Channel Islands

• 1. Introduction

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  The Channel Islands sit just off the coast of Normandy, close enough to France that you can see the mainland on a clear day, yet they have never been part of France. They are not part of the United Kingdom either. What they are is harder to explain. These islands have been described as remnants of the Duchy of Normandy, a medieval political structure that shaped English history in 1066 and then fractured, leaving these small patches of land in a constitutional category unlike anywhere else in the world. Saint Helier, the capital of Jersey, has a population of 33,500. Saint Peter Port, the capital of Guernsey, has 18,207. The islands are small. Their history is vast. How did a scattering of islands in the English Channel end up with their own currencies, their own legal systems rooted in Norman law, and their own internet domain names? Why did Victor Hugo write one of his most famous novels here? And what happened when the German Army arrived in the summer of 1940 and found the British government had already left?

• 2. A Peculiar Constitutional Status

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  The term "Channel Islands" was not used officially until around 1830, possibly coined first by the Royal Navy as a collective name for the archipelago. Before that, these islands had been drifting through centuries of legal ambiguity. In 933, they were granted to William I Longsword by Raoul, King of Western Francia, and attached to the Duchy of Normandy. When William II of Normandy conquered England in 1066 and became William I of England, the islands came along as part of his holdings. The crucial break came in the years 1204-1214, when King John lost most of his French territories to King Philip II of France but held onto the Channel Islands. By the Treaty of Paris in 1259, Henry III formally surrendered his claim to the Duchy of Normandy itself while keeping the islands, governed as a peer and feudal vassal of the French king. Since around 1290, Otto de Grandson split the islands into two bailiwicks. They were never absorbed into the Kingdom of England, nor into the later kingdoms of Great Britain or the United Kingdom. Each bailiwick developed independently. They have been administered separately since the late 13th century. The Bailiff in each bailiwick is the civil head, the presiding officer of the legislature, and the head of the judiciary, all at once. This concentration of roles drew scrutiny in the early 21st century. The case of McGonnell v. United Kingdom, decided at the European Court of Human Rights, became one of the pressures that led to the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 in the UK, which separated the roles of the Lord Chancellor and replaced the House of Lords' judicial function with the UK Supreme Court. The Channel Islands' bailiffs still retain their historic combined roles. At formal dinners, the loyal toast in the islands was historically to "The Queen, our Duke," a reference to the islands' nominal connection to the old Duchy of Normandy.

• 3. The Occupation Years

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  On the 21st of June 1940, the lieutenant-governors of the Channel Islands were withdrawn, leaving the island administrations to manage alone as German forces approached. The British Government had demilitarised the islands that month. German troops landed between the 30th of June and the 4th of July 1940. Before they arrived, evacuation was underway. Out of 50,000 residents, 6,600 left Jersey. Out of 42,000, 17,000 left Guernsey. Thousands of children were evacuated with their schools to England and Scotland. The population of Sark largely stayed put. In Alderney, all but six people left. The German forces then built four prison camps on Alderney that housed approximately 6,000 people, of whom over 700 died. Some historians have described Alderney as the site of the only Nazi concentration camps on British soil, though others have pointed out that Alderney's precise constitutional status complicated that claim. Forced labour on the islands involved many Spaniards, initially refugees from the Spanish Civil War, later joined by Russians and Central Europeans. In Jersey alone, 65,718 land mines were laid. There was no resistance movement comparable to that of mainland France. The density of troops reached up to one German soldier for every two islanders. The physical smallness of the islands left no terrain in which a resistance group could hide. By the final months of the occupation, following the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the Royal Navy blockaded the islands. The population was close to starvation. Negotiations brought some relief: Red Cross parcels arrived on the supply ship SS Vega in December 1944. Jersey and Guernsey were liberated on the 9th of May 1945, the day after VE-Day. The German garrison in Alderney did not surrender until the 16th of May. The first evacuees returned on the 23rd of June, but people from Alderney could not begin returning until December 1945.

