Petitions from the Channel Islands
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
Alexander Kelleher
This article
analyses a relatively neglected source for the history of the Channel Islands
in the Middle Ages: the petitions presented to the English Crown. The process
of invoking the direct intervention of the king in a range of local issues from
the late 13th century onwards forms an important part of Jersey and
Guernsey’s constitutional development. It was a process used by
individuals, interest groups, whole communities, and even the Channel Islands
as a whole, which showed some degree of collective consciousness. Petitions
must also be seen in the larger context of the contest to establish the
boundaries of authority and control between the king and the Channel Islands.
This was largely resolved to the advantage of the Islanders and culminated with
the 1341 Charter, which confirmed their privileges and customs, and allowed
them to continue to use and develop their own law and administrative and
judicial institutions.
1 This article offers a new analysis of a
relatively neglected source for the history of the Channel Islands in the
Middle Ages: the petitions presented to the English Crown. By contrast, other
official records produced by the English government have been closely studied.
The royal charters of liberties issued to the Channel Islands are, for
instance, a familiar part of the Islands’ constitutional landscape. Over the centuries, the
charters have been invoked periodically when the Islands have considered their
rights and privileges threatened by an overzealous English Crown, British
government and even, on occasion in the modern era, by Parliament. The first
such royal charter is that granted by Edward III in 1341. It can be viewed as a
hard-earned bundle confirming rights, achieved as an outcome of a period of
challenge by the Crown as to the boundaries of royal power and extent of its
rights in the Islands together with the pushback accomplished by a strong and
determined elite intent on recognition of their interests and the advantages
their loyalty gave to the Crown in the face of the territorial ambitions of the
kingdom of France. Similarly, the role played by the quo warranto proceedings, initiated in 1299 and lasting until 1331,
in this process is reasonably well traversed by historians. It is, however,
illuminating to view the 1341 Charter in the larger context of the activities
of the kings of England in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, seeking to
expand and centralise their administrative and judicial power in England and
their wider “dominions”. As part of that exercise,
it should also be noted that the Islands were also subject to extentes and the introduction of the
English general eyre from 1299–1331, invariably conducted by itinerant
justices from England. The process also took
place against the important backdrop of the depredations suffered by the
Islanders during the troubled Lordship of Otto de Grandison (1277–1328).
2 By contrast the process of petitioning has
been neglected for this important period in Jersey and Guernsey’s
constitutional development. This was a relatively new process in the late 13th
century, invoking the direct intervention of the king in a range of local
issues. From the reign of Edward I (r. 1272–1307) onwards, the ability of
the king’s subjects to seek justice, recognition of rights, and material
advantage by presenting a petition to the King and Council sitting in
Parliament, constituted a significant judicial and administrative development
linked to the evolution of Parliament as a judicial institution in the later 13th
century, and the increasingly formidable reach of royal government. Dating between the end of
the reign of Henry III (r. 1216–1272) and 1453, some 233 petitions are
extant which emanated from the Channel Islands. These petitions form a
fascinating and rich body of source material that evidence the administrative
and judicial integration of the Islands within the wider realm of the
Plantagenet kings of England in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. For our
constitutional history, they form part of a developmental period for the
Islands’ judicial and administrative systems, as well as their political
status vis-à-vis the English
Crown, a period in which John Le Patourel considered to lie the “origins
of our self-government”.
3 One reason for this neglect originates in
the much wider problem created by a series of unfortunate reorganisations in
the Public Record Office in the 19th century of what were known as the “Parliamentary
Petitions”. The reorganisations saw the contents of the Parliamentary
Petitions, held in the form in which they had been created at the time, broken
up and dispersed into other collections, depriving the petitions of their
original context. As an example of but one of the problems created by these
reorganisations, the warrants that often accompanied the petitions, which were
a key way of dating them, were removed. The petitions can now be
found in the National Archives Series “Special Collections: Ancient
Petitions" (SC 8), a broad category of miscellanea and in a form and order
quite different from the originals. Recent work has done much
to correct these problems, most notably a project directed by the late WM
Ormrod (d. 2020) and Gwilym Dodd, which has provided an accessible and
searchable online catalogue of the SC 8 series in the National Archives UK.
4 While the majority of Channel Islands
petitions are to be found in SC 8, this is not the only relevant collection.
There are also 19 petitions belonging to the 1305 Lent Parliament which have
ended up in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris as part of BN. MS
Latin 9215.
Searching the National Archives online catalogue using keywords reveals a total
of 214 petitions relating to the Channel Islands in SC 8 across a period
running from the end of the reign of Henry III to 1453, with the majority of
the petitions belonging to the reigns of Edward I, Edward II (r.
1307–1327), and the early years of Edward III (r. 1327–1377). Many
of these have been digitised for online viewing. Each entry for a petition
comes with a useful summary of its contents, a suggested date, and identification
of individuals and places named in the petition. Valuably, the entries provide
references to other records related to each petition, such as writs to
officials to carry out orders relating to a petition, which provide a more
complete picture of the context, as well as the outcome of the petitions if
they were endorsed.
5 Many of the Channel Islands petitions were
compiled and translated into English and published by the Société
Jersiaise as “Ancient Petitions
of the Chancery and the Exchequer”, in 1902, using SC 8 as its main
source. This was an admirable
endeavour, part of a larger process in the period to preserve and transcribe
medieval material from a host of archives in England and France. However, there are number
of problems associated with this publication which are potentially harmful to
accurate research. Le Patourel viewed it as a “regrettable publication in
every respect”, an unduly harsh and unexplained statement. In part his misgivings
were likely due to the compilers’ reliance on the SC 8 series without
reference to the problems associated with the artificiality of how this
collection was organised. This meant that many of the methodological problems
created by the reorganisations were transmitted to the Société
Jersiaise publication. Even accepting the limitations of the times, the
publication also has disappointingly few cross references to other records. It
does not include the original Latin and French transcriptions, and documentary
provenance is often not given. There are also errors in the translations,
duplicated documents, and a haphazard dating process. Many of the dates are at
odds with the more recent and reliable National Archives’ catalogue.
