Andros, Priaulx and Sausmarez

Chapter 8 · What the deed of 1630 kept back

In 1630 the lordship of Anneville was split in two, and the split was made in words that lawyers would still be reading three centuries later. A lordship of this kind was a bundle of rights over land and tenants, held from a higher lord, and a bundle can be untied. On 1 July 1630 George Fashion, then lord of Anneville, sold Le Comte — the great quarter of Guernsey, an island in the English Channel off Normandy belonging to the Crown — to Pierre Priaulx, a local merchant, for 1,900 écus, écus being French gold coins and a very large sum for an island purchase. Fashion kept Anneville for himself. In the deed he reserved the rights and dues owed from ancient times to the chief lord. By selling Le Comte while holding back its chief-lord rights, Fashion declared, in the plainest legal language of his day, that those rights existed and that they belonged to Anneville.

Le Comte was no small prize, and its new owners did not enjoy bowing to a neighbour. The deed itself called Le Comte a member of the Seigneury of Anneville, for which no homage nor relief was due to the King. Homage was the formal act by which a holder acknowledged his superior; relief was a payment made when a fief passed to an heir. A fief that owed the King nothing directly must owe its homage to somebody, and there was only one candidate. The Priaulx family spent the next century trying to loosen that bond. In 1677 Peter Priaulx himself signed Articles naming the disputed fiefs as members dependent on the manor of Anneville.

The quarrel then moved to the courts. In 1712 the Royal Court, Guernsey's own court of justice, found that a Priaulx deed of 1672 was colourable — a deed dressed up to look like something it was not. On 14 December 1724 the Royal Court upheld that deed, and Charles Andros, who then held Anneville, appealed to the Privy Council, the King's council in London and the last court of appeal for the islands. His appeal quoted the deed of 1630, including a receipt of 1639 recording the purchase of Le Comte and its being granted in fee — that is, handed over as a fief, to be held by its new owner on the usual feudal terms.

The quarrel was never about which fief was greater; the deed of 1630 had settled that on the day it was signed. It was about how far the greater fief's rights reached over the smaller ones around it. In 2019 the Royal Court observed that Anneville had been regarded as more important than Le Comte, though smaller in extent. The most dangerous witness against a man, in litigation as elsewhere, is his own deed.

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.