260 SOCIAL LIFE IN GUERNSEY. 



Cauches, her mother, and Guillemine Gruilbert, her sister, off 

 to prison in Castle Cornet while the case was being investi- 

 gated. 



The personalities of these women are obscured by the 

 immemorial local practice of invariably speaking of married 

 women by their maiden names. Catherine Cauches, then a 

 widow, was a daughter of Pierre Cauches, of St. Martin's ; a 

 relative of hers, Anthony Cauches, had been Rector of 

 St. Anne's, Alderney, and was only succeeded by Pierre 

 Herivel in 1550 ; and she was undoubtedly one of the family 

 after whom the Rue Cauches — running from the bottom of 

 the Merriennes Hill to the Forest Road — was called. She 

 had evidently been twice married, once to a man called 

 Gruilbert, father of Guillemine Guilbert, and again to one of 

 the family of Massey, who at that time held much land in 

 St. Saviour's parish. His daughter, Perotine Massey, was 

 herself a married woman, for in the previous reign she had 

 married one David Jores, a Norman Protestant schoolmaster 

 and refugee, at the Castel Church, the ceremony having been 

 performed by Monsieur Noel Regnet, one of the French 

 pastors who had supplanted the original Catholic priests in 

 the Guernsey Churches, and whom we have seen was banished 

 for disloyalty in 1554. At the time of the trial Jores was in 

 London ; probably he had fled the island owing to the increase 

 of the severity of our laws both against aliens and against 

 heretics. 



The three women having been cast into prison were 

 brought before an " enqueste " on the oth June, 1556, and by 

 the testimony of the neighbours before the Crown Officers, it 

 appeared that they had always lived honest, respectable lives, 

 and were deemed incapable of theft. This record of the 

 neighbours' verdict is a valuable proof that the old " enqueste " 

 du pays " was still in use in the island in criminal cases. It 

 was a survival of the Norman inquest of peers (i.e., equals), a 

 jury supposed to have a knowledge of the facts of the case, 

 and was held informally before the Crown Officers or the 

 Justices of Assize, and only the " raport " of the evidence 

 was produced at the regular trial before the Bailiff and Jurats. 



On July 1st, 1556, the other prisoner, Vincente Gosset, 

 was proved guilty of larceny and condemned, as the barbarous 

 custom then was, to be whipped ail round the town and at the 

 carrefours, which were the " Grand Carrefour " at the junction 

 of High Street, Smith Street and the Pollet, and the " Petit 

 Carrefour" at the junction of Mill Street, Fountain Street, 

 and the Bordage. After this the unfortunate woman was 



