ST ANTONIN
The life of the small parish of St Antonin – clustered around the castle, with its barracks for invalid soldiers and its prisoners of war – is an instance of the connections between military and town life. Of the twenty two events recorded in the parish register in 1764, nine involved the army or navy: five baptisms of the children of invalid soldiers; the marriage of a soldier to the daughter of a gardener in the castle; the burial of the two-year-old son of an invalid solider; the burial of the seventy-five-year-old widow of a naval officer. Over the entire period of the Seven Years War, about a quarter of all the events recorded in the parish were connected to the armed forces. There were soldiers known by their "noms de guerre:" "la jeunesse," "sans quartier," "la montagne." An English prisoner of war, captured on the warship King of Prussia, was buried in 1757; so was an Irish priest, aged thirty-five, the "confessor of the English prisoners." Even in peacetime, the castle loomed over the parish: in 1769, with the record of an unknown woman, "buried in the cemetery, after a judicial inquiry, the body of a woman found dead in the castle of this town."
AM-A, GG54/24, 44-47, 64. On the parishes of the town, see Emile Biais, "Notes sur les anciennes paroisses d'Angoulême," BSAHC, vol. 4 (1881), 171-215, vol 5 (1882), 247-284.
The social map, below, depicts the individuals who appeared in the nine St Antonin records connected to the military. Nodes are sized based on their number of connections.
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