Originally the vavassors[35] of the Court of St. Michael were twelve in number, similar to the Jurats of the Royal Court, but if you ask why the number for the last two hundred years has been reduced to eleven, the answer is--“that the devil carried away Vivien.” All that is known about Jean Vivien is that he was a vavassor of this Court, and that, in a fit of despair, he drowned himself, early in the seventeenth century. Up to about the middle of the present century three letters “I. V. V.” cut by himself on the broken fragment of rock from which he leapt into the gulf, still existed at the end of a footpath, not far from the “Fosse au Courlis”--Curlew’s ditch or grave--a spot haunted by witches. Since then no Christian has dared to replace the suicide Jean Vivien, and, when making the calculation of the symbolic vavassorial stones, his pebble is always omitted. There are but eleven instead of twelve. [27] “There were two Nigels (Neel or Niel), Viscounts of Cotentin, and proprietors of St. Sauveur le Vicomte. I have reference to those two charters, the perusal of which exalts conjectures into genuine _facts_. It is highly gratifying to possess, at last, extracts from the authentic charters of Robert I. and William II. granted to St. Michel and St. Martin of Tours.”--Extract from MS. letter from George Métivier to Sir Edgar MacCulloch, Nov. 1846. [28] According to Mr. Métivier Guernsey was called “Holy Island” in the days of a learned Greek called “Sylla,” the friend of Plutarch’s grandfather, and he says that it was the custom for persons to go from the “ogygian” (Gallic or Breton) Islands, to Delos every century, which means every thirty years. The voyagers also visited the temple of Dodona; and on their return from Delos “the sacred navigators were conducted by the winds to the Isle of Saturn or Sacred Island (Guernsey), which was peopled entirely by themselves and their predecessors; for although they were by their laws permitted to return after having served Saturn thirty years, which was the century of the Druids, yet they frequently preferred remaining in the tranquil retirement of this island to returning to their birth-places.” Demetrius, also, says: “Among the islands which lie adjacent to Britain, some are desert, known by the name of the Isles of Heroes.… I embarked in the suite of the Emperor, who was about to visit the nearest of them. We found thereon but few inhabitants, and these were accounted _sacred and inviolable_.” Mr. Métivier goes on to say later “Onomacritus, an author who flourished five hundred years B.C., in one of his poems speaks of a vessel that conveyed the ashes of the dead between England and Spain, and a celebrated Greek author of undoubted veracity, Procopius, who wrote about 547 A.D., states that the “Breton fishermen of an island subject to the French, were exempt from all tribute, because they conveyed the dead into a neighbouring island.”