two justices were needed to hold Quarter Sessions, although usually there were far more in attendance; in some English colonies in North America, however, the number of justices required to hold Quarter Sessions or their equivalents was raised to three. Up until 1794, the situation in Quebec and Lower Canada was unclear, with legislation and commissions varying between two and three justices; from 1794, the number of justices required to hold Quarter Sessions was explicitly set at three. The reasons for this change are unclear, in Quebec as elsewhere; perhaps colonial authorities believed that lower-status colonial justices needed more assistance to avoid error.

[4 George III, "An Ordinance for regulating and establishing the Courts of Judicature" (1764); 17 George III c.5 (1777); 34 George III c.6 (1794); general peace commissions 24/8/1764, 14/8/1776, 18/4/1785, 24/7/1788 and 2/4/1794, in LAC RG68 (Commissions and Letters Patent), Quebec vol. 1-3 and Lower Canada vol. 1. On England and British America in the eighteenth century, Burn, The Justice of the Peace IV: 196; Goebel and Naughton, Law Enforcement: 54-55; Spindel, Crime and Society in North Carolina: 26; Oxner, "The Evolution of the Lower Court of Nova Scotia": 61-66.]

Custos rotulorum (supplements page 41)

The largely ceremonial position of custos rotulorum, keeper of the rolls, which in England was conferred on a senior justice in each county as nominal representative of the central administration, never took hold in Quebec and Lower Canada. Murray had initially intended to institute the position, naming a custos in each district in the peace commissions of 1764 and 1765; the Montreal custos was even provided a house to live in. However, in Montreal at least, the custos position rapidly fell into disuse. The first custos, Captain John Fraser, refused to act as a justice after 1764, following a bitter dispute with the other justices over the billeting of soldiers; and the custos named for Montreal in the 1765 peace commissions, Benjamin Price, was mainly resident in Quebec City. Whether the position disappeared as rapidly in Quebec City is unknown, though the custos there, Samuel Gridley, did name the clerk of the peace in 1765; at any rate, from the next peace commission in 1776, no further custos were named in the colony. A half-century later, Dalhousie envisaged reviving the position for his proposed county Quarter Sessions, but nothing came of it.

[LAC RG1 E1, Executive Council minutes, 25/9/1764; notice from Gridley, c.1/1765, C.O. 42 vol. 2-2; Murray to Lords of Trade, 3/3/1765, C.O. 42 vol. 2 f. 132-194; LAC RG68 (Commissions and Letters Patent) Quebec vol. 1: 13-17 (24/8/1764), 53-57 (11/1/1765), and 84-87 (23/5/1765) and vol. 2: 36-39 (14/8/1776); Hilda Neatby, "Benjamin Price", DCB III; Dalhousie to Bathurst, 27/5/1827, C.O. 42 vol. 212.]

Stipendiary magistrates and police offices outside of the three main urban centres (supplements page 46)

The colonial administration initially made clear its intention to limit the system of stipendiary magistrates and police offices to the three main urban centres. Already in 1810, Philip Byrne and John Lane, two justices from the small town of Saint-Jean, south of Montreal, had asked to be appointed salaried magistrates there, but had been rebuffed. Byrne persisted, asking again in 1810, in 1811 and in 1815 that a subsidiary Police Office be established with himself as its head, but was consistently unsuccessful, as was another Saint-Jean justice, Thomas McVey. However, by the mid-1820s, the administration began to envisage extending the system to the two smaller districts of the colony, Gaspé and Saint-Francis. In the Gaspé, local justices of the peace had long refused to hold Quarter Sessions since they lacked professional assistance. Already in 1821, a report to the House of Assembly recommended that the resident Provincial Judge of the Gaspé assist the justices. As late as 1822, Dalhousie was still resisting appointing a permanent chairman of the Quarter Sessions there, but by 1824, complaints from the district and recommendations from other magistrates seem to have changed his mind. Hence, from 1824 to 1827, Robert Christie, the future chairman of the Quebec Quarter Sessions, then still a Quebec City lawyer, was paid to travel to Gaspé to preside in the Quarter Sessions. Then, in late 1827, James Crawford, a Gaspé justice of the peace, was appointed chairman of the Quarter Sessions at a salary of £250 per year. As chairman, Crawford was expected to travel (largely by boat) to each of the five General Sessions and four Special Sessions held yearly in the different settlements of the district. In the Saint Francis district, though there was no paid chairman of the Sessions, the professional Provincial judge, John Fletcher, previously the chairman of the Quarter Sessions at Quebec, took on the role of presiding in the General Sessions at the request of the justices; this included charging the grand jury and delivering the closing statement, corresponding with the central administration, and so on. Similarly, with regards to police offices, the expenditure estimates for 1825 proposed £100 Sterling each for "police purposes" in the Gaspé and at Sherbrooke, which the Assembly reduced to £50 each but voted nonetheless in that and the following years. In 1829, the Assembly's vote even made explicit reference to "Police Offices" in the two smaller districts. Whether these were ever actually set up on the ground remains to be determined.

