Parkinson, Chief Pleas and continuity

Chapter 14 · The Court still calls Anneville

In Guernsey — the Channel island that still governs itself under the Crown — a medieval court still meets, and the lords of the old fiefs still answer when their names are called. The Court of Chief Pleas is an ancient session of the Royal Court, the island's principal court. Today it is largely ceremonial, but the fiefs — pieces of land whose holders owe loyalty and dues to a lord above them — are still called by name, and their Seigneurs, the lords who hold them, still answer. In Guernsey no land is without a lord: every field is held either of the Crown directly or of a fief. When the Court calls Anneville, it calls a relationship with the Crown that began under a Norman duke.

The relationship has a legal shape, and the Fief Le Comte shows it. Le Comte is a quarter of the island which, until the seventeenth century, was held under Anneville, and it was Anneville that answered for it. When George Fashion sold Le Comte to Peter Priaulx on 1 July 1630, the deed reserved the rights and dues owed from ancient times to the chief lord. Later deeds tried to sweep those rights away, including a renunciation taken from Thomas Fashion in 1630 which the appeals of the Andros family to the Privy Council — the sovereign's board of final appeal — said Priaulx had kept 'in the dark for many Years'. But dues are not lordship. A chief tenancy — the holding of land directly under the Crown as chief lord — cannot be sold, and no sale could take effect without the King's congé, his official permission, granted through the King's Receiver, the officer who collected the Crown's share: a thirteenth of the price. Other fiefs once held by the Seigneurs of Anneville, such as Maumarquis and Fantôme, were sold outright and now answer to the Court on their own account; Le Comte was not. In 1815 Berry could still describe the lordship as extending over 'about one-fourth of the Island'.

The duty itself was described in the Andros appeals of the early eighteenth century. The Seigneur must appear three times a year before the Chief Pleas and answer 'by the Title and Name of his Seigneury, viz. Seigneur d'Anneville'. The roll call gives him no power to govern that quarter of the island; it records a precedence the island has never ceased to acknowledge.

In 1964 the institution received a famous recruit. Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the historian who had explained to the world that 'work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion', acquired the fief from Sydney Relph Andros, a member of the family that had held and defended the seigneury. He bought the Manor House separately in 1968 for £8,000, lived there fifteen years, and held the fief until 1987. He treated the seigneury with learned humour — the newspapers enjoyed the story that he thought of paying the old poulage, a due payable in poultry, in real chickens. But he exercised it in earnest: a conveyance records the congé granted by 'Cyril Northcote Parkinson écuyer, Seigneur du dit Fief Anneville', which is not the signature of a man who thought the whole thing a joke.

Since 2022 the Seigneur has been Dr Marco Paret, who rendered homage to King Charles III in 2024 — homage being the formal act of acknowledging the superior lord. He has begun the reconstruction of the seigneury's archive, from the thirteenth century to the present day, and the museum you are visiting is its public expression. The roll call continues, and someone still answers.

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.