Editor’s Note: Dr. Thornton’s article, “The Isle of Man, Channel Islands and Statutes of the English Parliament, to 1640: Development and Change in Territorial Extent,” is forthcoming in Law & History Review.
My article on territorial extent in English statutes in period up to the mid-sixteenth century considers the changing ambition of English regimes and of members of the Houses of Lords and Commons. Its starting point is the pattern of reference to some of the smaller territories ultimately controlled by the English king: the Isle of Man (in the Irish Sea, between England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales) and Jersey and Guernsey (remnants of the duchy of Normandy in the English Channel). But the article’s argument leads into wider conclusions about the Anglo-centric perspectives represented in statute and other parliamentary business from the fourteenth century through to the middle decades of the sixteenth century.
This has both historiographical and more contemporary implications. A century ago, Charles Howard McIlwayn and Robert L. Schuyler debated the history of English and British parliamentary intervention in territories outside England and most particularly in the Americas, as a vital context for understanding the arguments of the parties that contested the rights of colonists in the period of the American revolution. Schuyler debunked McIlwayn’s suggestion that the British parliament’s interventions in the American colonies lacked precedent and were illegitimate and illegal, pointing to a pre-history of statutes with a broad territorial extent across the monarch’s realms, dominions and territories.
In subsequent decades, this stark opposition around the suggestion of an English / British parliament both confidently legislating for, and generally respected as sovereign over, all the monarch’s possessions has been nuanced, notably for example in the work of Jack P. Greene and Philip Lawson. Yet neither these more recent scholars nor McIlwayn and Schuyler spent much time considering the earlier precedents for the territorial extent of statute, instead concentrating mainly on the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those who have picked up this agenda, including A. F. Madden, have tended to pick out examples of ambitious territorial extent without considering the broader context for them. This my article attempts to do.
A more contemporary relevance is evident today in the unresolved and very immediate echoes of these earlier debates and silences in the Isle of Man and in Jersey and Guernsey, now Crown Dependencies. They are not part of the United Kingdom and are self-governing dependencies of the Crown. The UK government is, however, responsible for their defence and international relationships, and the Crown and its ministers are responsible, through the Privy Council, for their ultimate good government. Especially in the latter two cases, there has never been a full acceptance of the legislative reach of the UK parliament over territories that have never sent their own representatives there to join those from constituencies within the elements of the United Kingdom.
Recent authorities, nonetheless, emphasise the longstanding inclusion of the Isle of Man in particular in the territorial extent of English/British parliamentary legislation. This aligns with views of the territorial ambition of ministers of the crown and members of parliament in their operation of parliament’s role in receipt of petitions and especially in the shaping of legislation going back centuries. While contemporary authorities on Channel Island law, especially those in the islands themselves, are more cautious about the territorial extent of such legislation, it remains, at least by implication, the norm to assert that all these territories could be included by express provision in English/British statute law, and that there might be strong assumptions of inclusion even when they were not expressly named.
Yet my article demonstrates that the evidence for the period before 1640 does not support these arguments. Instead, the narrowly Anglo-centric instincts of the English parliament from the mid-fourteenth century to the 1530s are clear. It was only in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, in legislation spurred by jurisdictional and administrative imperatives in ecclesiastical matters as a result of the Break with Rome, that examples of wording inclusive for all the king’s dominions and territories begin to appear, and gradually become more consistent and explicit. Arguments about the significance of the constitutional revolution which accompanied the Break with Rome are therefore, to a degree, reinforced. The same pattern was also evident, in other spheres of legislation, when it came to taxation. But even then, after the 1530s, express mention of the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey remained exceptionally rare. And considering the wide range of statute law created from this period, through Elizabeth’s reign and into the seventeenth century, there was only tentative and limited change to the territorial extent of English statute law. These findings therefore highlight just how revolutionary it was for the act in conditional restraint of annates (passed in the third session of the Reformation Parliament, which convened in 1532) to reference not just the realm of England but all the king’s dominions. But equally they highlight just how much legislation in the rest of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century continued to claim relevance in nothing more than the English realm.