The Court and Jurisdiction of Anneville

The Court and Jurisdiction of Anneville: from 1682 to today, under one arch

Monday 13 October 1913, near the Hautes Capelles. Under the round Norman arch of what had once been the manor house of the lords of Anneville, seven men sit on a bench. One of them opens a book and begins to call names. Those present answer. A photographer from The Star is there, and his picture hangs in this room. The men are doing what was done on the same spot in 1682.

A feudal court is the yearly assembly of a fief. Everyone who holds land of the Seigneur must appear, answer to his name, declare what he holds and pay what he owes. The court also swears in its own officers and settles questions between the lordship and its tenants. At Anneville its full name stands at the head of the proceedings of 22 October 1956: "Cour et Juridiction du Fief d'Anneville". In these papers the jurisdiction is the land and the people who answer to that court: the Fief d'Anneville and, with it, the Fief de Fauville, each with its own Prévôt.

The court has a fixed place and a fixed season. A history of the fief kept in the same file quotes a lease of 1755: the tenant of the old house accepts that "la Cour du fief d'Anneville se tiendra de droit comme d'ancienneté dans la vieille maison du présent bail", and must provide a bench for it. The same history describes the spot. The old house had become a stable, but "the old doorway, so like the west door of the Vale Church, of which it may be contemporary, still remains". The Vale Church, the old priory church of the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel, goes back to the Norman centuries. "In the porch of this house the Court of Anneville sits as it has done from time immemorial." The caption in The Star of 1913 says it in a few words: the roll was called with the court "stationed inside the Arch". A round Norman arch, and in front of it a court of the Norman kind: at Anneville stone and custom meet in one place. The season is autumn. The "Chefs Plaids Capitaux", the chief sittings, are held after Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael on 29 September. The dates in this room are 9 October 1820, 13 October 1913, 19 October 1953, 22 October 1956 and October 1982.

Five offices make the court. The Sénéchal presides and judges. Two Vavasseurs sit beside him as judges; when the Sénéchal is absent the first of them takes the chair, as Jean Mahy did in 1820, "premier Juge en séance". The Greffier keeps the register, says the prayer and administers the oaths. The Prévôts summon and collect, and one of them is also Grenetier, keeper of the grain rents. A Sergent attends. The handwritten lists in this room name the holders of these offices from 1670 to 1967, and they show a career: the same man is Greffier in 1848, Vavasseur in 1868 and Sénéchal in 1882.

The sitting follows an order that the papers of 1953, 1956 and 1982 repeat almost word for word. The Sénéchal asks the Prévôt whether the Seigneur will attend. In 1956 the answer was: "Pas aujourd'hui, Mons. le Lieutenant Sénéchal." The Greffier says the customary prayer and calls the roll. New officers take their oath, which ends "Ainsi Dieu vous soit en aide! Dieu sauve la Reine!" Then come the aveux, the declarations by which tenants acknowledge what they hold, the fines, and whatever the court must decide. In 1820 it decided that a piece of furze land called "le bas du mur" would no longer pay champart, the share of the crop due to the Seigneur, after proof of forty years' enjoyment. In 1913 there was "no other business except to collect fivepence from those who had purchased property on the fief during the year". A blessing closes the sitting, and the court goes to dinner.

The Seigneur rarely sat. When Amias Charles Andros presided in 1882, the new Sénéchal called his presence "a very rare occurrence". That day the Seigneur read aloud, from the register kept in his family, the entry of two centuries before: "Les chefs plais capitos de la Cour et Seigneurie d'Anneville tenus après le jour St. Michel, l'an 1682, par devant M. George Andros, seneschal". The register, he said, ran on year after year to 1827.

In 1953 the court set out to show the island what it was. On 19 October, in the doorway of the stable that stands where the manor stood, the Sénéchal H. J. Blampied opened the sitting, and Advocate W. H. Langlois was sworn in as Lieutenant-Sénéchal, escorted by a Prévôt with a drawn sword-stick. Then tenants in smocks and top hats came to the bar of the court and paid their dues in kind: fowls, eggs, potatoes, a coil of rope. One was fined for bringing scraggy birds. The broad beans were measured in the old wooden measures. The Guernsey Evening Press reported it the next day under the headline "Effort to keep Island tradition alive".

The court did not end with the Andros family. The last papers in the file are of October 1982. They are headed "Cour et Jurisdiction du Fief d'Anneville" and "Acte à la Cour des Fiefs d'Anneville et de Fauville", and the Seigneur they name is Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the historian of Room 14. At those Chefs Plaids a new Greffier, John Auguste Le Flem, took the oath. The court of 1682 was still sitting three hundred years later. A court of this kind belongs to its fief and passes with it.

The court has not ended. Today the Cour d'Anneville works through two offices. The Greffe, the court's registry, keeps its registers and archives and maintains this museum (greffier@lordofanneville.com). The Office du Sénéchal, named after the steward who once presided over the sittings, leads the court's projects and relations. Three decrees of 2026 set how the court registers, writes and communicates its letters. In 2026 the Cour wrote to the States of Guernsey, to the Région Normandie, to the departmental archives of the Manche and to the Constables of St Sampson, and the Région Normandie replied that it was ready to list this museum among the resources of MILLENIUM 2027, the European Year of the Normans. The round arch under which the court once called its roll is still its emblem: it heads the letters the Cour sends today.

Every sheet of the file is shown below, with a note that says what it is. The originals are at the Island Archives of Guernsey under the reference AQ 1324/03, "Fiefs d'Anneville & Fauville". Read together, they are the working memory of the court: how it is called, who sits, what is said, and in what order.