The issue here is the mixing and misunderstanding of access strategies.

The hibernate xml mapping system uses property-based access by default. This implies that you want to place any annotations that the binding system should see on the getter methods and not the field level, as your jira description indicates. You can override this behavior by setting the access="field" appropriately on your respective entity hbm xml mappings so that the xml mapping access strategy coincides with your use of field-level envers annotations. Either case works, they simply just need to be consistent.

You can read more about this in Chapter 5, https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/4.2/manual/en-US/html/ch05.html.