Guernsey's history: the piece of Normandy that stayed with the English Crown

Who held Guernsey before Normandy split apart

Rising seas cut Guernsey off from the continent around 6000 BC, as the English Channel formed. Neolithic farmers settled afterwards and raised dolmens and menhirs. Two carved statue menhirs survive, and the dolmen of L'Autel du Dehus contains a carved figure known as Le Gardien du Tombeau.

Roman-period traders used the harbour at St Peter Port. The wreck of a third-century Gallo-Roman cargo ship, nicknamed Asterix, was found there, and excavations on Kings Road turned up silver from England, Breton pottery and wine amphorae.

Tradition credits Christianity to Saint Samson, who came from the Kingdom of Gwent and later became abbot of Dol in Brittany. Benedictine monks from Mont-Saint-Michel founded a priory at St Michel du Valle, variously dated to about 962 to 968, on northern land that was cut off from the rest of the island at high tide until the nineteenth century.

The Norman connection starts in 933, when William Longsword, son and successor of Rollo, took the Channel Islands as part of territory annexed from the Duchy of Brittany. In 1020 Duke Richard II divided Guernsey between the viscounts of the Cotentin and those of the Bessin. When pirates attacked in the middle of that century, Duke William sent his esquire Sampson d'Anneville against them, and in 1061 he received half the western part of the island as the Fief d'Anneville. By then the island had been divided into ten parishes, each free fief had a manorial court, and civil order was regulated before William crossed to England in 1066. After Hastings he went on ruling Guernsey as part of Normandy, a possession separate from his English kingdom.

Why Guernsey's seigneurs stayed with King John

King John lost mainland Normandy to Philip II of France in 1204. Pierre de Préaux, Lord of the Islands since 1200, fought for John and was beaten at Rouen; when he surrendered on 24 June 1204, his lordship of the Channel Islands passed on paper to France. For a short time the islands belonged to neither side. Norman seigneurs across the duchy had to choose an allegiance, and many chose whichever power offered them more. The seigneurs of Guernsey confirmed their loyalty to the English king.

John's answer, as island tradition records it, was a promise that the islands could go on governing themselves under their own laws and customs. The privileges are attributed to the so-called Constitutions of King John, which the Wikipedia article on the Bailiwick calls "a legendary document", and successive monarchs have confirmed the island's liberties by referring to it. The islands were never joined to the Kingdom of England by any Act of Union. In 1259 the Treaty of Paris settled the matter: Henry III renounced his claim to the Duchy of Normandy and kept the Channel Islands. Around 1290 the governor Otto de Grandson split the archipelago into two bailiwicks, and every island except Jersey went into the Bailiwick of Guernsey.

Britannica traces the courts from that settlement. The warden set over the islands could not hold the king's sessions regularly on all four of them, so on Guernsey his judicial work passed to a bailiff, who came to preside over a Royal Court in which twelve jurats gave judgment. That court, in Britannica's words, "has survived substantially in this medieval form", applying a law founded on the custom of Normandy and local usage. Guernsey defended its right to the Coutume de Normandie against English common law in the quo warranto pleas of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

The feudal layer is still observed. The Court of Chief Pleas sits once a year, and the Court of Chief Pleas (Guernsey) Law, 2004 still requires the seigneurs of the fiefs to perform suit of court. The island's government describes the monarch as "Head of State" in some documents and as "successor to the Duke of Normandy" in others, and no document explicitly defines the position.

How the Crown paid for island loyalty

Loyalty put Guernsey on the front line of every war between England and France. The Guernsey Militia is first mentioned as operational in 1331, and service in it was compulsory for every man on the island for about six hundred years. Raids by the exiled David Bruce in 1336 and 1337 came at the start of the Hundred Years War; from 1339 French forces held the island for two years and Castle Cornet for seven. In 1372 Aragonese mercenaries under Owain Lawgoch, remembered locally as Yvon de Galles, invaded in the pay of the French king, and island legend later turned the dark-haired soldiers into fairies from across the sea.

The Crown paid for the island's steadiness in privileges. Richard II granted a charter in 1394 that exempted the islanders for ever from English tolls, customs and duties, citing the loyalty they had shown. The island's liberties, customs and usages were written down in Le Précepte d'Assise in 1441. In 1483 Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull granting the "Privilege of Neutrality", under which "the Islands, their harbours and seas, as far as the eye can see" were neutral ground and anyone molesting islanders faced excommunication. A royal charter confirmed the neutrality in 1548. Island ships could now trade with France and England while the two were at war, and the taxes on that trade paid for the garrisons. The privilege lasted until William III abolished it because of privateering against Dutch ships.

An assembly of the island grew up beside the court. The Royal Court's own history of the States notes a document of 1481 suggesting a parliament existed, a weaker hint of one around 1429, and the first use of the name Les Etats in 1538. Its three estates were the Royal Court, the clergy and the constables of the ten parishes, and the Bailiff always presided. An Order in Council of 1605 revived it on the petition of the inhabitants.

