Lost history of the Channel Islands republished

Saturday 21 October 2023

A book described as “the first true history of the Channel Islands in the modern sense of the word” has been published by the Société Jersiaise after lying undiscovered for three centuries in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Jean Poingdestre’s 'Le Premier Livre de L’Histoire des Isles' has now appeared for the first time in a parallel French and English text, the translation undertaken by former president of the Société Jersiaise, Neil Molyneux.

Le Premier Livre’s author – a supporter of the Royalist cause during the English Civil War – was a Jerseyman who graduated from Cambridge but was subsequently made a fellow of Exeter College Oxford in 1636.

As the Civil War progressed, he took refuge in his native island, spending the years of the Republic in his St Helier home, where Mr Molyneux believes he wrote Le Premier Livre, some of which Poingdestre later used in another of his works, Caesarea.

In his introduction to the new publication, Mr Molyneux sets out the circumstances of the rediscovery of the earlier work, which owes much to the efforts of the Société’s former librarian Bronwyn Matthews, herself involved in an important translation project for the organisation.

It was while she was inspecting copies of the manuscript of Les Chroniques de Jersey that she came across the only version held outside the Channel Islands.

Pictured: The book is described as “the first true history of the Channel Islands in the modern sense of the word”.

Early in 2020, when a digitised version of this manuscript was sent to the Société, it became evident that there was something unusual about it, as Mr Molyneux explained: “It was found that the digitiser at the Bodleian, not knowing where the Chroniques ended in the volume, had digitised a number of extra folios at the end, which contained a variety of short documents, interesting in themselves...”

Among them was one which appeared to Mr Molyneux “both unfamiliar and yet also curiously familiar too”, the lost text of Le Premier Livre. The story Mr Molyneux tells of its journey to the Oxford library is no less engrossing because it casts the Reverend Philippe Falle, a close neighbour of Poingdestre’s family and founder of Jersey’s first public library in Library Place, in a not altogether favourable light.

Falle used some of his predecessor’s material passed off as his own and then might have destroyed the original, believing it to be the only copy, Mr Molyneux speculates, offering the not uncharitable comment in the circumstances.

“Plagiarism was probably taken less seriously in the early-eighteenth century,” he said, adding that it was nevertheless surprising to find a clergyman conspiring to boost his reputation by “passing off as theirs the translated text of another”.

It appears, however, that another copy belonging to Daniel Messervy was ultimately to find its way into the Bodleian Library, giving the Société Jersiaise the opportunity to publish the lost history of the Channel Islands from the end of the Roman administration in Gaul to the beginnings of Norman rule.

As its name implies, it was intended to be the first volume of a larger work, but Le Premier Livre is all that remains. Neil Molyneux’s translation is published in paperback by the Société Jersiaise, priced £15.

Pictured top: Former president of the Société Jersiaise Neil Molyneux with a copy of another book he translated – Extente de L’Ile De Jersey 1331.