Ultimately, the “Ancient Petitions of the Chancery and the Exchequer”
is now an outdated publication and it is more prudent to rely upon the National
Archives summaries as an instructional aid to the petitions, though the keener
researcher will never be fully satisfied unless by reference to the original
records themselves.
Wider history
of the petitions, political ambitions of the Crown
6 The very existence of petitions from the
Channel Islands in SC 8 reflects the extent of the Islands’ judicial and
administrative integration into the wider realm of the Plantagenet kings of England
in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Islands, as the only remnant of the duchy
of Normandy still in the hands of King John following the loss of Normandy in
1204, were a privileged community in this context: they had retained their
Norman laws and customs and, though ruled by the king of England, had not been
integrated into the kingdom of England itself. Nonetheless, as Le
Patourel concluded, their administration was the king’s administration,
save for when they were infrequently farmed out to members of the nobility: the
king controlled all major administrative and judicial appointments, officials
acted in the king’s name, and all revenue collected from the Islands was
expended on the local administration or went to the English Exchequer. In terms of judicial
structure, although there were five separate and somewhat overlapping legal
jurisdictions in the Islands—the King and Council in parliament; the
direct exercise of the king’s jurisdiction in the Islands in the form of
assizes; the locally established Royal Courts; the local seigneurial courts;
and the ecclesiastical court of the bishop of Coutances—ultimate judicial
power very clearly rested with the king.
7 The king of England, as suzerain, was the
ultimate source of justice and political power in the Plantagenet realm. From
the early reign of Edward I (r.1272–1307), all the king’s subjects
both in England and the king’s wider dominions theoretically had the
right to petition the king and council in parliament directly to air their
grievances with a view to redress or to seek special favour. The motivation for the
introduction of the petitionary process in England, and the extension of this
system to the dominions, has been simply described by Gwilym Dodd as one of
pressure and incentive. The immediate
circumstances upon Edward I’s return to England in 1274 from crusading,
where he found the local judicial systems afflicted by corruption of officials
and serious and widespread discontent, necessitated reforms and the overhaul of
the judicial machinery. The petition, alongside
other administrative reforms, was introduced as an effective way to ensure that
individuals could have their grievances heard and judged at the highest level.
As Dodd has observed, allowing people to seek redress without using local
judicial structures that could be dominated by the local elite, provided an
effective way of making these structures more accountable to the central
institutions of royal government. It also offered the king an alternative link
with the localities rather than simply relying upon information sent to his
administration from local officials and the elite. The ability of a citizen to
overreach local officials was particularly important in matters where officials
were themselves accused of misconduct or corruption.
8 Whilst Edward I genuinely desired reform
and took seriously his responsibility as king to provide effective justice, the
introduction of petitioning was also used as an opportunity to strengthen royal
control outside its traditional heartlands in south-east England and into other
areas of the country and the king’s wider dominions. During his reign, Edward
I engaged in an ambitious, though ultimately unrealistic, programme of
administrative reform that sought to expand the reach of the increasingly
bureaucratised and sophisticated royal government. The programme was a
response to developments during the political crises of the later reign of
Henry III, where royal rights were believed to have been usurped by the
magnates and local communities, and a number of asserted privileges and
liberties had “just growed” without royal approval. In order to restore royal
rights, Edward I enacted numerous reforms to improve royal oversight in the
localities, such as reforms to the shrieval office, which had become
notoriously corrupt. Most notable was the process known as the Hundred Roll
enquiries from 1274–1275; commissions whose investigations were
fundamentally about restoring to the Crown certain rights, the usurpation of
which “encroached[ed]” upon “the royal dignity”. Their
findings on the necessary judicial and administrative reforms were cemented in
the Statute of Westminster in 1275. Reflecting Edward’s
efforts in England to push back these developments, in 1274, a major extente was carried out in the Islands
to identify the rights and revenues of the Crown there. Some twenty years later,
the attempt to strengthen royal control could also be seen in the introduction
of the English general eyre to the Islands from 1299–1331, an indication
of the growing influence of English institutions on the Islands’ local
institutions. These were conducted by itinerant justices from England, who
engaged in a series of provocative quo
warranto (“by what authority?”) proceedings, which sought to ensure royal rights had not been
usurped by the local elite by challenging their provenance, mirroring similar
proceedings which had been used earlier in England. The mechanism of
petitioning supported these activities to a certain extent for it sought to
place an additional form of oversight on the activities of the local officials
and the elite. Moreover, the very act of petitioning was an express recognition
of the superior and legitimate jurisdictional authority of the king by his
subjects.
Thus, petitioning sought to provide an alternative mechanism for the Crown to
project its authority in England and its outlying territories.
9 In the case of the king’s
continental dominions, such as the Duchy of Aquitaine and County of Ponthieu,
petitioning to the king and council in parliament served the additionally
important purpose of challenging the growing threat of the appellate
jurisdiction of the Paris Parlement
to the king of England’s authority in these regions. The Treaty of Paris
in 1259 saw Henry III abandon his title as duke of Normandy and accept liege
homage to the king of France for the duchy of Aquitaine and most likely the
Channel Islands.
