Rural life in pre-industrial Quebec was essentially organized around a feudal society. Allan Greer takes a close look at the at society and its economy in three parishes in Lower Richelieu valley - Sorel, St Ours, and St Denis - from 1740 to 1840. He finds a pronounced pattern of household self-sufficiency; as in other peasant societies, the habitants lived mainly from produce grown throught their own efforts on their own lands. How the family-based economy operated and how the household was reproduced over the generations through marriage, birth, inheritance, and colonization, together form a major focus of this study.