The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Forest of Vazon, by Anonymous

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Title: The Forest of Vazon
A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century

Author: Anonymous

Release Date: December 28, 2004 [EBook #14501]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE FOREST OF VAZON

_A GUERNSEY LEGEND OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY_.

London:
HARRISON & SONS, 59, PALL MALL
Booksellers to the Queen and H.R.H the Prince of Wales
1889.

PREFACE.

Nothing authentic is known of the history of Guernsey previously to its
annexation to the Duchy of Normandy in the tenth century. The only
sources of information as to events which may have occurred before that
date are references in monkish chronicles of the usual semi-mythical
type, and indications conveyed by cromlechs and menhirs, fragments of
Celtic instruments and pottery, and a few Roman relics. It is
unfortunate that we are thus precluded from acquiring any knowledge of
the development of a people as to whom the soundest among conflicting
conjectures seems to be that, coming originally from Brittany, they
preserved the purity of the Celtic race through periods when in other
offshoots of the same stock its characteristics were being obliterated
by the processes of crossing and absorption.

If early local records had existed they would hardly have failed to
have given minute details of the convulsion of nature which resulted in
the destruction by the sea of the forest lands on the northern and
western sides of the island, and in the separation of tracts of
considerable magnitude from the mainland. Geologists are agreed in
assigning to this event the date of March, 709, when great inundations
occurred in the Bay of Avranches on the French coast; they are not
equally unanimous as to the cause, but science now rejects the theory of
a raising of the sea-level and that of a general subsidence of the
island. The most reasonable explanation appears to be that the
overpowering force of a tidal wave suddenly swept away barriers whose
resistance had been for ages surely t