This entailed recognition of the Paris Parlement
as the court of “last resort” for these territories. As the
king of France sought thereafter to extend his jurisdictional authority, the Parlement accepted appeals from
inhabitants of the duchy of Aquitaine. This did much to undermine the ducal
authority of the king of England there. After the 1294
Anglo-French war, which above all revealed the unworkability of the Treaty of
Paris, the Plantagenet kings of England recurrently sought to deny that their
continental possessions, including the Channel Islands, lay within the
jurisdiction of the king of France. Allowing Gascons to
petition the king and council in Parliament was one way to deny the
jurisdictional authority of the king of France in the duchy. There is no evidence thus
far discovered to suggest that Channel Islanders attempted to use the Paris Parlement as a remedy for grievances.
Nonetheless, the risk existed, and as tensions increased between the kings of
England and France, assertions of royal authority in the Islands, such as
through strengthening appellate and jurisdictional control, were necessary further
to draw the Islands into the orbit of the English Crown.
10 In a similar vein to the appellate
jurisdiction of the Paris Parlement,
the Court Christian of the bishop of Coutances posed a threat to royal
jurisdictional authority. Despite the Islands’ separation from the duchy
of Normandy, they remained within the diocese of Coutances, and a number of
ecclesiastical institutions primarily based in Normandy remained major
landholders in the Islands. Jurisdiction over ecclesiastical matters in the
Islands lay with the Diocese of Coutances. That the mother houses of
these ecclesiastical institutions lay within the kingdom of France, yet were
well-established in the Islands, contributed to jurisdictional issues and was a
regular source of tension between the Crown and the Church. Islanders
intermittently used the ecclesiastical courts as an alternative source of
remedy for their own cases: Drogo de Barentin, the Seigneur of Rozel, was fined
during the 1299 assize for wrongly suing Guillaume Payn in the Court Christian
at Coutances on pleas that were claimed to lie in the exclusive jurisdiction of
the king’s court. Indeed, the wrongful use
of this court was often a source of complaint expressed in petitions by
Islanders.
The threat to the jurisdiction of the English Crown was such that, in 1305, the
Crown went to the considerable effort of securing a special indulgence from the
Papal Curia that prohibited Islanders being summoned to a court outside the
Islands, though this failed to put a complete stop to Islanders suing other
Islanders in the Court Christian of Coutances. Thus, like the duchy of
Gascony, the problematic position of the Channel Islands sitting literally and
constitutionally between two kingdoms that were both expanding the reach of
their power, presented Islanders with opportunities for alternative sources of
justice. The process of petitioning allowed its development as one of many
tools to stress the superior jurisdiction of the king of England and to deny
possible competitors.
How petitioning worked, and its effectiveness
11 Petitioning quickly proved to be a
popular tool across the Plantagenet realm. In response, a system to receive and
process petitions was developed to avoid overburdening the king and council and
allow them to attend only to petitions that required the king’s direct
attention. From 1290, there were receivers appointed in parliament to analyse
and sift petitions from England, Ireland, and Gascony and, at least by 1305,
there was a separate enrolment of Channel Islands petitions, perhaps reflecting
a recognition of the distinct political status of the Islands in the realm. Petitions that could be
resolved by adjuncts of government other than the King and Council, such as the
Chancery or the Exchequer, were directed to these institutions. Committees of triers were
also appointed to oversee the resolution of petitions from Ireland, Gascony and
the Channel Islands. These committees were typically made up of lords or
prelates who were almost exclusively Englishmen, which could be problematic when
they were handling petitions from areas where different laws and customs
prevailed and where local knowledge was essential to the resolution of a case.
12 Although the overall extent to which the
King and Council actually adjudicated petitions themselves is difficult to
assess, the role of parliament within this process is ill-defined. In the case of the
Channel Islands’ petitions, it is noticeable that the King and Council
rarely adjudicated upon them directly, but instead directed them to the king’s
officials in the Islands to report back; or, in certain cases, entrusted their
consideration to specially appointed commissions sent to the Islands. The investigation and
adjudication of Channel Islands’ petitions were then generally the
responsibility of the warden of the Islands, who, until the introduction of
itinerant justices from England from 1299–1331, was also responsible for
conducting the assizes in the Islands where many petitions were resolved. In this sense, the role
of the King and Council was primarily to facilitate the resolution of cases,
and it rarely committed to a definitive statement on the contents of the
petition. Many petitions seem to have been sent simply with the intention of
asking the king to “spur local officials into action” on problems
that should already have been resolved locally.
13 Petitions, primarily addressed to the “King
and Council”, or simply “the King”, “the lord the king”
and other such variations, were initially written in Latin, but by the end of
the reign of Edward I, almost all petitions were written in French. The majority of
petitioners were individuals from across the socio-economic strata but some
were issued on behalf of particular interest groups. As one example of the
latter, there is a petition from the fishermen of Guernsey in c.1297, which
sought a grant under the Great Seal of the King to allow them to sell their
catch in English markets quit of paying foreign customs. There are also petitions
from clergymen and from whole ecclesiastical communities in the Islands. A small but nonetheless
significant number of petitions claimed to represent both the “communities”
of Guernsey and Jersey, but unified petitioning by the Islands seems only to
have been undertaken in exceptional circumstances (see below).
14 Who exactly drafted the petitions and how
this unified process was brought about is not easy to discern. It is likely,
given the form and style of petitions as they evolved, that the drawing up of
petitions for their presentation to the King and Council was dominated by a
small circle of specialist scribes and clerks in England. It also seems that
petitions were often presented by attorneys who then appeared before the King
and Council in parliament on behalf of their principals. For instance, Thomas
de Estfeld, a Jurat in Guernsey, a keen petitioner on his own behalf, presented
numerous petitions as a representative of the communities of Guernsey and
Jersey, and appeared before the king in parliament as an attorney on a number
of occasions in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The major secular and
ecclesiastical landholders, such as the abbot of Mont-St-Michel, also regularly
employed attorneys in England to represent them in their affairs before
parliament, and their attorney presumably handled all the necessary procedural
formalities relating to petitions to the king and council.
