Anguilla’s 368-year old judicial system has evolved through three distinct phases:
1. The Period Before Union with St Kitts in 1825
2. The Period of Union with St Kitts
3. The 1967 Anguilla Revolution to Today
1. The Period From Settlement in 1650 until Union with St Kitts in 1825
In this article, we look at the first and earliest phase of the history and evolution of the court system in Anguilla. It is the 175 year period from the date of settlement in 1650 up to the union with St Kitts in 1825.
Anguilla was first settled in the year 1650 by runaway indentured servants from Barbados and small farmers from St Kitts escaping the heavy tobacco taxes, imposed there to pay for the defence of that island against French invasion. Poor as the soil of Anguilla was in comparison to St Kitts, they preferred the freedom offered by an island with no formal government establishment.
In 1666, some sixteen years after the settlement began, the leading members of the isolated and impoverished Anguillian settlers formed themselves into a self-appointed Council and elected Abraham Howell as their first deputy governor. For many years, this Council acted as an informal legislature, judiciary and executive for Anguilla. The power it exercised was not sanctioned by any local or regional statute or other law.
By contrast, Bermuda boasts the second oldest continually sitting legislature in the common law world dating back to 1621, the oldest being that of the colony of Virginia in America, 1619. In England, between 1653 after the dissolution of the ‘Rump Parliament’, and 1659 when the Rump Parliament was recalled, Oliver Cromwell ruled England as Lord Protector during the period known as the ‘Protectorate’. The UK Parliament therefore has been continuously sitting only since 1659. The earliest volume of the laws of Bermuda was published in 1719, though individual laws had been enacted for a century previously.
The earliest volumes of the laws of the Leeward Islands, published in 1740, include laws passed by the Assembly in Montserrat as early as 1668, indicating the antiquity of that island’s legislature. That for Nevis contains laws dating back to 1666. That for St Kitts, also published in 1740, contains earlier laws dating back to 1711, though there had been a legislature for nearly a century prior to that date.
In almost every other Leeward Island, Royal Patents were sent out from London for the appointment of a deputy governor, an island Council and an Assembly to make laws. The Virgin Islands was the only other colony that at first functioned without an Assembly. In the year 1773, the first half-hearted and generally ineffective Assembly was established for Tortola. It took another ten years before the first Act of the Virgin Islands legislature was assented to by the Governor in Chief in Antigua. Generally, the powerful planters of Tortola sabotaged the Assembly, as they were suspicious of any development that challenged their primacy over their slaves and their properties. We can safely assume that the same motive was at work in the lack of any enthusiasm in the Anguilla land-owners to demand a formal legislature for Anguilla.
In Anguilla, for nearly 175 years after the island’s settlement, there was no lawfully constituted Assembly to make laws for the people. When in 1825 the first laws were passed specifically for Anguilla, they were made by the Assembly in St Kitts. This was 175 years after the settlement began in 1650. Such a degree of neglect by the colonial authorities was unique in the West Indies. The first legislature to be legally established in Anguilla, by which the people’s representatives made laws for the island, came about as recently as the year 1976, or 326 years after settlement.
The earliest Anguilla Councils were self-appointed and were merely tolerated by the colonial authorities in Antigua. In later years, the Governor-in-Chief invariably confirmed the local appointees, and never interfered in the affairs of the Anguilla Council, as he frequently did in the more prosperous and consequential colonies of Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat. He touched on Anguillian affairs only when there was an appeal from a decision of the Anguilla Council, which he would often pass on to the Secretary of State in London for a ruling, since he exercised very limited authority over the Anguilla Council. The result was that, throughout this early period, the common Anguillian man and woman endured the unregulated government of their Council of local, invariably white, planters, without the benefit of any real supervision by the colonial authorities. There was no Assembly to enact statutes under which the people could be governed. Under the colonial regime of the day, no law enacted in one colony could apply in another. The truth is that Anguilla was too poor, and of no consequence to the colonial authorities, since it contributed nothing to the Crown to merit any expenditure of time or money on its administration. The result was that up until the year 1825, the Anguilla Council, in effect, acted as the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government of Anguilla, without any formal constitutional or statutory authority.
In the absence of a legislature to enact laws for good government, a deputy governor of Anguilla was obliged to rely for his authority on his personal standing in the community, not to mention his physical prowess. An English historian, writing in 1707, nearly sixty years after settlement began, described the settlers of Anguilla this way,
Their business . . . was to plant corn, and breed tame cattle, for which purpose they brought stock with them. They were poor and continue so to this day, being perhaps the laziest creatures in the world. Some people have gone from Barbados, and the other English Charibbee Islands, thither; and there they live like the first race of men, without government or religion, having no minister nor governor, no magistrates, no law, and no property worth keeping. If a French author is to be believed, . . . ’The island is not thought worth the trouble of defending or cultivating it’.
Regular periods of drought; frequent hurricanes; and a thin, poor and unproductive soil offered limited opportunities for growing the cash crops that flourished in St Kitts and Antigua. The people were further impoverished by the devastations brought by the wars between the English and the French. Only the keeping of small stock such as goats, and subsistence farming of such hardy crops as maize, sweet potatoes, and pigeon peas, could ensure the survival of the people. Fishing added some protein to their diet. Goats were mainly sold for cash in St Kitts and Antigua, or were slaughtered on special occasions. The risky enterprises of privateering during times of war, and the continuous smuggling among neighbouring islands, brought into the island a limited amount of coin. Laziness was no part of the hardy Anguillian nature. No one could prosper, far less grow rich, in such adverse conditions.
As the Governor-in-Chief said of the governor of Anguilla in a 1724 dispatch, “If his cudgel happens to be one whit less than a sturdy subject’s, then good night, governor!” The result was that Anguillians lived, worked and died through the late seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the early nineteenth centuries without the benefit of any legal system for their government.
In the 1730s, Anguilla’s reputation for lack of a judicial system and any form of government was at its lowest point. In 1734, Governor-in-Chief William Mathew remarked on the lack of law and a properly constituted method for its enforcement in Anguilla. He complained that he did not know what to do with the inhabitants. “They live, he wrote, “like so many bandits, in open defiance of the laws of God and men.”
The first effort to create an Assembly for Anguilla to make laws for the island, then classed among the Virgin Islands, was an initiative of Governor Mathew in 1734. As he wrote to the Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations, the people of Anguilla were in continuous property disputes. In the absence of a court system, he wrote, the stronger party always had the better title. Some sort of Court was required for citizens to have both a fair hearing and also a remedy against wrongs done to them. Additionally, there was no provision for the trial of criminal cases. Offenders could not be prosecuted. Governor Mathew gave as an example a case of a person accused of murder and brought to St Kitts for trial. There, he was tried and convicted of murder. When he broke out of jail, he could not be re-arrested as the Attorney-General advised that his trial in St Kitts for an offence committed in the Virgin Islands was illegal. His effort at establishing both a court and a legislature for Anguilla came to nothing.
For the next seventy years until 1825, Anguilla continued to have no legally established judicial system. All members of the Council were by the mid-eighteenth century appointed as Justices of the Peace. A committee of them sat to adjudicate disputes and to hear complaints, and imposed such penalties and fines and gave such decisions as seemed proper to them. Appeals from such decisions of the Council lay informally to the Governor in Antigua, but this right was seldom exercised.
Next week we will look at Part 2. This is the second phase of the history and evolution of the court system of Anguilla, the 142-year period from union with St Kitts in 1825 up to the Anguilla Revolution of 1967.
