Anneville on European maps

Chapter 12 · A fief counted field by field

Before Guernsey — a Crown island in the Channel with Norman customs — appeared on any map, its fiefs were written down as lists. A fief, in this setting, was a lordship: an area of land whose tenants owed the lord yearly dues in wheat, hens or money. The list was called a perchage, a walk over the ground plot by plot, naming each field, its tenant and what he paid. The book that held it, the Livre de Perchage, was the fief's memory. When the book was lost, the fief forgot what it owned.

The book for the Villain Fief d'Anneville survives in the Andros papers at the Priaulx Library, a library in St Peter Port, Guernsey, founded on a local collection of island records and books. 'Villain' here is an old legal word for the fief's ordinary rent-paying land, not an insult. The book was made in 1594, parcel by parcel, tenant by tenant, each entry ending with the rente, the yearly rent due. On 21 June 1662 the Seigneur d'Anneville, the lord of the fief, summoned the douzeniers, the elected men of the parish, to make the perchage again. The book of 1663 followed, with extracts that run on to 1829.

William Berry, an English writer compiling his History of the Island of Guernsey in 1815, read these books and saw a living institution. The manor of Anneville, he wrote, consists of seventeen bouvees of land — a bouvee being an old measure of area — about three hundred and eighty-four Guernsey vergees, a vergee being a local land measure of roughly two-fifths of an English acre, with perches as smaller units still. The land was divided among twenty-seven tenants. Around it lay its dependencies: Fauville, two hundred and sixty-three vergees and five perches among eleven tenants; the little fief Bouilleuze, twenty-three vergees between two tenants; and La Rozière, of some two hundred and fifty vergees, whose exact extent nobody knew, for want of a livre percharge.

Once a year the fief came together. The lord held a court yearly at Michaelmas, the autumn church festival at the end of September, with its usual officers — the presiding seneschal, the sitting vavasors, the recording clerk and the provost who carried out orders. Every tenant had to appear and answer to his name as the clerk called it over. Absence cost five sols tournois, French coins of small value, the first and second time; the third time the tenant's lands were seized for the lord and kept for a year. Each new tenant was enrolled with his land, for a fine of five sols, be the land great or small.

Berry also set down what the land paid. For Anneville alone: twenty-seven quarters of wheat, small measure — a quarter being a grain measure, and 'small measure' a local, smaller standard of it — and the twelfth sheaf of every kind of grain grown on the manor, called champart; and from every house on the manor a couple of fowls, the poulage. The small fief of Croûte Bouilleuze owed twenty-four sols tournois, four loaves of bread, four capons, and eighty eggs. These were not debts of the fief; they were its income, paid yearly by those who held its land. In 1787 the Duke of Richmond, Master-General of the Ordnance, the office in charge of the army's artillery and surveying, mapped the island with the instruments of a new age, and the modern Cadastre — the official register and map of every holding — came after him. The maps show where a field lies; the old books show who held it and what he gave. Where the two disagree, this room shows both.

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.