15 Petitions concerned a wide range of
subjects and purposes. They included, but were not limited to: requests for
assistance or remedy; royal favour; seeking confirmation and sometimes
extension of privileges and rights granted to the Islands; and redress from
misconduct by royal officials. One of the more common
types of petition was a request for a royal pardon, as the king possessed
considerable discretionary power across his realm to relieve his subjects of
culpability. In the Channel Islands, many individuals sought pardon for
abjuration. Abjuration arose when an individual, after being suspected or
adjudged guilty of a crime, took sanctuary in a Church, and, upon oath before a
clergyman, agreed to quit the king’s realm and never to return. The proximity of the
Islands to Normandy enabled a relatively easy physical exit from the scene of
the crime and abjuration accounted for a significant amount of judicial
business. That many of those who availed themselves of this means of escape
subsequently sought a royal pardon, suggests that abjuration was viewed as an
immediate respite from prosecution, thus buying time to assess the situation,
after which the process might be alleviated by royal pardon. It appears to have
been customary for individuals to abjure the Islands for all types of crime.
For instance, in 1324 a man from Guernsey sought pardon after abjuring the Island
for stealing two sheep. In a formulaic response, the warden of the Islands was
ordered to verify to the king the circumstances of the abjuration before
proceeding further and granting the pardon. Even in fairly routine
cases like this, it is clear that petitions were properly scrutinised before
pardons were issued. Pardons were granted in most cases, but only for the
abjuration rather than the original crime itself, and the pardon was often
conditional on individuals answering for their crimes upon returning to the
Islands.
16 A number of petitions were used by the
Islanders to convey to the King and the Council incidents of acute crisis and
the need for assistance. From 1295, the people of the Islands of Jersey and
Guernsey sent a number of petitions to the king about the serious devastation
inflicted on the Islands as a result of an invasion by forces of the kingdom of France in 1294.
They stated that 1,500 people had been killed during the attack and many
properties (including the all-important king’s mills) destroyed beyond
repair. The Islanders requested compensation for the damage incurred, to the
tune of £10,000 tournois or
more, the money to be raised from the seizure and sale of the goods and
merchandise of those who had adhered to the cause of the king of France. They
also sought that the chattels of Islanders who died in the attack, the
possession of which had been taken into the king’s hand, should be fully
restored to their heirs. The king was moved to
grant the request. However, reflecting how the effectiveness of overarching
authority was only as good as the ability to enforce it, the warden, Henry de
Cobham (Warden, 1294–1297), despite being ordered by a writ of the king
to compensate the Islanders, was unmoved. It was also alleged in
other petitions that he had appropriated goods from deceased Islanders
(although he was supposedly legally entitled to one-third of the property of
war casualties, to his considerable profit) and kept the wages of the garrisons
at Gorey Castle for himself. The extent of de
Cobham’s culpability is clouded by the apparent hostility of the
Islanders towards him and the lack of alternative sources of evidence. Whatever
the case, de Cobham was dismissed in 1297. However, a further petition in the
same year indicates that compensation had still not be made to the Islanders.
The petition stated that de Cobham had been summoned to appear in parliament to
address the complaints, and had claimed that all the assets that he had
received had been spent on the defence of the Islands. As a result, a senior
royal clerk, Robert de Leysset, was sent to audit de Cobham’s accounts as
well as act as a justice in the 1299 assize in order to resolve the Islanders’
complaints.
These steps seem to have been to little avail, as Henry de Cobham was again
ordered to appear before the King and Council in 1302 to answer repeated
complaints by the Islanders. Although it is unclear
whether the grievances of the Islanders were eventually remedied satisfactorily
(the lack of further documented complaints may suggest that some form of
compensation was received), it is clear that at the least the royal government
took their petitions seriously. The case also reveals the often lengthy and
complicated procedure in resolving the complaints made in petitions.
17 Petitions were also used to seek
rectification of legal documents. In the early 14th century, for example,
Geoffrey de Carteret petitioned the King of England and his Council requesting
a remedy regarding a letter of Privy Seal given by the king to his father,
Master Renaud de Carteret, which had granted Renaud all the tithes belonging to
the Abbot of Mont-St-Michel in the parish of St Ouen in Jersey. Unfortunately,
the de Carterets had been unable to obtain these tithes owing to the fact that
the letter had mistakenly written “Guernsey” instead of “Jersey”
and, as a result, local officials, who were in possession of the abbot’s
lands and rights, owing to wartime confiscation, refused to act. Petitions like these,
seeking to undo minor errors with unfortunate consequences, do, however, reveal
the often tedious and prolonged process of invoking a distant, centralised
royal power and the drawbacks of relying upon documentation emanating from the
central institutions of government rather than an agent with insular
jurisdiction possessed of greater local knowledge.
18 Petitioning was not always an effective
tool in resolving grievances. Where the petition consistently faltered, if not
failed, as an effective mechanism of judicial redress in the Channel Islands
was in resolving complaints against the maladministration of officials, most
notably during the troubled Lordship of Otto de Grandison (1277–1328).
Otto was a “man of European importance”, entrusted with a number of
delicate diplomatic missions on behalf of the king, including in Gascony and
Paris, and was a personal friend of Edward I. Such attributes must have
given his activities a level of immunity from too close a scrutiny. In November
1275, he was granted the wardenship of the Islands, undoubtedly as a way of
rewarding his royal service, providing him with the king’s revenues and rights
in the Islands in exchange for an annual rent of 500 marks. In 1277, his
package was improved: Otto was appointed Dominus
Insularum (“Lord of the Islands”) and granted a usufruct over
them for life, making him “practically supreme lord” in the Islands.
