05/28/2026
On Not Being Worth a Groat in Old Acadie
The first decade of the 18th century was a violent time in these parts, culminating in 1710 with a successful Anglo-American attack on Port-Royal, the administrative capital of Acadie. In handing over the keys to his fort, the defeated French governor, Subercase, reportedly announced his intention to return for it the following campaign season, but this was not to be. His fort would eventually become known as Fort Anne, and the town of Port-Royal would be renamed Annapolis Royal.
The question of what was to become of the rest of the colony was immediate and pressing. Most of the French inhabitants – the people we now call Acadians – did not live in the town or even along the adjacent river. Decades previously, they had begun moving to Chignecto and to the shores of the Minas Basin, beckoned by tens of thousands of acres of salt marshes, the focus of Acadian dykeland agriculture. (The question of how to manage relations with the region’s Indigenous people was another matter, and one that we’ll put to one side for the moment).
The job of reaching out to the scattered French population devolved to a 26-year-old captain of the Royal Engineers named Paul Mascarene. According to his report of the affair, he was awarded the post not only because he was the “eldest Captain and first in command,” but also because he possessed “the advantage of the French Language.”
Mascarene, as it happened, was of French Protestant, or Huguenot, ancestry. His family had been driven into exile from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and, after having lived for a time with relatives in Geneva, Switzerland, Mascarene had come to England in his early 20s and enlisted in the Royal Army.
The improbable young emissary made his way up the Bay of Fundy and into the Minas Basin aboard the brigantine ‘Betty’, under the command of Nathaniel Blackmore. Blackmore would a few years later pen a very interesting chart of southwest Nova Scotia and Bay of Fundy littoral, which survives in the National Archives in London, but that’s also a matter for another day.
Mascarene and his party of soldiers arrived at “Manis,” or Grand-Pré, around noon on Monday, Nov. 13th, and was “recvd. Upon the shore by abt 150 of the inhabits. with demonstrations of joy.” The authenticity of this joy is, on its surface, highly suspect. It might have been more or a diplomatic theatrical performance designed to mitigate whatever was coming, and something was…
For Mascarene had arrived not only to announce the fall of the French fort well over the horizon, but to receive the submission of the inhabitants up the bay and impose taxes here and now. The sum was to be 6,000 livres. One cannot help seeing it as a mob-style shake-down: Nice village you got here. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it. How the inhabitants responded to these demands, however, is quite interesting.
After Mascarene informed the assembled people about the purpose of his mission, they asked if they might “have the liberty to choose some particulr. numr. of men amongst them who should represent the whole by reason of most of the people living scattered far off and not being able to attend for a considerable time.” This proposal, being nothing more or less than the geographically-imposed logic of representative government, received Macarene’s ‘easy consent’. But note what happens next.
“… accordingly they chose Mr. Peter Melanzon and yees four formerly captains of their militia, with another man for Manis, one for Chicanacto and one for Copequid being eight in all.” The core of the representative leadership, in other words, crossed the boundary separating French and British regimes, seemingly intact.
More interesting still, the representatives quickly expressed great concern over the community’s ability to pay Mascarene’s tax. They “concluded it was an impossible sum” on account of “the third part of the inhabitants not being worth a ‘Groat’ and ‘actually beggars’.” A groat was an old style of coin worth four pennies.
Their poverty, the representatives complained, was “occasioned chiefly by the tyranny of Mr. Subercase, who was wont to oppress them…” It is difficult to know whether this characterization was sincere or pitched to curry favour, but the historical record does give hints of friction between the people of Grand-Pré and the French colonial administration. In 1703, Subercase’s predecessor, Governor de Brouillan, had deployed troops to Grand-Pré to awe the disobedient locals.
In the end, Mellanson and his team bargained Mascarene down to half the demanded sum. They then drew up a census and “taxed them and themselves proportionably in respect both of the sum they were to make up of their respective capacities…”
The fairness with which this burden was apportioned cannot be discerned through the ragged sources, but this dynamic is interesting for a number of reasons, all of which have consequences for how we view the past, and maybe even the present also.
