It only remains to be added that the people at large were not at all warmly attached to either of the parties to the Civil War. The language of the majority was an old form of French, now reduced to the condition of a patois; the more educated classes studied the laws and language of France. The proceedings of the Courts and the services of the Church were conducted in modern French, and the sympathies of the community were divided between a mundane attachment to England, and a religious leaning to the creed of the Huguenots, of whom a great number had sought refuge on their shores. Hence the Jersey folks were indifferently submissive to royalty, the only form of English government of which, till these days, they had heard; but they by no means shared the High-Church fervour which had animated the late unfortunate King. Their ultimate motive, as is common to human nature, was for their own interests; and although the influence of the Carterets had kept them, for the most part, nominal followers of the cause of royalty, men like Michael Lempriere and Prynne had good reason for believing that they would, in the long run, favour those who seemed the best friends to Jersey. Let them not be blamed for this. Their love for England was very much founded upon fear of France. By observing the attitude of the Scottish borderers of a slightly earlier period, an Englishman of the seventeenth century could imagine the attitude of the Jersey mind towards the "Normans," by which name they were accustomed to designate their feudal and aggressive Catholic neighbours the Lords and Ministers of the French Kingdom. Even as the Grahams and Scotts of Tweedside stood at arms against each other on either bank of the dividing stream, so did the de Gruchys and Malets, the Le Feuvres and de Quettevilles, on either side the Channel. The danger that was nearest was the most formidable; and the Channel Islanders were ready to side with England much as the Saxon Scots of the Lothians came to make common cause with the Celts of the Highlands. These explanations may appear tedious: but the reader is implored to pardon them; for without such he could not realise the passions which are exemplified in this little story. Long exposed to invasion, the Jerseymen of the middle ages had handed down to their descendants an abhorrence of France which was fomented by the stories of persecution brought to them by Huguenot refugees; and which, indeed, has hardly yet completely died out among the rural population. Thus sentiment and interest kept the islanders attached to England by a two-fold cord; careless whether their immediate leaders were Cavaliers, as in Jersey, or Parliamentarians, as in the neighbouring island of Guernsey, where the royal Governor was beleaguered in Castle Cornet.