Elizabeth Le Cocq of Alderney, paillarde, 1736
Elizabeth refused to appear before the Ecclesiastical Court to admit 'paillardise'—licentiousness—having given birth to an illegitimate child. From Peter Mollet's Notebook in the Library.
Religion
Lost things: Old Red House, St Saviour's, 1891
Letters from the Star, April 1891. Blondel and Andros, Brouard, Dumont, and Angel, at St Apolline. St Apolline's Chapel is first mentioned as belonging to Nicolas Henry in 1394; it was then called Notre Dame de la Perelle. The woodcut shows the chapel in use as a barn, from Bellamy's Pictorial Guide of 1843, in the Library collection.
French emigres buried in St Peter Port, 1796
C. Hettier, Les Relations de la Normandie et de la Bretagne avec les Iles de la Manche pendant l'émigration, 1885.
Lines, on the lamented death of Captain Dobree, R N
'Who lost his life in a humane attempt to save the lives of shipwrecked seamen on the coast of this island.' From L'Independance, March 14th, 1818; followed by excerpts from the sermon given at the Castel church on 15th March 1818 by Nicolas' young contemporary, the Reverend William Guille. The watercolour of the church is dated 1804 and is signed JM (for Dr John MacCulloch).
The Yellow Dress
A surprising dark side to life at the Town Hospital is hinted at in this Royal Court case. Unmarried local girls who became pregnant and who sought help at the Hospital, although treated kindly, were nevertheless put under a great deal of pressure to disclose the name of the father, so that he would be responsible for the child's maintenance and not the parish, but the threat extended to this girl is another thing entirely and seems to have terrified her. It should be noted that the Star newspaper chose not to mention the dress and represented the trial somewhat differently.
List of residents of Alderney who sheltered French priests 1792-3
The names of the Alderney people have been extracted and normalised.
A variety of vicars
A list of the incumbents of Alderney covered in Ernest Bigg's chapter of the same name in An Alderney Scrapbook, pp. 118 ff., published by the Alderney Society in 1972, and snippets about other ministers of the island.
Rene Le Porc de la Porte de Vezins, 1590
A well-known tale of intrigue in Renaissance Brittany, in one of its earliest and near-contemporary versions, from The Monthly Illustrated Journal (Guernsey Magazine), February, 1873. The Editor describes this as 'a free translation of an interesting account of a disputed identification case, which occurred in the latter part of the 16th century, and in which Guernsey figures; it is taken from a work entitled La Vie de François, Seigneur de la Nouë, kindly lent to us by Mr Thomas Lenfestey, des Fontaines, for the purpose.' The illustration below is a detail from Sydney's Arcadia, published by Ponsonby in 1589, in the Library collection; the portrait above is of François de la Nouë, dit Bras-de-fer, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Acts of the Ecclesiastical Court: II
List of names taken from Edith Carey's full-text extracts of the Acts of the Ecclesiastical Court, Library 41B. 17/18th century. II: Marriages annulled; Disputed Ownership of Pews; Abjurations of Rome; and Forbidding the Banns.
Acts of the Ecclesiastical Court: I
List of names taken from Edith Carey's full-text extracts of the Acts of the Ecclesiastical Court, Library 41B. 17/18th centuries. I: Those charged with Breaking engagements; Paillardize; Incontinence: Seduction under promise of marriage; and Cohabitation.