Rose-Marie Crossan

An account of poor relief in Guernsey from the Reformation to the twenty-first century, incorporating a detailed case-study of the St Peter Port workhouse and an outline of the development of Guernsey's modern social security system. 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 townof 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. Moreover, since Guernsey was outside the jurisdiction of the Westminster Parliament and retainedcultural affinities with France, the island developed its own social welfare regime which was closer, in some respects, to continental regimes than it was to the English Poor Law model. The differing nature of welfare regimes, how they arose and and how they differ is a major focus of interest amongst historians of social welfare; besides being a fascinating local study, the book has much to contribute to the wider history of social welfare in Britain andEurope. Rose-Marie Crossan completed her doctorate at the University of Leicester and is the author of Guernsey, 1814-1914: Migration and Modernisation (The Boydell Press, 2007). .

First scholarly study devoted to Guernsey in the nineteenth century, as it changed from a francophone to an anglophone society. In the early nineteenth century, despite 600 years of allegiance to the English Crown, a majority of Guernseymen still spoke a Franco-Norman dialect and retained cultural affinities with France. By the eve of World War I, however,insular society had turned predominantly anglophone and was culturally orientated towards England. In examining this sea-change, the author focuses particularly on the role of migration, since the Island experienced both substantial outflows [to North America and the Antipodes], and substantial inflows [from Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Hampshire and Cornwall; the Irish province of Munster, and the French départements of La Manche and Les Côtes-du-Nord]. The author investigates push- and pull-factors influencing the various migrant cohorts, and evaluates the reception they met from the insular authorities and population at large. Whilst showing that both British and Frenchmigrants, in their different ways, advanced the process of anglicisation, she sets their contribution in its proper perspective against the host of less tangible forces which had first initiated anglicisation and were hastening it on irrespective of the migrant presence.