19 Otto’s status as “Lord of the
Islands” gave him considerable control of the administration. The right
to the fruits and profits of the Islands meant he was not accountable to the
English Exchequer. He regularly appointed
family or friends to the key positions of government. Otto’s brother,
William de Grandison, and his close associate Henry de Bonvillars, the Prior of
Wenlock, were intermittently sub-wardens and attorneys on behalf of Otto. These officials, with no
long-term interests in the Islands, sought to extract as much profit from them
as possible, and generally abused their positions. Due to their stranglehold on
the administration, it proved extraordinarily difficult to oust Otto’s
officials from their positions, even though gross injustices had clearly been
committed, including one accusation of torture and murder. Notwithstanding numerous
petitions from discontented Islanders and the fact that the Crown sent several
commissions of inquiry to the Islands, in reality the Crown was either unable
or unwilling (particularly during Edward I’s kingship) to intervene
effectively due to Otto’s status and his proximity to the royal
household. Often Otto’s officials, and sometimes Otto himself, were
required to appear before the King and Council in parliament to answer these
accusations, but there is no evidence of any sanction being imposed. When in 1292, the Bailiff
of Guernsey, Guillaume de Saint Remy (Bailiff, 1288–1291 and 1292–1296),
one of Otto’s appointees, was ordered by a commission sent to investigate
the Islanders’ complaints to pay considerable sums of money in
compensation to injured parties, Guillaume opted simply to abjure the Islands
for France. Despite his obvious guilt as determined by the commission, he was
pardoned by the king a year later, and his lands and chattels were restored to
him by Otto de Grandison. Ultimately, the Crown
only fully and properly intervened when there was perceived to be a genuine
risk that the Islands might be invaded by the kingdom of France, such as from
1294–1298 when the Islands were taken back into royal hands on account of
the fact that Otto’s officials had neglected their military
responsibilities, or when royal rights were threatened by the influential
Norman churches in the Islands. The Islanders were not to
be relieved of Otto and his officials until his death in 1328. Edward III (r.
1327–1377) would later admit, somewhat laconically, in a letter to the
Islanders that Otto did not maintain “sufficient wardship”.
20 The failure to resolve complaints against
Otto’s administration was also due to the fact that the responsibility of
investigation and adjudication of Channel Islands petitions was directed to the
warden of the Islands or his officials, or directed to be resolved at the next assize
in the Islands.
This understandably created a problem when many complaints were against the
warden and his officials, and when the warden was responsible for conducting
the assizes. One might anticipate that the introduction of itinerant justices
from England to conduct the assizes from 1299–1331 would alleviate these
problems. However, even the impartiality of the itinerant justices can be
called into question. For example, John de Ditton, an itinerant justice in the
Islands in 1309, was regularly employed as the attorney of Otto de Grandison in
England and Ireland. On the reverse side of
the coin, justices could be suspected of bias towards their local communities.
The Stonore-Bourne commission of 1320, sent to investigate the entire period of
Otto’s Lordship, included amongst its justices Nicholas de Cheny and Jean
de Carteret, two of the local elite known to be hostile towards Otto. As a result, many of the
commission’s judgments, heavily in favour of the Islanders, and affecting
Otto’s landholdings and rights, were shortly afterwards overturned by the
Crown, which recognised that they would ultimately serve to diminish royal
revenue when the Islands were back in the king’s direct possession. Reliance on the assizes
to resolve petitions then, ultimately seems to have accomplished little either
as to the determination of the complaints of the Islanders or improving the
impartiality of the judicial process.
21 Even the direct intervention of the king
in the judgments of the 1321 eyre did not ensure impartiality. The Crown had
its own interests and many of the justices were on the look-out to increase
Crown revenue through judicial proceedings. At the same time as investigating
complaints against Otto’s administration, the itinerant justices engaged
in a series of highly provocative quo
warranto proceedings, beginning in the 1299 assize, in which the major
seigneurs and clergy were summoned to show proof of their customary laws and of
their rights to their landholdings. For instance, Pierre de Saumareis (Samarès)
of Jersey was asked to provide proof of title to the manor of Samarès
and to his rights, such as varech (wreck) and éperquerie (a
right to dry fish on the foreshore), which were argued by the king’s
attorney to be reserved to the royal prerogative. Unsurprisingly, the quo warranto proceedings were a source
of contention for the Islanders, who resented their rights being questioned and
were concerned they would lose the privilege of being adjudged according to
their own laws. Moreover, the majority of these proceedings were subsequently adjourned to the King’s Bench,
where they largely remained unresolved.
22 This potential extension of the English
legal system to the Islands—the adjudication of their disputes by an
English court—was perceived by many as a serious threat to the Islanders’
privileges and customs, though, as Professor Tim Thornton has highlighted,
Islanders themselves had a pragmatic tendency to bring cases before the
King’s Bench. For Channel Islanders,
petitioning the King and Council could be said to be little different from
appealing to the Duke of Normandy in his court. There is an obvious argument
that engaging the King’s Bench was stepping beyond the bounds of
jurisdiction. However, it is hard to see a difference between that and the use
of petitions to the King and Council sitting in Parliament. In the case of petitions
from the duchy of Aquitaine, Guillaume Pépin has shown that the majority
of these were treated directly by the king’s council with a more limited
role played by Parliament due to the fact the king of England held the duchy of
Aquitaine as duke and not in full sovereignty. This did not make Parliament
ineligible to hear petitions, but it likely changed the process for hearing and
adjudicating petitions from the duchy, and this may also have been the case for
the Channel Islands.