First, these events somewhat contradict the seemingly natural and self-evident categories we often employ to understand the past. The bias of political historical framing, rather than social and cultural historical framing, encourages us to draw a thick line between the French and British periods of administrative control. But we have already seen core elements of Acadian local leadership cross that line essentially intact.
Ethnolinguistic categories are also disrupted here. The red-coated British officer sent to obtain the community’s submission was a fluent Francophone of French origin (his Protestantism was the category more determinative of his political commitments). I might as well have added that Pierre Mellanson, the French community’s big man, was also a complex figure. Many readers will be aware that he was a fluently speaker of at least French and English, whose baptismal record may be found in a church register in central London, no less.
Second, there is the issue of social class. The Longfellow version of Acadian history – which dies hard – would have us believe that pre-Deportation Acadian social life was a kind of Eden. For the poet, it was an egalitarian community in which “the richest was poor, and the poorest lived in abundance.”
Pierre Mellanson, with his groat comment, would appear to disagree. But we don’t have to take him at his word, and good historical inquiry would never do so if other sources were available.
The first French census taken of the immigrant community of Les Mines, for example, dated 1686, counts nine families in the Grand-Pré and Canard districts. Pierre Mellanson and his family are by far the most prosperous, owning nearly 40% of all animals and over 60% of all improved land. Historical records link his commercial production to extended trading networks stretching from New England to as far as Madeira. Mellanson’s wife, Marguerite Mius-d’Entremont, was the daughter of Philippe Mius d’Entremont, the Baron of Pobomcoup, and there are even hints that Mellanson had important links to, and some standing in, the Mi’kmaw community as well. He seems to be a highly atypical French peasant.
There is a tendency to oversimplify the past, and some of this comes naturally. We are, after all, removed from those people and those events by a great span of time. There is nobody who we can sit with and be told what happened. Our textual sources are incomplete and, like Mascarene’s report, can be laden with ambiguity. Finally, the tales we weave from this very patchy evidence cannot help but bear the mark of present-day understandings and pre-occupations. In a largely secular age, for instance, the weight of Mascarene's Protestantism as a determinant of his identity and actions is more difficult to fully understand than it once was.
Even this post is a little like this, unavoidably. In critiquing Longfellow’s fantasy vision of Acadian egalitarianism and folding up those old, rose-tinted glasses, might I be inspired – even subconsciously – by concerns about the rampant growth of economic inequality today?
A final thought: as we press our perception into the past, it is wise to attend to these motives, concerns, and biases, no doubt. We can bundle them all into the category of theory. We are all theorists, as we must all carry assumptions into our inquiry, but there is also evidence. One of the benefits of archaeology in cases like this is that it offers an independent evidentiary avenue into the past. The manner in which this less-travelled route intersects with the historical record, and with cultural memory, is endlessly fascinating. The view, you might say, is often amazing.
Wouldn’t you want to be there if we could find and excavate Pierre Mellanson’s house?
----------
Speaking of theoretical diversions, if you are interested in who is worth a groat today, you might find this discussion interesting:
How billionaires get away with paying less tax than you | The News Agents
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_LzxGg6q_k
Mascarene's report was reprinted in the Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, Vol. 4, in 1884 (it starts on p. 69).
For more on Pierre Mellanson, I’d recommend Margaret C. Melanson’s book, “The Melanson Story: Acadian Family, Acadian Times” (2003), which is packed with primary source material.
This portrait is of Paul Mascarene himself, painted by John Smibert in 1729, and it is held today in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: https://collections.lacma.org/object/31950
Mascarene is also a fascinating historical figure and one who has not received the attention he deserves. Dr. Barry Moody wrote his PhD dissertation on Mascarene, entitled “A Just and Disinterested Man: The Nova Scotia Career of Paul Mascarene” (1976).
06/14/2026
06/11/2026
06/07/2026
06/05/2026
06/03/2026
06/02/2026
05/28/2026
05/28/2026
05/20/2026
05/19/2026