[On Byrne, Lane and McVey: Ryland to Lane and Byrne, 3/5/1810, LAC RG7 G15C vol. 15: 220; Byrne to Ryland, 27/6/1810, LAC RG4 A1 vol. 109: 34806-09; Foy to Byrne, 3/9/1810, LAC RG7 G15C vol. 15: 279; Byrne to Foy, 30/3/1811, LAC RG4 A1 vol. 112: 35779-80; Brenton to Byrne, 21/11/1811, LAC RG7 G15C vol. 18: 29; Cochran to Byrne and to McVey, 2/3/1815, LAC RG7 G15C vol. 18: 532-533. On the Gaspé: JHALC 30 (1820-1821) Appendix X, 35(1826) Appendix F #17 and #18, 36(1827) Appendix H #18 and 38(1828-1829) Appendix Y #10; Cochran to Munro, 29/10/1822, LAC RG7 G15C vol. 31: 160; Taschereau to Ready, 18/2/1822, LAC RG4 A1 vol. 206; Gaspé residents petition to Dalhousie, 10/8/1823, LAC RG4 A1 vol. 220; Dalhousie to Murray, 6/9/1828, C.O. 42 vol. 216; Crawford to Yorke, 26/7/1829, LAC RG4 A1 vol. 294; Kempt to Murray, 28/4/1830, C.O. 42 vol. 229 f. 176-186. On Saint Francis: Stanstead British Colonist 25/2/1825; Fletcher to Montizambert, 21/10/1825, LAC RG4 B20 vol. 10: 3593-96; Fletcher to Yorke, 20/3/1829, LAC RG4 A1 vol. 282; also testimony of Viger, Report from the Select Committee on the Civil Government of Canada (Quebec, 1829): 139. On the police offices in Gaspé and Sherbrooke: [JHALC 34 (1825): 345 and Appendix R, and 38 (1828-1829): 561 and Appendix Z; Kempt to Murray, 23/3/1829, in Communications between the Colonial Office and the Governors of Upper and Lower Canada, on the Subject of the Civil Government of Canada (London, 1830): 80.]

Birthplace of justices named in the district of Montreal (supplements page 87)

This excludes ex officio justices and justices whose commissions were immediately abrogated. Prosopographical data is incomplete for justices appointed after 1830.

Birthplace First named
1764-1814 1815-1830
Unknown 59 (21%) 68 (26%)
Quebec 114 (41%) 102 (39%)
Elsewhere in post-Revolutionary BNA 1 (<1%) 3 (1%)
Great Britain 49 (18%) 47 (18%)
Elsewhere in Europe 15 (5%) 4 (2%)
American colonies or United States 41 (15%) 38 (15%)
Total 279 262

 

Justices' compliance with the formal requirements for holding Quarter Sessions (supplements page 132)

In the Montreal Quarter Sessions, apart from brief periods, the justices conformed almost exactly to their legal obligations as to the sitting of the court, although they interpreted the various laws as loosely as possible. From January 1765 through January 1770, the justices in Montreal held Quarter Sessions consistently every January, April, July, and October apart from one (January 1768), although sometimes for only a day. Following the alienation of the British justices after the revocation of their civil powers in February 1770, there were no Quarter Sessions until September 1771, though given the looseness of the ordinance this was only debatably illegal. From September 1771 until the province's entire administrative structure was abolished by the Quebec Act in May 1775, the justices once again held Quarter Sessions four times a year, although sometimes at different months, with the last being in April 1775. From May 1775 to August 1776, when there were no justices, there were of course no Quarter Sessions; but soon after Carleton issued the new peace commission in 1776, the justices were once again holding Quarter Sessions, from October 1776 at least. From July 1777 through October 1794, the justices again complied scrupulously with the law, opening Quarter Sessions on the specified days in January, April, July, and October; however, since they could end the sessions whenever they pleased, the court sometimes sat for as few as two days, it almost never sat on Fridays, perhaps because this was Montreal's market day, and October sessions were almost invariably opened as required by law but then immediately adjourning to mid-November. This was possibly an attempt to avoid having both the justices and grand jury members tied up in court during shipping season, or perhaps it was related to the district's agricultural schedule: in 1828, a King's Bench grand jury complained that the terms of the Quarter Sessions were especially inconvenient to those engaged in agriculture, since the April term came during sowing, that in July during haying, and that in October during fall plowing. Finally, the justices initially paid little heed to the fixed terms specified by the act of 1794, missing nineteen of the 67 days they were supposed to sit in 1795 and 1796; but from 1797 through 1830, they sat on almost every day, and even when there was no business before the court, they met to fulfil the statutory obligations, only to adjourn immediately. Similarly, despite the legislative confusion surrounding the number of justices required to hold Quarter Sessions, the Montreal justices apparently followed the law, although again interpreting it loosely. Thus, the justices before 1775 followed their commissions and English precedent rather than Murray's ordinance, since there were only two justices present on ten of the 48 Quarter Sessions days where the names of the justices present are known. After 1776, they continued this practice, as allowed by their commissions; however, while the 1785 commission was in effect, they conformed to its requirement of three justices, and on four of the five occasions where there were only two justices present the court immediately adjourned, and on the fifth, the two justices present dealt only with administrative business that was entirely within their competence. Finally, from 1794 the justices also conformed closely to the act requiring three of them to hold the Quarter Sessions, although on days where the court opened and adjourned immediately for lack of business, there were sometimes only two justices present.

Recors in the countryside (supplements page 179)

In many cases individuals appointed to serve warrants in the countryside for more serious offences charged fees for recors (assistants). It is impossible to say very much about these assistants, since in most case the principal officer simply noted them as "recors" rather than giving their name. In some cases, they were local inhabitants: thus, for example, in 1820 John Bates, a Chatham carpenter, accused George Bradford, a Chatham farmer, of hitting him on the head with a club while Bates was assisting Adam Wiley, a Montreal police constable, in arresting Bradford. In other cases, they were professional justice officers: thus, Alexander Darville, a Chambly bailiff who performed several arrests in the 1820s, also acted on one occasion as assistant to Ulrich Clure, another Chambly bailiff. [QSD 9/6/1820; RG1 E15A vol. 50 file "Sheriff 1824"]