23 But if the king used the judicial process
as a means to further his own interests, the Islands’ elites showed
themselves to be particularly astute in using petitioning as a political tool
to press the king to continue recognising their privileges and constitutional
status within the realm. For instance, in an attempt to ensure their liberties
and customs were respected, in 1328 the people of Jersey, in the midst of
increasing hostilities between the Kingdoms of England and France, cleverly
petitioned their “Prince Edward” to remind the king of the
strategic importance of the Islands: that the Islands were the only refuge for
shipping between England and Gascony; that if they were seized, the kings of
France would be the “Lords of the Sea”. Such concerns would have
resonated with those responsible for English strategic planning where fear of
French naval superiority in the English Channel and the necessity of
maintaining the profitable wine trade between England and Gascony were a
constant focus in the period of Anglo-French hostility. The 1328 petition was
also carefully timed: it was sent shortly after the death of Otto de Grandison,
when the Islands had once again come back into the king’s hand.
24 By invoking the continued loyalty of the
Islands in the face of a very proximate enemy, the 1328 petitioners were
pioneers of what became a continued refrain for Islanders over the centuries.
This can be seen, for example, in Jean Poingdestre’s Cæsarea or A Discourse of the Island of Jersey (c. 1682),
and Philip Falle’s An Account of
the Isle of Jersey, The Greatest of those Islands that are now the only
Remainder of the English Dominions in France (London, 1694), among the
earliest books about Jersey. Both writers, from prominent Jersey families had a
vested interest in the preservation of the privileged liberties and customs
that the Islanders held from the English Crown, and were also active in
academic and official capacities in England. Like the petitioners of
the 14th century, they recognised that the privileged status of the Islands was
fundamentally due to their continued strategic importance to the defence of the
English Channel during times of Anglo-French hostility and, during Poingdestre’s
lifetime, Jersey’s contribution to the royalist side during the English
Civil War. Their accounts explicitly sought to emphasise, primarily to an
English audience that was largely ignorant of the position of the Islands, the
close association of the Islands with the English Crown (both works were
dedicated to the king), and propagated the importance of the Islands to wider
English affairs.
This does not mean, though, that these authors were altogether wrong in such
assertions.
25 It is important to recognise, however,
that the proceedings of the itinerant justices from 1299–1331 cannot be
seen simply as acquisitive efforts by the justices to fill the coffers of the
Crown or to absorb altogether the Islands into the English legal system, and
there has been a tendency by earlier historians to portray these proceedings as
purely an assault on the privileges of the Islanders, the successful defence of
which were a progressive part of the Islands’ history. In many ways, the
justices were attempting to bring clarity to the customary law of the Islands,
which had been the source of considerable administrative and judicial
complications, and genuinely to adjudicate upon civil and criminal cases. Alongside the
proceedings, as we have seen, the Crown conducted a number of important extentes, notably the 1331 extente, mainly to assess Crown rights but also with the intention to
reduce the Islands’ law into writing. The Islanders themselves
had, from as early as 1292, come under increasing pressure to put their laws
from “time immemorial” into writing. This was viewed as a
major challenge to the rights of the Islanders, and persisted until matters
came to a head in 1331, when the Islanders were summoned before the itinerant
justices to evidence their liberties and customs. This sparked a riot in
Guernsey, and subsequently a suspension of the proceedings and their
adjournment to the King’s Bench.
26 Against a background of these clashes
between the Crown and the Islanders, we see the petitions strenuously asserting
the privileges and customs of the Islanders. The most important of these is a
lengthy petition dated to 1333 from the Islanders of Guernsey and Jersey. It
highlighted to the king the grievances caused and unlawful activity committed
by the itinerant justices of the 1331 eyre, requested that the judgements of
the eyre be suspended and be reviewed, and asked that the Islanders’
liberties and customs be confirmed by the king. Attached to the petition was a
list of articles in Latin, explaining the Islands’ laws and how they
differed from the laws of Normandy. Importantly, the articles asserted the
importance of the Jurats in all judicial procedure in the Islands, including
those conducted by the itinerant justices, and asserted that no legal case
opened in each Island should be adjudicated elsewhere, including before the
court of the King’s Bench. Though the petition was
unsuccessful in securing the confirmation of the Islanders’ privileges,
it did cause the king to suspend the proceedings that had been adjourned by the
itinerant justices to the Court of the King’s Bench in 1331. This was only considered
a temporary suspension with the intention to investigate fully the
Islanders’ claim in due course, but proved permanent perhaps largely
owing to the onset of war with France, when it was recognised by the Crown that
any further challenges to the Islanders’ customs would seriously strain
their loyalties. In 1341 Edward III issued his royal charter to the Islands,
which confirmed the privileges and customs of the Islands (many of which
continued to remain unwritten) and essentially created an exclusive
jurisdiction for the local courts to adjudicate upon any claims and criminal
procedures occurring in the Islands.
27 The 1333 petition has had a considerable
long-term influence on the constitutional history of the Islands. It was shown
by the French historian Julien Havet in the late 19th century that the articles
appended to this petition were later interpolated into the so-called “Constitutions
of King John”, a rather problematic document with an “apocryphal”
status, contained only in Falle’s appendix in his Account of the Isle of Jersey. These “Constitutions”
do not belong to John’s reign but were in fact a combination of an
Inquiry in 1248 conducted by the warden of the Islands, investigating the
customs and laws laid down in the time of King John, and the articles of the
1333 petition. Whilst the “Constitutions” may reflect laws and
administrative reforms instituted by John or dating perhaps even prior to his
reign, the “Constitutions” as we know them in Falle’s book
belong to the 17th century. Despite early doubts as
to the authenticity of the “Constitutions”, they were frequently
reproduced and deployed to establish the Islands’ laws and customs in
legal cases.
