What was his astonishment when one of them looked out, and, recognising a fellow countryman, called out and told him that she was Adèle, daughter of his old friend and neighbour, Ranulph. She also had been taken prisoner by these pirates, by whom her father had been killed; she implored him to effect her escape. She handed him her jewels, and with these he bribed their jailers, and he, she, and her nurse Alice, all managed to escape to France. He took her to the Norman “Haye du Puits,” and there, according to the old chronicle, he found his wife, Matilda, and all “in a right prosperous and flourishing condition.” From there Adèle married a Hugh d’Estaile, a young Norman knight, high in the favour of King Henry.
But the spirits of the Cromlech were not yet appeased. Sir Richard could not shake off the brooding care and haunting night-mares which always oppressed him, though he tried to propitiate heaven by building two churches in Normandy, “St. Marie du Parc,” and “St. Michel du Bosq,” “for the deliverance of his soul,” but it was of no avail, and he died, a wretched and broken-down man. Even the nuns in the Convent of the Haye du Puits were so harassed and distressed, that finally they decided to leave it; it is said that one unquiet nun haunts the house to this day. Since then it has passed through many hands, but tradition says that for many years it never brought good fortune to its possessors.
[52] I have heard that the strokes of the hammer were heard in the town when La Roque qui Sonne was broken up. A spot was shewn me some years since as the site where this stone stood. I cannot exactly define the spot, but know it was to the east of the Vale Parochial School.—From John de Garis, Esq., of Les Rouvets.
[53] From the late Mr. Thomas Hocart, of Marshfield, nephew of the Hocart to whom these events occurred.
[54] Editor’s Note.—In Traditions et Superstitions de la Haute Bretagne, Vol. I., p. 32, M. Sebillot says: “En beaucoup d’endroits, on pense qu’il est dangereux de détruire les pierres druidiques, parceque les esprits qui les ont construits ne manqueraient pas de se venger.” See also “Amélie Rosquet, p. 186 of La Normandie Romanesque.”
“Le Tombeau du Grand Sarrazin.”
In the district called Le Tort Càmp, near Paradis, was one of the principal Cromlechs at the Vale, now quarried away, called “L’Autel,” or “Le Tombeau du Grand Sarrazin.” Who “Le Grand Sarrazin” was, it is now impossible to say. He is also called Le Grand Geffroi, and his castle—from whence the name “Le Castel”—stood where the Church of Ste. Marie-du-Castel now stands. He must have been one of those piratical sea kings, who, under the various appellations of Angles, Saxons, Danes, and Northmen or Normans, issued from the countries bordering on the North Sea and the Baltic, and invaded the more favoured regions of Britain and Gaul. The name “Geffroy,” (Gudfrid, or “la paix de Dieu”) seems to confirm this tradition. As to the term “Sarrazin”—Saracen, although originally given to the Mahometans who invaded the southern countries of Europe, it came to be applied indifferently to all marauding bands; and Wace, the poet and historian, a native of Jersey, who lived and wrote in the reign of Henry II., in speaking of the descent of the Northmen on these islands, calls them expressly “La Gent Sarrazine.” Among the many Geoffreys of the North whom history celebrates, there is one, a son of King Regnar, who may be the one celebrated in our local traditions. Charles the Bald yielded to him “a county on the Sequanic shore.”
At that time the coast of Gaul was divided into three sea-borders, namely, the Flemish, the Aquitanian, and the Sequanic, called “Sequanicum littus” by Paul Warnefrid, who places one of these islands near it.
That his castle stood at one time on the site of the present church, is confirmed by the discoveries which have frequently been made in digging graves, of considerable masses of solid masonry, which appear to be the foundations of former outworks of the fortress. It is even possible that some portions of the walls of the church may be the remains of the earlier building. There are also in the neighbourhood “Le Fief Geffroi” and “Le Camp Geffroi.”[55]