When Lore supercedes Law

As you all know, I do go to the Channel Islands from time to time and I am starting to really enjoy my visits to these lovely islands. Not only are they beautiful, but the locals are unfailingly friendly and the more I get to know about the islands, the more fascinated I am by the strange mixture of France and England that you can see all over the place. I have decided that I want to find out a bit more about the history and traditions of the islands and so whenever I am there I try to make time to chat to the locals I meet and ask them to tell me all about the way of life in this part of Great Britain.

During my last visit, I discovered that an old tradition in Jersey, allowed the local people to take “time out” if they had committed a crime (hmmmm… interesting idea this….) and they could go and shelter in their nearest church for 8 days and while they were there, nobody could arrest them. Their families could visit them and bring them food while they were sheltering in the church. Then on the 9th day, the person had to make a choice either to submit to trial in the Courts, or to leave the island for good and take their chances somewhere else in the world. In order to allow people to make this choice, every church had a special path that went down to the beach, and while you were walking on this path you could not be arrested. The paths were called

“Les Perquages”, and you can still see this name on many of the street signs around the island. (There is that French influence again – I wonder if it was a French idea to have an official “get out of jail free” system?) So in olden times, ancient Lore superseded the Law of the land in Jersey. I mused over this for a while during my last stay in St Helier and wondered if it would be a good idea to introduce such a system nowadays? Maybe our MPs could all go and closet themselves in Westminster Abbey for a week and then hot foot it to Westminster Pier to catch a boat out of the UK, rather than having to hand back their expenses and possibly face trail? It would be a sort of latter day Dunkirk, but in reverse.

In fact I rather like the idea of disposing of our MPs by palming them off on the rest of the EU…