The First Report of the Commissioners
(1847) commented that “whatever the origin of these Constitutions, they
have for many ages been treated as a Charter granted by the Sovereign and
accepted by the inhabitants”. For the purposes of this
discussion, when one considers that Edward III’s charter of 1341 was
rather general in the terms of its grant, the articles of this petition
fundamentally substantiate our understanding of what the laws of the Islands were
in the 13th and 14th centuries, and occupy a place as one of the more important
medieval documents in the constitutional history of the Islands.
Conclusion
28 Over the course of the 14th century, the
use of petitioning in the form instituted during the reign of Edward I declined
considerably. Petitions from the Channel Islands continued in reduced numbers
from the 1340s onwards until the 15th century, and the final petition in the SC
8 series is dated to c.1453. The decline of petitions from the Channel Islands
correlates with the general decline in use of the petitionary mechanism in
England and elsewhere in the realm. Gwilym Dodd concluded that the decline in
petitioning during the reign of Edward III was not so much due to the
ineffectiveness of this mechanism but as a result of more stable political
conditions and on account of comprehensive improvements to central and local
judicial institutions: alternative remedies became available. It is important
to recognise that the petition was originally introduced to resolve issues that
could not be resolved elsewhere, and at a time when other judicial mechanisms
were in need of serious reform. After numerous improvements to the
administrative and judicial systems during the 14th century, the need for
people to rely upon petitioning as a remedy for their grievances was
significantly lessened, and the need for intervention by the King and Council
became more limited, though the mechanism was never altogether extinguished and
the King and Council retained its place as the ultimate appellate jurisdiction
in the realm.
29 A similar picture may be seen in the case
of the Channel Islands. It is noticeable that the bulk of petitionary activity
occurred during the “longue oppression” of Otto de
Grandison’s Lordship, when local officials were largely unaccountable and
there existed serious deficiencies in the Islands’ judicial systems. Following the death of
Otto in 1328, and the return of the administration of the Islands to the
king’s hand, the growing sophistication of the Royal Court and the offices
of Bailiff and the Jurats saw the local judicial institutions reach a stage of
maturity that enabled them more effectively and independently to resolve
disputes and grievances, reducing the need for petitioning and the intervention
of the central institutions of royal government in Channel Islands affairs.
30 The greater reliance on local judicial
institutions in this regard was additionally due to a number of shortcomings in
a process which entailed invoking assistance from a body which was some
distance away and in certain respects quite different from the Channel Islands.
One issue was the costs involved in pursuing legal process in England and
having to travel there when summoned to present cases before the King and
Council in Parliament. In a petition of 1324, for instance, Dennis le Marchant
and Matthew de Sausmarez lamented the significant expenses they had incurred
from two years of legal process in England seeking to resolve certain defects
in a royally issued document concerning tenements in Guernsey. Furthermore, as the
period progressed it became increasingly difficult for English authorities to
determine Channel Islands disputes, owing to a decreasing number of English
judges skilled in Norman law, let alone the specific of the laws and customs of
the islands. As a result, and, as has been seen above, legal process went back and
forth, rarely achieving a satisfactory outcome, until the creation of the 1341
Charter and its confirmation in the first instance jurisdiction of the
Islands’ Royal Courts. Finally, in 1368 the King’s Bench declared
itself incapable of hearing cases from the Channel Islands. From the perspective of
the Crown, a greater reliance on local judicial institutions was a much more
practical solution to the resolution of most of the grievances of the sort that
had been expressed in petitions, and thus after 1341 it reserved only
exceptional cases for its adjudication.
31 It is clear that the mechanism of
petitioning occupies an important place in the history of the Islands, but what
does it tell us from a constitutional perspective? First, petitions gave people
from the Channel Islands direct access to the highest level of the king’s
power structure and the possibility to use it to seek to vindicate private and
public rights and gain commercial and political advantage. It was a process
used by individuals, interest groups, whole communities and even, on occasion,
the Channel Islands as a whole, which showed some degree of collective
consciousness. Secondly, the parliamentary and judicial machinery was in a
state of development. But even though they would separate into the Houses of Commons
and Lords, the Privy Council, and a separate court structure, a precedent had
been set and it was the Privy Council, the successor to the King and Council,
that the Channel Islands would continue to use for judicial and political
appeals and, ultimately, to obtain sanction for locally initiated legislation. Thirdly, petitions must
also be seen in the larger context of the battle to establish the boundaries of
authority and control between the king and the Channel Islands. For the Islands
at this stage, this meant the extent of their judicial independence and the
right to retain their own laws as well as their own customs and rights. This
was largely achieved by the Islanders and culminated with the 1341 Charter,
which confirmed the Islanders’ privileges and customs, and allowed them
to continue to enjoy their own administrative and judicial institutions and
hence retain and develop their distinct cultural identity.
Alexander Kelleher is currently researching for a Ph.D. at Trinity
College Dublin, on The Channel Islands in the Plantagenet Realm,
1254–1341.
J Le Patourel, the well-known
medieval historian and native Guernseyman, defines “dominion” as “signifying
political units, distinct in law and administration, ruled together by one
monarch”. J Le Patourel, “The Plantagenet Dominions”, History, I (1965), reprinted in Feudal Empires: Norman and Plantagenet,
edited by M Jones (London, 1984), chap VIII, pp 289–308. For discussion
of the expansive ambitions of the kings of England in this period see
especially: RR Davies, The First English
Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford,
2000); P Crooks, D Green, WM Ormrod (eds), The
Plantagenet Empire, 1259–1453, Proceedings of the 2014 Harlaxton Symposium
(Shaun Tyas, 2016).
