At the beginning of the nineteenth century, despite 600 years of allegiance to the English Crown, a majority of Guernseymen still spoke the language and retained aspects of the culture of France, the Island's closest neighbour, but England's hereditary foe. However, by 1914 Guernsey had been transformed from an essentially francophone to anglophone community. In this first comprehensive academic study of nineteenth-century Guernsey, the author analyses this huge sea-change. She devotes particular attention to the role of migration in this transition, since Guernsey experienced both...

This book, based on extensive original research, provides an account of parochial poor relief in Guernsey from the Reformation to the twenty-first century, incorporating a detailed case-study of the parochial workhouse in the town of St Peter Port, and an outline of the development of Guernsey's modern social security system from its beginnings in the 1920s to the present day. Guernsey has had throughout much of its history a disproportionately large population for its size: in the early eighteenth century St Peter Port was on a par with English county towns such as Warwick and Lincoln....