Calvinist reformers crossed from the mainland in the mid sixteenth century, and in 1556, under Mary I, three women known as the Guernsey Martyrs were burned for their Protestant faith, together with the infant son of one of them. Bailiff Hellier Gosselin, who ordered the child's burning, fled the island to escape the outrage. Catholicism faded after Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558.

The Calvinist majority, and Charles I's refusal to pay for the island's defences, put Guernsey on Parliament's side in the Civil War. The governor, Sir Peter Osborne, held Castle Cornet for the king with Royalist troops, and the town of St Peter Port bombarded the castle built to protect it. Castle Cornet surrendered in December 1651 with full honours of war. Two Wikipedia articles disagree on its place in the war: the article on the island calls it "the last Royalist outpost anywhere in the British Isles to surrender", the article on its history "the penultimate Royalist stronghold to capitulate".

How Guernsey grew rich on other people's wars

The Newfoundland cod trade mattered to Guernsey until about 1700. After that, small island ships found smuggling paid better, and St Peter Port businesses bought in goods to sell to smugglers until the trade declined at the end of the eighteenth century. Legal privateering replaced it. Shipowners applied for letters of marque, turned merchantmen into licensed privateers and sent them after the shipping of France and Spain. Investors bought shares in a ship, an eighth for instance, and took a portion of the prize money after costs, so that many islanders grew rich without going to sea.

The wars also brought British money for defence. Construction of Fort George began in 1780 and finished in 1812, built for the extra troops sent against a feared French invasion. In 1806 the British government drained Le Braye du Valle, the tidal channel that had made the north of the island a tidal island, and the eastern end became the harbour of St Sampson's from 1820. The States asked the Privy Council for their own coinage in 1813; the first coins, issued in 1830, were struck by R. Boulton & Co. of Birmingham, and French currency stayed legal tender in Guernsey until 1921. From 1815 the States paid for roads by creating money free of debt.

In 1821 the island had 20,302 people, 11,173 of them in St Peter Port, and the population had doubled by 1901. Guernsey granite repaved London Bridge and many London roads, and hundreds of quarries opened in the northern parishes. Glasshouses built to grow grapes turned to tomatoes, a large industry from the 1860s. Victor Hugo arrived in exile on 31 October 1855, stayed fifteen years, wrote works including Les Misérables there and dedicated Toilers of the Sea to the island in 1866.

The island was strict about who counted as local. Between 1842 and 1880 it deported 10,000 people as vagrants, criminals or paupers who were not "local", among them local-born widows and children of "foreign" men and people who had lived on the island for more than fifty years.

How English and elected deputies reached the States

The Royal Court and island officials used standard French from the medieval period into the early twentieth century, and merchants in St Peter Port spoke it too. The countryside spoke Guernésiais, a variety of Norman that the Guernsey Language Commission traces to the Vulgar Latin of the region and to a thousand years of rule by the dukes of Normandy. Georges Métivier published the first dictionary of it in 1870, and Thomas Martin translated the Bible and the whole of Shakespeare into it. English arrived with the soldiers of the garrison and with British incomers to the town. At the end of the nineteenth century English began to be taught in schools and used in court, and in 1926 it became an official language of the States.

The assembly opened to election at the same time. The two official accounts disagree on the date: the Royal Court's history of the States gives 1900 for the first election of deputies, nine of them on an island-wide vote, while the States' own parliament site dates the nine elected deputies to 1899. The Reform (Guernsey) Law 1948 took the jurats and the rectors of the parishes out of the assembly, and the table below follows the number of deputies.

The number of deputies was cut to 38 in 2016. A 2019 amendment to the Reform Law replaced the districts with a single island-wide constituency, and the first election under it, in October 2020, returned 38 deputies on an 80% turnout.

What happened when Britain left Guernsey undefended

How the island emptied in a week

On 15 June 1940, after the fall of France, the British government decided the Channel Islands had no strategic value and would not be defended, and did not tell Germany. The last troops left on 20 June, quickly enough to leave bedding and half-eaten meals in Castle Cornet. Parents had been told on 19 June to register their children for evacuation and say goodbye the next morning. By 21 June the island government saw that it could not ship out everyone who wanted to leave, and its message turned against evacuation. The Wikipedia history of the occupation counts 5,000 schoolchildren and 12,000 adults evacuated from a population of 42,000; its article on the island gives the total as 41,000. VisitGuernsey puts it as four-fifths of the children and almost half the population.

On 28 June 1940 German bombers attacked St Peter Port, where lorries lined up at the harbour to load tomatoes for England were taken for military vehicles. VisitGuernsey records 33 civilians killed. Two days later a reconnaissance pilot, Hauptmann Liebe-Pieteritz, made a test landing on the deserted airfield, Luftflotte 3 concluded from his report that the islands were undefended, and a platoon of Luftwaffe airmen was flown in that evening. Inspector Sculpher of the island police went to the airport with a letter from the Bailiff declaring Guernsey an open island. Major Albrecht Lanz asked to be taken to the island's chief man, met the Bailiff and the president of the controlling committee at the Royal Hotel, and announced through an interpreter that Guernsey was under German occupation.

