The Channel Islands and the Courts of Westminster from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries

This Joan Stevens memorial lecture challenges the traditional account of the relationship between the Channel Islands and the Westminster courts, established by John Le Patourel, that after extensive activity there in the 1320s and 1330s, in 1368 a further attempt to take an island case to King’s Bench was made – only to be rebuffed. Thenceforth, even if King’s Bench did not see island litigation, other English courts attempted to exercise influence in the islands, in the form of Chancery, Star Chamber and Requests, and especially the privy council, as an expression of the ultimate judicial power of the king. Instead, it concludes that there was in Westminster no obvious source of threat to the local resolution of legal issues after 1341, and that the royal charter of liberties granted in that year governed the relationship between the crown and the islands in this regard as in others over succeeding centuries.