Given the peculiar constitutional position still occupied by the Channel Islands, it is all the more surprising that Tim Thornton’s is the first attempt at a definitive edition of the Latin charters (here with English translations) granted to Jersey by English kings and queens: sixteen texts, spanning the period from Edward III to James II. Crown dependencies, not parts of the British Commonwealth, never represented by MPs summoned to the Westminster Parliament, and from 1975 refusing to follow Great Britain into (or subsequently out of) membership of the European Community, the Islands continue to operate a legal system derived from the Coutume de Normandie, albeit leavened with doses of English Common Law. This, of course, with considerable advantage to their still flourishing financial services industry.
Thornton’s edition here follows his earlier publication of The Charters of Guernsey (2004), and with no small overlap, since through to 1465, when Edward IV issued a renewal of earlier privileges specifically excluding Jersey from its list of beneficiaries, each of the five earliest royal charters here presented was a joint award to Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney. In essence, through to the sixteenth century, what was guaranteed to the islanders by these charters was their existing customs and liberties (in detail undefined), combined from 1394 onwards (albeit with occasional lapses thereafter) of the right to trade in mainland England with the same privileges as native born Englishmen (i.e., distinct, say, from French or Irish, or other “alien” or second-class citizens). Even thereafter, there remained as much correspondence as divergence between the two bodies of charter text for Jersey and Guernsey, through to the 1680s, after which parliamentary statute replaced royal charter as the Islands’ constitutional basis.
For the Guernsey volume, thirteen of the nineteen charter texts spanning the period 1341 to 1668 were supplied from single-sheet originals surviving in the Greffe, or Guernsey state archive. For Jersey, by contrast, Thornton relies principally on copies enrolled at Westminster, either in the Patent (London, National Archives C 66) or earlier the French Rolls (C 76). He allows that only two of his sixteen charters survive as originals in Jersey’s own archive, in the case of the Richard II charter in very poor condition (unlike its almost perfectly preserved twin for Guernsey). In reality, even so, the final membrane of his Charles I charter (D/AP/Z/5), his James II (D/AP/Z/9), and a charter of Charles II (D/AP/Z/10, licensing import duties to pay for the St Helier school, 14 April 1669) are catalogued elsewhere as originals surviving in the island’s archive.
The many surviving originals for Guernsey are only occasionally employed to correct or supply omissions in the Jersey enrolments, and although both volumes must be at hand for proper understanding of their contents, the lack of any sequential numbering system for either makes it all the more difficult to flip between them, to establish what is common to both, and what distinct. Such numbering, and a tabulation of divergence, would have been most helpful. Moreover, in neither case are we presented with a full Lachmannian edition, noting variants between originals and enrolments. Where such variants occur, they are mostly minor and orthographic. The provision of clear photographic facsimiles in both volumes allows for the correction of a series of minor blemishes (for instance Jersey on page 12 line 10 fecimus notfecims’), or at page 150, 4 lines from the bottom of the page, where maritima should replacemaritina). Much of this is mere quibbling.
Even so, one would surely want to know that the privileges formerly granted to all four islands were renewed for the Guernsey group in 1465, but not for Jersey (at that time in effect under French occupation), a detail here noted only in passing and in respect to Richard III's renewal of the 1465 charter in 1483 (61). Likewise (71), it is surely significant that the 1486 renewal of Edward IV’s privileges was originally granted as two distinct charters, one for the Guernsey confederation alone, the other for Jersey and Guernsey collectively (Guernsey 36-7; Jersey 55), again a detail here unremarked.
If one senses an editor coping with persistent insular rivalries, and a certain unfamiliarity with standard editorial practice, then Thornton’s commentaries offer rich compensation. Here, for Jersey, he supplies a level of detailed contextualization sketched only briefly in the equivalent Guernsey volume. Indeed, his commentaries offer what is in effect a splendid overview of the islands’ story, updating much of what he has already offered in his history of The Channel Islands, 1370-1640 (2012). There is humour here (for instance at 172 commenting, from the 1660s, on Sir George Carteret’s “perhaps less (than) refined” accuracy in matters of audit or account), and an unrivalled knowledge of local circumstance.
Who, for instance, coming untutored and without Thornton’s commentary to Edward VI’s 1548 award of trading privileges in time of war, could possibly guess that this represents the tacit secularization of provisions first proposed by Pope Sixtus IV in 1481? In other words, one of the key privileges claimed by the Channel Islands, themselves fierce bastions of Protestantism, derives ultimately from the Donation of Constantine and papal claims to jurisdiction over the islands of the west. Thornton describes the award itself as one of “neutrality.” Here too, he walks a delicate tightrope across local sensibilities. In reality, despite allowing shipping from either France or England to continue to trade or seek haven in the Islands’ ports, neither the 1481 nor the 1548 provisions come anywhere close to a declaration of neutrality. On the contrary, the Islands remained (and remain) closely guarded possessions of the English crown, albeit with a degree of license to shelter from the worst consequences of Anglo-French hostility.
Likewise, in acknowledging the effects of Elizabeth I’s charters (Guernsey 1559, Jersey 1560) in, for the first time, explicitly upholding the authority of the Islands’ jurisdiction by bailiff and jurats, free from summons to English courts, Thornton chooses to make relatively little of the clauses of “exceptis” and “salvo” (1560 cc. 6, 8) safeguarding English sovereignty and the prerogative right to appeal or summons in cases customarily or by royal authority reserved to the English crown. A rogue bracket before the word exceptis here (at 130 c.6 line 17), like the editor’s decision to correct a previous local translation of the word civitates as “states” rather than “cities” (107-8), hints at modern complexities that to the unwary might slip by unnoticed.
Meanwhile, it remains, to say the least, highly questionable whether the 1560 privilege, renewed from 1604 onwards, guaranteed that “no writ from England was to have the power to bring any inhabitant of Jersey to an English court” (124). Whether regarded as bastions of loyal Protestant allegiance to the English (later British) crown, as nests of medieval brigandage, as a paradise for early-modern smuggling, or as legally constituted havens for the hard-earned proceeds of international capitalism, the Channel Islands retain their status as intriguing, albeit on occasion not entirely uncontroversial, anomalies.
Steering between their various reefs and whirlpools, Thornton is to be congratulated for bringing his ship safe to port, ready now to be unpacked by those capable of judging the forensic significance of its cargo. Thus is a thoroughly worthwhile project brought to completion.