How the States governed under a Kommandant

The States had already changed shape. On 21 June 1940 they voted to hand the island's affairs to a controlling committee under the Attorney-General, Ambrose Sherwill, then 50, chosen over the 69-year-old Bailiff, Victor Carey. The Royal Court's history of the States describes the committee as a cabinet in all but name, each member running his own department, while the public sector grew enormously. The Kommandant ordered on 2 July 1940 that every law the States passed would need his assent and that German orders would be registered as legislation. Clocks moved to Central European Time, traffic moved to the right, and islanders working for the Germans were paid in occupation Reichsmarks.

Hitler signed a directive on 20 October 1941 to make the islands an "impregnable fortress". The sources give different shares of the Atlantic Wall for it: one twelfth of its resources in 1942 and a decree of 10% of its steel and concrete in the occupation article, over 20% of its materials in the history article, which adds 47,000 cubic metres of concrete poured for gun bases. Four captured Russian 305 mm naval guns went into Batterie Mirus.

Who was deported and who went hungry

In September 1942, on Hitler's orders, residents born outside the islands and men who had served as officers in the First World War were deported to camps in south-west Germany, at Biberach an der Riss and Laufen among others. The Wikipedia article on the island puts the number taken from Guernsey at over 1,000; of 2,300 deported from all the islands, 45 died before the war ended. Three islanders of Jewish descent were sent to France and on to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Radios were confiscated the same year, and islanders hid sets or built crystal receivers to hear the BBC.

Some protest was public. When the bodies of 21 sailors and marines from HMS Charybdis washed ashore after its sinking on 23 October 1943, around 5,000 islanders attended the funeral and laid 900 wreaths, and later military funerals were closed to civilians. Seventy-five islanders escaped from Guernsey during the occupation, about 1,400 were sentenced for breaking the occupiers' laws, many for ordinary crimes, and at least nine Guernseymen sent to continental prisons did not return.

After D-Day the Allies bypassed the islands and the supply route through France was cut. By the winter of 1944 islanders and soldiers alike were close to starvation. The Red Cross ship SS Vega reached the islands in December 1944 with food parcels, salt, soap and medical supplies, and made five further trips. On 9 May 1945 HMS Bulldog arrived at St Peter Port and the German forces surrendered on board at dawn.

How the occupation has been judged since

The island's conduct is contested, and the dispute is recorded here without a verdict. The subject stayed quiet until wartime archives were released in the 1990s and Madeleine Bunting published The Model Occupation, which argued that islanders "did not fight on the beaches" and that more than half the population worked for the Germans. Charles Cruickshank, the official historian of the occupation, defended the island governments, writing that "they carried the administrative war into the enemy camp on many occasions". In November 1946 the Home Secretary told the House of Commons that most collaboration allegations lacked substance; twelve cases were considered and the Director of Public Prosecutions ruled out prosecution.

How Guernsey rebuilt itself after liberation

The controlling committee was wound up on 4 July 1945. The States decided that government by many committees answerable to the assembly suited peacetime better than a small cabinet, and created an Advisory Council beside them. Military government ended on 25 August 1945.

Constitutional reform had been planned in exile. Guernseymen in London formed the Guernsey Society in 1943, and a pamphlet published there by islanders, Nos Îles, influenced the 1948 reforms. The Reform Law of that year replaced the twelve jurats and ten rectors in the States with twelve conseillers holding office for six years. Alderney, emptied in 1940 and run as a communal farm for two years after the war, received its own States under a law in force from 1 January 1949, with its taxes collected into Guernsey's revenue and many of its services run by the States of Guernsey. Sark kept a feudal Chief Pleas until April 2008, when universal suffrage made it an elected assembly.

The occupation also cost the island much of its language. Children who left in 1940 fluent in Guernésiais came back five years later having lost much of it, and a phrase quoted in the occupation article says they "left as Guerns and returned as English". The 2001 census counted 1,327 fluent speakers, 2% of the population, and 70% of them were over 64.

The economy came back in stages. Rationing lasted until the mid 1950s, as in the United Kingdom. Fishing and quarrying never recovered, and by the 1960s the island exported 500 million tomatoes a year, until Dutch growers heated their glasshouses with cheap North Sea fuel and rising oil prices finished the Guernsey industry by the end of the 1970s. The States made it harder and dearer to move to the island. Finance grew through the 1970s and 1980s and spread into captive insurance and fund management in the 1990s, while tourism fell back in the 1980s as holidays in Spain became cheaper. The record gives Guernsey's population as 67,787 on 1 January 2024.