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The Jersey Law Review – June 2005
BOOK REVIEW
THE CHARTERS OF GUERNSEY by TIM THORNTON . Woodfield Publishing, Bognor Regis, 2004, Pp vii, 172 pp.
1 The publication of this collection coincided with the fine exhibition of Guernsey’s charters mounted at the Candie Museum last year. European pressures to curtail advantages in trade and finance enjoyed by both bailiwicks make this an opportune time to review the royal charters on which those ancient liberties are based. In a sense the charters can be seen as the price to the English crown of securing allegiance from a mercantile people who have vigorously exploited their strategic position over eight centuries since the ‘loss of Normandy’. Nineteen charters in the form of letters patent issued from fifteen sovereigns between 1341 and 1668; four monarchs made second charter to accommodate changed circumstances later in their reigns: Richard II, Edward IV, Elizabeth, and James I.
2 Tim Thornton’s aim is modest: he transcribes the original texts many of them not in print, and provides translations; his brief introductions explain the historical circumstances of each renewal and suggest the power politics at play. Thus, in 1394, Richard II asserts his royal rights, rewards a series of loyal wardens by granting Channel Islanders exemption from tolls and customs in England on equal footing with its inhabitants, and names Guernsey first. In 1400, the usurping Henry IV, lacking recognition in France, harks back to Edward III (1341) and omits confirmation of the Ricardian privileges of 1394, in retaliation for Jersey’s earlier detention of his supporter Lord Cobham. After a perfunctory renewal (1559) of Mary, Elizabeth’s second charter (1560) substantially ‘makes it new’: she spells out the independence of Guernsey’s courts, the islanders’ immunity to prosecution for Channel Island matters territorial waters ‘as far as the sight of man’ and encourages regional Protestantism by citing the dukes of Normandy among her ancestors. The process of negotiation underlying the charters is explicit in James I’s recognition (1605) that Guernsey may continue to apply revenues from the ‘petit coutume’ to building a new harbour; this is done ‘At the humble petition….’ and ‘We have been informed….’ Charles I (1627) is very specific in detailing the victuals that can be transported duty free to Castle Cornet and is clearly wary of abuses. While granting Guernsey freedom over its charitable institutions, he warns against the diversion of funds from their original purposes. There is much of interest here.
3 Dr Thornton’s silence about the charters as material objects is understandable in relation to the exhibition, and the volume includes eight splendid colour plates to compensate. But a reader unfamiliar with other charters finds little help in viewing Guernsey’s charters within the forms and conventions of other royal letters patent. Apart from a footnote to say whether the original is in the Guernsey Greffe or among the Jersey Prison Board Case papers (it would be interesting to know why), Thornton has nothing to say about textural history, nothing about scribal production and layout, ornament, seals, or cost. All these aspects are related to ‘meaning’. (A charter of 1485 from the frugal Henry VII cost the men of Guernsey ‘forty shillings into the hanaper’; whereas Elizabeth’s expansive second charter (1560) states that the bailiff and jurats may from time to time require copies ‘without rendering or paying to our use, any fine or fee, great or small, in our hanaper’ – a detail that accords with the magnanimous tone of the charter itself.) Where so much is repetitious, much of the meaning of a charter is in the detail.
4 Texts and translations are plain and glossing is almost non-existent (exceptions are dicker = measure of 10 hides and tod = 28lbs of wool). Edward IV’s ‘Theoloniis’ (1469) is translated ‘tolls’, but Elizabeth’s repetition of the formula in 1559 is translated ‘Theolonies’. The period flavour may derive from Dr Thornton’s English copy text – but he does not tell us what that is. Some charter syntax is difficult to construe, some downright obscure. An incomprehensible sentence in James I (1605) [para. 2.] is repeated verbatim by Charles I (1627) [para. 10] and by Charles II (1668) [para. 10]. The subject is exemption from levies on goods shipped from Guernsey into English ports. The verbal confusion was caused by the first scribe, who wrote ‘in hoc regno nostro Anglie aut aliquem Portum’, when he should have written ‘in hoc regnum nostrum ….’ Over-familiarity with the ablative formula led him to obscure that it refers not to the inhabitants of Alderney and Sark but to goods conveyed into England. The consequent English versions of this are complete gobbledy-gook. This is not all Dr Thornton’s fault, but the example serves to show how difficult it can sometimes be to interpret the literal sense without textual apparatus.
5 Thornton’s decision to print the longer charters in numbered paragraphs is very welcome and makes it easier to identify mere citation of earlier charters. When a king begins by citing his father citing his father and so on, the voices are hard to distinguish. Marginal glossing of the regnal dates would immediately clarify the process. One could go further, as in William Rastell’s Statutes of the Realm, using different fonts to distinguish preamble and core. The charter form is like the cross section of an onion. The structure, for example, of Henry VI’s charter on reaching his majority (1442) can be shown like this.
HVI (RII((HV(((HIV((((RII(((((EdIII)))))RII))))HIV))) HV))HVI
6 The asymmetry highlights the importance of Richard II’s 1394 charter, ignored by Henry’s father and grandfather. Dr Thornton argues that Henry wants to associate himself with Richard’s legitimate rule. The Channel Islands had not been under direct control of the crown for two decades. In 1440 the English parliament levied a tax on aliens, including Channel Islanders. Protests were successful and in 1443 they were recognised as the king’s subjects and exempt. The king seems to have known what was needed and, with the assent of the lords and council, addresses the men of Guernsey and Jersey as his ‘beloved men’.
Richard Axton, Life Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge; Hon Archivist to the Seigneur of Sark; Hon. Director of La Société Sercquiaise museum and archive.
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