[To the Editor Of the Seicreros.1 Sin,—As to the above,
let me say at once that I am sorry for having wholly without intention hurt the feelings of any Jerseyman. But I was not writing a constitutional or ethnic treatise, but only some casual gossip tending to show that there was a racial affinity (with all that that connotes) between the people of Jersey and part of the neighbouring country of France, but nothing more. That position cannot surely be denied.
Mr. Falle objects strongly to my "We have held." A loose generalization perhaps, for I am perfectly well aware that Jersey has never been incorporated into the United- Kingdom (any more than it has ever been a possession of France), but surely justifiable in a broad way when we remember Jersey's thousand years' subjection to the English Crown. The- words merely call attention to the English connexion. Moreover, Mr. Falk will remember that (according to Freeman's Norman Conquest) the British Parliament can, on emergency, legislate specially for both Jersey and Guernsey. As to language, if Norman-French is not French, what is it ? Though a Scot myself, I dare not take exception to the averment that the Scotch language is English—Northern English ; and in the same way Norman-French is one of the scions of the French linguistic stock. Eastern Normandy at all events was speaking the longue d'oeit in the tenth century. I hope I am not misconstruing Mr. Falle's remarks, but I seem to read in them a sub-suggestion that England is a sort of appanage of Jersey's, which irresistibly reminds one of a whilom minister of Little Cumbrae on the West of Scotland, who used to pray for the spiritual health of Great and Little Cumbrae and "the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland."
Among my alleged local errors are jacketed cows, cabbage hedges, long-tailed horses, and church services in French. Jacketed cows I have seen tethered, but I could hardly have been expected to know that they were expectant or actual mothers--an interesting fact typical of the efficiency of the islanders. Cabbages, six feet or more high, I have also seen, obviously planted to form -wind-breaks, if the term hedge is objected to. Mr. Falle does, I see, allow me a long-tailed horse or two, and now I have a confession to make. I have never attended a church service in St. Helier, but took my information about morning services in French from a little book on the Channel Islands by C. B. Black, which states of St. Helier's church "at 11 a.m. the service and sermon are in French." I am sorry that Mr. Black has to be put right here.
I duly note that there are other military exploits and periods on which. Jerseyrnen pride themselves more than the repulse of the French in Royal Square, St. Helier, in 1781, but I seem to remember a picture in La Cohue Royale, which appears to indicate that Jersey still recalls the event with pride. Mr. Falk tells us, however, that Jersey exults more in a period when, according to an historian of his own name, the island was "rendered not much better than a haunt of bucaniers, a kind of Barbary in the very centre of Europe." Is not, by the way, my critic's history slightly at fault when he speaks of Jersey's having resisted Admiral Blake for "seven months " ? Blake landed troops under Major-General Haines in St. Ouen's Bay on October 22nd, 1651, and Sir George Carteret capitulated in Elizabeth Castle on December 15th, lass than two months afterwards.
But though I decline to cry Peceavi, I would beg Mr. Falle to believe that mine was no insidious attempt to undermine Jersey's legitimately prized political status, but merely a trifling tribute of admiration to a beautiful island and "a conquering people."—I am, Sir, &c., M. J. C. MEIKLEJOHN.
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