Anneville in the press and public memory

Chapter 11 · The third bottle

In the nineteenth century Guernsey — a small island that had kept its Norman law — learned to print its own past, and the Seigneur of Anneville became a subject for writers. Newspapers and a reading public had arrived, and a man who had once simply held a court now found himself described in books. The finest portrait came from the pen of Samuel Elliott Hoskins, a physician and antiquary — a student of old records — writing of the years after the French attack on Jersey, a neighbouring Channel Island, in 1781.

Hoskins describes a young officer's uncle, whom he calls only "Monsieur d'Anneville": a bachelor who had studied at an English university, lived in Paris, learned "the graceful paces of the minuet de la cour", and was "considered une fine lame" — a fine blade — with the sword. Then he came home to "his patrimonial estates", the lands inherited from his fathers. They formed a fief: an inherited estate whose tenants paid him rents, and for which he in turn owed loyalty to the Crown. The old rent book, the livre d'Estente, said plainly that the holder "doit foy et hommage a nostre sire le Roy" — owes faith and homage to our lord the King, when the King shall come to the island.

The position, Hoskins writes, "enabled him to act the chieftain at stated seasons". At his feudal court he presided, attended by his senechal, his prevot, his bordiers and his grangier — the officers and tenants who carried on the business of the fief — to receive rents paid in wheat and settle his tenants' differences, to their admiration. He was also a Jurat of the Royal Court, one of the island's judges, and in due course colonel of a militia regiment, the local force of citizen soldiers. A bachelor with a court, a bench and a regiment had little reason to feel modest.

At his table, after the health of the King had been drunk, it was his custom to toast his native island and his Norman ancestors. "The Normans, our progenitors, have a more legitimate right to command in England, than the English to rule in Normandy." The claim was not his own invention: Hoskins traced it to a manuscript by Laurent Carey, a Jurat of the Royal Court. Still, the Seigneur pressed it with such reasoning and "such excellent wine, that at the end of his discourse and the third bottle, it was difficult to refuse assent".

Smaller traces of the same world survive. In 1761, for a house at 38 High Street in St Peter Port, Guernsey's chief town, there is a record of "the stones which had been prepared by Mr Andros — a member of the family that held the fief — for rebuilding his house at Anneville" being purchased. A manor may be carried into town, stone by stone, but the stones remember where they were cut.

About these lines: a narrative reconstruction written in the manner of C. Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993), Seigneur of the Fief d'Anneville from 1964 to 1987, historian, and author of the novels of Richard Delancey, a Guernsey sailor. Parkinson did not write them and they are not a historical source. They invent no characters and no speeches: every fact comes from the room above, and words in quotation marks are quoted from the documents cited there.