Where did the name Guernsey come from?

No one seems to know with any certainty where or when the word Guernsey originated, or Jersey for that matter, though we all know where New Jersey comes from! And Sarnia too, that we all believed for a long time was the Roman name for the island, seems to have been their name for Sark…possibly. Few people who live in the town of Sarnia, Ontario realise where their town name originated, though the links to Guernsey through Major General Isaac Brock are obvious. And now it appears that our island was originally called Lisia. I like this word… thought it might be a good name for my first grand daughter who is yet to be conceived, as I write! I Googled it and found nothing of note but since Charles Parkinson’s (C. Northcote Parkinson’s son) book “Lisia” has just been published, I’m expecting more Googlable entries sometime soon. Charles Parkinson puts forward the theory that Guernsey may have been Vorti"gern"'s island. This could very well be true but my explanation below is the one that I thought most plausible and until I've read "Lisia" it's still my favourite!

Guernsey is the name that the island acquired at some point after the Romans left and before we were part of the conquering force of William of Normandy in 1066. Many people believe that the name meant “green island” and it is true that “ey” is a common ending meaning island that comes from Old Norse but I can’t find any resemblance between any Nordic word for green and “guern”. Rollo the Viking, from the early 10^th century (and his predecessors) who gained Normandy from the Franks, brought the Nordic language with him and many of our local place names and common words have indisputable links to Old Norse, such as Variouf, meaning werewolf and vraic, meaning seaweed.

So, “Guern” is quite possibly derived from a Nordic word and there is a word in Old Norse, “horn” that means corner. This word is essentially the same nowadays in Norwegian (hjorne), Swedish (horna) and Danish (hjorne). It would make some sort of sense that ancient seafarers would name islands after something that was recognisable and Guernsey certainly does have two definable corners on its south coast, at both the western and eastern ends. St Martin’s Point is almost a perfect right angle and, coming in from the WSW from Brittany’s NW extremity (Ushant), this is the logical route for anyone wishing to head North towards Britain and NW Europe, via sheltered parts of the coast. I can imagine a mariner being given sailing directions to Guernsey….”Head west leaving the coast of France just out of sight on your right until you see the island with the corners and turn left there at the second corner. A mile or so up the coast is a sheltered spot where you can stay”. This place is now our main port, St Peter Port. I have done this trip many, many times and I know what a relief it is in bad weather to turn almost 90deg to port, after getting into the white sector of the light at St Martin’s Point, knowing that you will be able to anchor safely in less than an hour. Using the word corner would also be used if a ship arrived from the east, as you would still have to turn, this time to starboard, after the islands of Sark and Herm (and their outlying rocks) are cleared.

I rather like this explanation (I found parts of it on an obscure website a few years ago that I have now lost) for the origin of our island name.

Now I come to the contentious use of the word guernsey and its derivatives, for that woolly jumper that we all know and generally love or hate in equal measure….!

There has been an awful lot of heated debate on whether the word “gansey” comes from Guernsey or whether it comes from the Gaelic geansaidh, or the modern Norwegian word for sweater, “genser”. I have come to believe that they are all related but not necessarily  in the way most people might now read on the internet.

I have spent far too much time in recent weeks googling any and every site I could find, as well as reading umpteen lengthy forum posts on my favourite knitting site, Ravelry which has thousands of keen guernsey/gansey knitters all over the world. I also spoke at some length with our island’s foremost authority on Guernsey costume, Gillian Lenfesty. So, here, eventually is my maybe not so woolly theory.

Starting at some sort of beginning of Guernsey’s knitting history… the island has most certainly been a very important staging post for seafarers ever since any sort of sea trade began between S Europe, the Med and the N European countries. The small ships, vulnerable to bad weather, would shelter at any suitable place en route and Guernsey is perfectly situated for such a stop,  its natural harbour on the east coast, just a reasonable day’s sail from Ushant to the WSW, the south coast of the UK to the north, or Normandy to the NW. It’s also highly probable that there was a fair bit of trade, both imports and exports, over the centuries and it’s well documented that the craft of knitting also arrived in the island from Europe, at some point in the 14^th century.

Guernseyfolk have always been resourceful. As a small island, dependent on the outside world for much of our needs, we have to be. We certainly have our place in history, not all of it as well known as it jolly well ought to be! For instance, did you know that we were once (in the mid 19^th century), the world’s largest producer of marmalade? Keiller, Dundee had a factory here. It was all to do, yet again, with some very silly tax laws in the UK where sugar was taxed, but not goods produced from sugar, like…marmalade. After a while, the UK government saw sense and changed the law. That particular industry in Guernsey then declined but the island still abounds with old ceramic jamjars bearing the name of Keiller.  Anyway, ever resourceful, we turned our sugar cooking skills to sweetmaking.  We also have the world’s first postbox, but these are not being further discussed here!

