Cider in the Channel Islands

The Channel Islands are Norman in law, in language and in agriculture, and cider reached them as part of the ordinary farming of the Norman world rather than as an import from England. What made the islands unusual was the concentration: on a land area of a few dozen square miles, a very large proportion of the cultivable ground went under apple trees.

The figures usually quoted for the end of the eighteenth century put something approaching a quarter of Jersey’s total area under orchard. That proportion should be treated as an estimate from contemporary observers rather than as a survey result, but every account of the island’s agriculture in the period agrees on the general picture: an island densely planted with apple trees, in enclosed fields bounded by earth banks, with a press house on most holdings.

The output went out through the harbours. Island cider supplied England, where it was landed at south-coast ports, and it supplied the victualling trade — including the Newfoundland cod fishery, in which Jersey merchants had a substantial interest — because cider kept better on a voyage than water and was cheaper than beer to load in a place with no barley to spare.

The characteristic island crushing arrangement is a circular granite trough with a granite runner wheel turned by a horse, and a great many of these survive in gardens, farmyards and museum grounds because granite is not worth breaking up. Pressing was by twin-screw timber press onto a built cheese, in the manner general across the Norman world.

The working vocabulary was Norman French. Jèrriais in Jersey and Guernésiais in Guernsey are varieties of the Norman language rather than dialects of standard French, and both carry a full orchard and press-house vocabulary of their own. Those words are recorded in island dictionaries and dialect studies, and they are among the better-preserved parts of a vocabulary that was largely oral everywhere else.

The islands are therefore an unusually good place to see what the Norman cider vocabulary looked like before standard French flattened it, which is a point of general interest for the history of cider terminology rather than a local curiosity.

A large family of West Country bittersweet apples carries the word Jersey in its name, and the assumption that these are Channel Island fruit is one of the most persistent small errors in English cider writing. The names are recorded in Somerset, Devon and Dorset, and the fruit is West Country fruit.

The derivation generally preferred is that the element is a corruption of a French descriptive term applied to a class of bittersweet apple, which was then heard and written as the familiar island name. That derivation is plausible and is the standard one, but it is a reconstruction rather than a documented borrowing, and it should be held as such.

What can be said with more confidence is the negative: there is no evidence that the Jersey-named West Country apples were brought from the Channel Islands, and there is a great deal of evidence that they were raised and named locally. The island connection is a folk etymology working on a familiar word.

The islands did not lose their orchards to neglect, war or fashion. They lost them to arithmetic. From the middle of the nineteenth century a series of higher-value crops became available to island farmers with access to fast steamer connections to English markets: early potatoes in Jersey, glasshouse tomatoes and flowers in Guernsey, and pedigree cattle in both.

An early potato crop out of a sheltered Jersey field reaches a London market weeks before anything grown in England, and commands a price that an acre of cider apples could not approach. Under those conditions an orchard is not a tradition; it is a field earning a fraction of what it could earn. The trees came out steadily from the 1840s onwards and the export trade in cider collapsed with them.

Duty is a secondary part of the story. Island cider had enjoyed favourable treatment entering England at various points, and changes to that treatment removed part of the advantage. But the decisive factor is the alternative crop, and the same logic operated later and more slowly in Herefordshire and Somerset when other enterprises came to pay better than orchards.

A small amount of cider making has continued and has been extended since the late twentieth century, alongside the conservation of island apple varieties, which had been left to a handful of old trees. Identification work on those varieties runs into the same difficulties as elsewhere: local names, no reference material, and fruit that looks different in a different season.

The physical remains are more substantial than the drink. Granite crushers, press beds and the earth-banked field pattern that the orchards were planted in are still legible in the landscape, and they are the principal evidence for how much of these islands was once under apple trees.