It has been suggested that the
membrane of the Latin summaries of these Channel Islands petitions ended up in
Paris due to the fact that many of them relate to the Abbey of Mont-St-Michel.
The membrane may have been separated from the original parliament roll and sent
to the abbot as evidence for the disputes arising out of these petitions. See RL
Atkinson, “The Channel Islands Petitions of 1305”, The English Historical Review, vol 36
(1921), pp 554–556; more recently, see P Brand, “Petitions and
Parliament in the Reign of Edward I”, in L Clark (ed), Parchment and People: Parliament in the
Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 2004), pp 14–38, 18–20. These petitions
are transcribed in full in Havet’s Les
Cours Royale des Iles Normandes, pp
197–205, and also Jersey Prison
Board, vol II (London, 1891–1894), pp 108–109.
Le Patourel, The Medieval Administration of the Channel Islands, p 20.
In 1254, the Islands were included
in an appanage granted by Henry III to his eldest son Edward, along with
Gascony, Ireland and the Island of Oléron. Henry III stated that they
were granted in such a way that they may “never be separated from the
crown of England . . . that they should remain to the kings of
England in their entirety for ever”. Le Patourel and, more recently,
Darryl Ogier, have described the effect of this grant as an annexation by which
the kings of England became the Islands’ legitimate rulers, but notably
there was no attempt to incorporate the islands into the kingdom of England
itself. Calendar of Patent Rolls (CPR),
Henry III: 1247–1258, vol 4 (London, 1908), p 270. D Ogier, The Government and Law of Guernsey (2nd edn;
St Peter Port; Guernsey, 2012), pp 205–207. Le Patourel, “The
Plantagenet Dominions”, Feudal
Empires, pp 301–302. AC
Ruddick, “Gascony and the Limits of Medieval British Isles History”,
in B Smith (ed), Ireland and the English
World in the Late Middle Ages (Basingstoke; Hampshire, 2009), pp
68–88, 75. For discussion of the immediate circumstances following the
loss of Normandy see JA Everard and JC Holt, Jersey 1204: The Forging of an Island Community (London, 2004); WB
Stevenson, “England, France and the Channel Islands, 1204–1259”,
Reports and Transactions of La
Société Guernsiaise (RTSG),
vol XIX, Part 5 (1975), pp 569–576; “English rule in the Channel
Islands in a period of transition, 1204–1259”, RTSG, vol XX, Part 2 (1977), pp 234–258.
M Brown, Disunited Kingdoms: Peoples and Politics in the British Isles, 1280–1460 (Harlow, 2013), pp 1–27.
It has been argued by that such efforts at administrative and judicial
centralisation continued till the 1360s. Ormrod, “The English State and
the Plantagenet Empire, 1259–1360: A Fiscal Perspective”, in JR
Maddicott and DM Palliser (eds), The
Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell (London, 2000), pp 197–215,
197–198, 206–208, 214–215.
Le Patourel states, for example,
that after 1303, the kings of England forced Islanders to make their appeals to
courts in England rather than France. He is vague on which courts he is referring
to. The only courts the Islanders occasionally used outside the Islands or
England were the ecclesiastical courts of the major Norman churches which held
lands in the Islands. Although most references regard the Court at Coutances,
there are some references in the 1309 assize to a court at La Haye du Puits,
presumably an ecclesiastical court, and it is possible other ecclesiastical
courts were used. Le Patourel, “Guernsey, Jersey and their Environment in
the Middle Ages, RTSG (1975), Feudal Empires, chap IV, pp 435–461,
455. Rolls of the Assizes held in the
Channel Islands in the Second Year of the Reign of King Edward II, A.D. 1309, Translated by EM Walford,
Société Jersiaise (St Helier; Jersey, 1903), pp 256,
282–283, 284, 286–287, 294; TNA JUST 1/1160, 1/1161, 1/1170.
Ruddick, “Gascony and the Limits of Medieval British Isles History”,
in Smith (ed), Ireland and the English
World, p 70. GP Cuttino, English
Medieval Diplomacy (Bloomington; Indiana, 1985), pp 62–63.
There is still a difficulty in
determining the provenance of the sources, particularly with whether they can
be assigned to a parliamentary context, a matter which has been addressed by G
Dodd in “The Hidden Presence: Parliament and the Private Petition in the
Fourteenth Century”, in M Clanchy (ed), Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge; Suffolk,
2001), pp 135–150.
TNA SC 8/275/13731; Ancient Petitions, pp 6–7.
Regarding Master Robert de Leysset: CCR, Edward I: 1296–1302, vol IV (London, 1906), p 51–52, p
65. “Comptes du Gardien Henry de Cobham pour l’annee,
1294–1294”, R Rouequette (ed and trans), ABSJ, vol XIII, Part 1
(1936), pp 19–32.
Le Patourel, Medieval Administration of the Channel Islands, p 47. Kingsford, “Otto
de Grandison”, pp 125–128. Prestwich, Edward I, p
54.
Jersey
Assize Roll, 1299–1300, pp
64–65. Interestingly, Drogo de Barentin, Seigneur of Rozel, stated that
the deeds for the manor of Rozel were stored in England for safe keeping, pp
58–59. On éperquerie, see
B Bolton, “Esperkeria Congrorum”, RTSG, vol XVIII, Part III (1968), pp 288–296.
Le Patourel, Medieval Administration, pp 18–19, 58–60,
112–113. Havet, Les Cours Royales
des Iles Normandes, pp 11–13, 226–227, 228–233, Ogier, Government and Law of Guernsey, pp 152–153.
First
report of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the state of the criminal
law in the Channel Islands (Jersey) (London, 1847), pp ix, 72–73.