• 4. Finance, Trade, and a Complicated Independence

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  Jersey's potatoes are still exported, mostly to the UK. Agriculture, however, now contributes just 1.2% of Jersey's Gross Value Added, while financial services account for 39.4%, as of 2018 data. Jersey's GVA has fluctuated between four and a half and five billion pounds for roughly two decades. A rising population, from below 90,000 in 2000 to over 105,000 in 2018, combined with a flat GVA, has meant GVA per head fell from around 57,000 pounds to around 44,000 pounds per person over that period. Guernsey's economy tells a different story. With a stable population of around 66,000, Guernsey's GDP stood at 3.2 billion pounds in 2018, with GVA per head exceeding 52,000 pounds. Both economies grew into major offshore financial centres from the 1960s. When the UK joined the European Economic Community, the Channel Islands chose not to join as full members, though they were included in the Customs Territory of the European Community under Protocol Three. They were therefore not part of the 2016 referendum on EU membership. In September 2010, a Channel Islands Brussels Office was set up jointly by the two bailiwicks to maintain influence with EU institutions. Despite having only around 250,000 residents, the Channel Islands combined with the Isle of Man rank as the second-biggest source of foreign direct investment in the United Kingdom. Both bailiwicks issue their own banknotes and coins, which circulate freely alongside UK currency across the islands. Since 1969, Jersey and Guernsey have run their own postal administrations, with their own stamps valid only in their respective bailiwicks. It was not until the early 1990s that the islands joined the UK's postcode system, with Jersey using JE and Guernsey using GY.

• 5. Language, Culture, and Local Identity

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  Victor Hugo spent years in exile on these islands, first in Jersey and then in Guernsey, where he finished Les Misérables. Guernsey became the setting of his later novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer. A "Guernsey-man" appears in chapter 91 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. These literary associations point to something real: for much of their history, the Channel Islands were a Norman-speaking world. The Norman language predominated until the 19th century, when Anglicisation followed easier transport links and English-speaking settlers. Four dialects of Norman survive in local memory. Auregnais, the dialect of Alderney, became extinct in the late 20th century. Dgèrnésiais belongs to Guernsey; Jèrriais to Jersey; Sercquiais, an offshoot of Jèrriais, to Sark. Place names across the islands still carry Norse roots, particularly the -ey and -hou suffixes on island names, derived from the Old Norse words for island and islet. The island nicknames capture something of the local character. Guernsey people are les anes, "donkeys", a name they accept as a symbol of strength, though Jersey people read it as stubbornness. Jersey people are les crapauds, "toads", a reference to the amphibians that Jersey has and Guernsey does not. Sark residents are les corbins, "crows", visible from the sea on the island's coast. Alderney people are les lapins, "rabbits", for the island's warrens. The annual Muratti inter-island football match is considered the sporting event of the year, though broadcast coverage has reduced the crowds of spectators who once travelled between the islands for it. Jersey and Guernsey cricket teams are both associate members of the International Cricket Council and have played each other in the inter-insular match since 1957. In 2001 and 2002, the Channel Islands entered a combined team into the MCCA Knockout Trophy.

• 6. Religion and Settlement

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  Christianity arrived on the islands in the sixth century, carried by missionaries including Samson of Dol, Helier, Marculf, and Magloire. Jersey's evangelisation is attributed by tradition to St Helier; Guernsey's to St Samson of Dol. The islands remained within the diocese of Coutances from the sixth century until the Reformation. At the Reformation, they converted to Calvinism, driven by French-language pamphlets published in Geneva. Several attempts to move the islands to different dioceses, including Nantes, Salisbury, and Winchester, had little practical effect until an Order in Council of 1569 formally placed them in the diocese of Winchester. Anglicanism was imposed in the 17th century, but the islands returned to nonconformism through a strong adoption of Methodism. Episcopacy was not restored until 1620 in Jersey and 1663 in Guernsey. In the late 20th century, significant Catholic communities re-emerged with the arrival of workers from mainland Portugal and from Madeira, later reinforced by migrants from Poland and Eastern Europe. By 2015 statistics, 39% of the island population identified as non-religious. The grant of seigneurship over Sark from Elizabeth I of England in 1565 forms the basis of Sark's constitution to this day. Sark had been uninhabited until colonised from Jersey in the 1560s. And a Papal bull of 1483 decreed that the islands would be neutral in time of war, a privilege that enabled islanders to trade with both France and England until the Glorious Revolution, when an Order in Council abolished it in 1689.