Flag

Jersey Flag

In brief

The present Jersey flag is a red diagonal cross on a white background, with three gold leopards (or lions) on a red crest surmounted by a gold crown in the top triangle.

It has its origins in Jubilee year (1977), when the presidents of the States committees decided to commemorate the event with an officially recognised flag. This replaced the old, unofficial flag (the same basic design, but without crest and crown) in 1979.

The red saltire in a white field had been adopted as the Jersey flag at some time around the 1820s. The crest is the Jersey arms and the crown (a Plantagenet crown) is a reminder that the crest has been used by Jersey since the time of Edward I.

In more detail

The red diagonal cross on a white background is the flag of the Fitzgeralds, Earls of Kildare. It was adopted by the Kingdom of Ireland, then by the Knights of St Patrick, and later incorporated into the Union Jack.

The flag's earliest association with Jersey seems to be in Bowle's Universal Display of the Naval Flags of All Nations (1783). However, Captain John Tessin-Yandell claims the connection is made in French naval charts dating back to 1757.

Bowle drew on Dutch charts by Van Keulen (c. 1720), who drew on Allard. Allard himself drew on two plates in Le Neptune françois (Amsterdam 1693) where the argent, a saltire gules is labelled ierse at the top and irlandois at the bottom.

Major Rybot believes that Bowle was wrong to take ierse to be Jersey, since the Dutch word for 'Irish' is iers. But Tessin-Yandel says that ierse did not exist as a declension of iers before 1923, and in the context the correct declension would have been iersche anyway. Furthermore, the old French word for 'Jersey' was iersé.

The debate will continue until an association of the flag with Jersey from before 1783 is discovered. The flag is not featured on coins or in paintings, but it did begin to appear on pre-19th century state buildings, and at official functions from 1841.