So, for sure, we had a very well established knitting tradition by the 15^th century, both Guernsey and Jersey producing fine items, notably elaborately patterned stockings. These were knitted in the round on four or five fine needles and were worn by the nobility of Europe, royalty even. Raw fleeces were imported, as we had few sheep, then spun and dyed locally. Guernsey knitting was generally in one colour (indigo) and fairly coarse, whereas Jersey produced finer items using more colours. Mary, Queen of Scots was wearing stockings knitted in “Jerzie” when she went to the scaffold.  Around this time, knitted goods from Guernsey that were a present from  Leonard Chamberlain, Governor of Guernsey, to the monarchy, included stockings and wastcotes, among other items. A wastcote in those days referred to a short, long sleeved, tight fitting garment, not the waistcoat as we know it today. This is all well documented.

The market for fine knitted woollen items went out of fashion around the end of the 17^th century, after more than 300 years, when silk became the preferred choice of the nobility of Europe. The Channel Islanders however, continued to produce finely knitted garments, called wastcotes in England, for the working men on land and sea. There are numerous references, dating from 1629 (Heylin), to the particular type of knitted garment worn by the menfolk of Guernsey. Another reference,  by a travel writer from 1838 (Mudie), notes that the Islandfolk produced a type of coarse woollen knitted fabric that is worn by “sailors in seaports in most parts of the world”. It is clear from this that this type of knitted jumper was already very well known and widely spread  by this time and it is also reasonable to suggest that the influence was spread by seafarers who are far more likely to travel. Farmers tended to stay more or less put!

Now, I have come to the conclusion that these garments didn’t have a special name at the time. Why would they? But, and I’m no etymologist, it is suspected that somewhere along the line, someone, in some seaport somewhere, asked a Guernseyman what he was wearing. With the obvious language difficulties, because our locals generally only spoke Patois at the time, (a Norman French dialect), it is reasonable to suppose that this man would have used the word Guernsey as an answer, not exactly to describe what he was wearing but just to explain where he came from. I can just imagine some foreigner asking me something I couldn’t understand at all and my response would be to put my hand on my chest and say “Guernsey”. How he pronounced the word, I don’t know but if he said it to a Cornishman for example, then it may very well have been repeated as “garnsey”. Cornwall is practically next door to Guernsey, well around 75 miles away, so our seafolk had been trading for centuries.

Cornwall as a source for guernsey knitting is without dispute. Some of their intricate patterns are also found in the ancient family patterns that existed on our own west coast of Guernsey. It is entirely possible that a guernsey was exchanged or given as a gift or maybe a Guernsey fisherman married a Cornish girl? Whatever it was, it happened a long time ago and nobody wrote it down. Why would they?

Now the Cornish fishermen also fished and traded around the coasts of Britain and Ireland. Just a thought, but if a Cornishman pronounced his wonderful garment as “garnsey” and then turned up in a NE port of the UK, the locals there may well have turned it into “gansey” (How do southerners pronounce bath, compared with northeners?). Guernsey also had very strong trade links with the East coast of the UK (actually around most of the coast as well as across the Atlantic) and our seafarers wore their woollen wastcotes wherever they were so it’s equally possible that the language problem caused the folk of, for example, Yorkshire to think that pointing at your chest and saying Guernsey was also the name for your clothes. Who knows how the exchanges went? Again, nothing was written down. Guernsey ships were regularly visiting the NE ports, from 1780 at least, to load coal for use in the new, efficient brick fireplaces that had replaced the old “walk in” hearths, but this is an aside...

What we do know is that a distinctive type of finely knitted, dark navy, upper body garment, knitted in a very similar style, commonly  began to appear, from sometime early in the 19^th century, in many ports around the British Isles and beyond and that this garment was called a garnsey, gansey, ganzy or geansaidh (Gaelic).  It’s inconceivable that all these names, so similarly pronounced,  miraculously appeared, scattered around thousands of miles of coastline, at roughly the same time. Wouldn’t it make more sense that the name originated from just one place? Note that I haven’t said that we called the garment a guernsey at this time and I don’t think we did. I think the name “guernsey” came along rather later…possibly around 1851, when it first appears according to the OED and when the type of garment was well established in coastal areas all around the British Isles, each with its own evolved pattern and version of the name though many of the patterns are very similar to some of the original Guernsey family designs.

On a note that I touched on at the beginning of this piece, I have read that Northerners believe the word gansey comes from the Norwegian word for tunic. The word for tunic in all the Scandinavian languages, as well as in Old Norse is actually close to kirtle and a jumper is "trollja" or similar. Genser is only seen in Norway and it means sweater. Sweater is a relatively new word that was given to a garment worn by rowers in the late 19^th century. I can’t find a name for sweater anywhere else in Scandinavia. I believe that the Norwegians (great deep sea fishermen) called their garments after the geansaidh or gansey, not the other way round. And so with genser now appearing in Norway, the word Guernsey has just possibly further evolved and arrived back in the part of the world that it originated, but with a totally different meaning. Funny isn’t it?

 

*Many thanks must go to Gillian Lenfesty curator of the Guernsey Costume Museum at the National Trust of Guernsey for her permission to use many of the historical facts in this piece. She respectfully requests that they not be further reproduced without her permission.