UNDER THE SWASTIKA

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21206, 31 August 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

UNDER THE SWASTIKA

The Channel Islands :: Outpost of Feudalism

(Sydney A. Clark in Christian Science Monitor.)

rpHE DUKE OF NORMANDY is King George VI. of Great Britain. His duchy consists of the Channel Islands, whose inhabitants look up to him not as their king but as their duke or prince. The wealthier, more Anglicised, more socially elite islanders may choose to ignore this distinction but the humble folk who grow tomatoes and gather kelp and take their cattle to pasture cling to it with tenacity, as I once found out by questioning several of them. Many of these folk speak French, or rather a rustic Norman, more naturally than English, and the traditions of England are as remote from their way of thought as they would be from the thought of a Norman peasant on the neighbouring mainland of France. The successive Dukes of Normandy have owned these islands, in a strictly feudal sense, for over a thousand years, from the time of Rollo in the early tenth century until the middle of the year 1940. Then came a man named Adolf Hitler and took them away. His henchman, Hermann Goering sent bombing planes to strafe mercilessly, despite the fact that they had already been demilitarised and civilians were in process of being evacuated. The Duke of Normandy, presumably with very heavy heart, abandoned his people because there was No Possible Way to Defend Them. It is by no means fanciful to assert that these islands, consisting of Jersey and the Bailiwick of Guernsey (which includes Alderney, Sark, Herm and Jethou) were one of the last outposts of medieval feudalism. When the mainland of Normandy was lost to the British crown in the time of King John Lackland (about 1200), the islands elected to remain loyal and the King-Duke promised in return that they should have perpetual enjoyment of their ancient laws, privileges, and exemptions. They were never incorporatd with Great Britain. Their people have never been subject to British laws nor to British taxes. Even the far-reaching income tax has passed them by. They elect their own public servants, bearing such un-English titles as Juratas, Greffiers and Connetables. They actually cling, in some degree, to the oddest of all feudal customs, the Clameur de Haro. This last is hard to believe and I almost blush to set it down in print, but I was assured, on the islands, that authentic cases ot this Clameur had been heard and witnessed very recently. The Clameur de Haro is a vocal appeal to Rollo, the first duke, the word Haro being an abbreviated

form of Ah Rollo. An islander believing himself to be a victim of trespass or damage by a neighbour, a marauder, or an impersonal corporation, falls on his knees and cries in a loud voice, “ Haro! Haro! Haro ! A l’aide, mon prince! On me fait tort! ” (Help, my prince, I am being wronged.) This is an automatic injunction, as legal and binding as any court order in any country. The alleged trespass or harmful practice must be halted until the Jurats and the Duke’s bailiff can determine the merits of the case. Almost everything about the islands is Quaint, Haphazard, Charming. One can only find reason in it by searching tradition. Weights, measures, and coinage are different in Jersey and Guernsey, and each system is different from that of England. In the former island, for instance, the penny is marked not “ penny ” but “ 1/12 of a shilling,” and even this is a concession, since it took, until rather recently, thirteen Jersey pennies to make a Jersey shilling. In Guernsey it still takes twelves and a half pennies to make a shilling, and the penny is marked “ 4 Doubles.” It takes 4200 to make a British guinea. Signs and firm names of the islands were as interesting to me as the coinage. I. C. Fuzzey, Onesimus Dorey, E. J. Honey are conspicuous business names of Guernsey’s St. Peter Port, and the Guernsey Railroad Company, whose medieval tram cars lumber along the shore to St. Sampson, advertises itself not as a transportation company but as “ Iron Merchants; Specialty Kitchen Ranges.” I love to think of the ruddy cows of Jersey, whose delicious milk was a penny a glass in any farmhouse; of the flowered “ Walter Lanes ” of Guernsey banked solidly with primroses; of the high meadows of Aldnemey whence the world’s most ambitious skylarks soared into the blue with a song to shame the magic flute; of Sark, the Decoy of Every Romantic Artist of brush or pen. I suppose the dwellers in these lovely islands must accept their fate with what grace they can muster. Surely they cannot have thought it worth while to fall on their knees and shout their Clameur de Haro when the invader committed so gross a trespass. Their rightful lord was bound hand and foot by the evil of the times, and the new “ Duke,” whose sign is the swastika, is a machine. A machine has no heart and knows ac mere y.