The Original Manor House
The first mention of the de Sausmarez family in Guernsey is at the consecration of the Vale church in 1115 followed by a letter dated 1254 in which Prince Edward, Lord of the Isles, afterwards King Edward I, ordered an enquiry into the rights of the Abbot and Monks of St. Michel to "wreck" in the Islands of Guernsey and Jersey. The enquiry was duly held before "Dominus Henry le Canelu, Dominus Gulielmus De Saumareis, milites."
The William De Saumareis is almost certainly the same person as William de Salinells who was Seigneur de Samarès, then called Saumareys, in the parish of St. Clement in Jersey and was born towards the end of the reign of Richard Coeur de Lion. It is not known when he acquired his new fief in St. Martin's parish in Guernsey but its manor-house was so much the same site as the present one and the fief was the same as that mentioned in the Extente (land value assessment) of Edward III (1331) as having belonged "from time immemorial" to the family of his grandson Matthew.
Of this oldest manor-house only a fragment remains. Its rough but remarkably solid stonework forms the basis of an outhouse on the north-east side of the main buildings and surrounds an arched doorway which was later blocked in with quite a different form of stone. This is one of the most ancient fragments of unrepaired Norman masonry in the island and can be fairly confidently dated as mid 13th Century work.
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