Sausmarez Manor
country house in Saint Martin, Guernsey
Sausmarez Manor is a historic house in Saint Martin, Guernsey.
The original manor house
The first mention of the Sausmarez family in Guernsey is at the consecration of the Vale church in 1117 attended by Guillaume de Sausmarez, 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 Mont-Saint-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 Saint Clement in Jersey, who 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 on much the same site as the present one.
In 1313 an inquisition of Edward II and again in 1331 Matthew de Sausmarez was Captain of the Castle at Jerbourg and the Seigneur of the Manor. The fief was mentioned in the Extente (land value assessment) of 1331 in the reign of Edward III of England as having belonged "from time immemorial" to the family of his grandson Matthew. The capture of the Island by the French in 1338 resulted in 1341, after a battle was lost in Les Hubits, St Martin, to Sir Peter de Sausmarez escaping via Petit Port to Jersey, returning after the Island was retaken in 1345.
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 a different form of stone.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3191883. Authority coordinates are 49.436, -2.547. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1117, 1254, 1313 and 1331.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sausmarez Manor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.