I can imagine some of you guys might actually have liked living under that regime, as there was virtually no taxation, and you were obliged by law to keep a musket to defend the island against pirates and the French
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,17129-2403182.htmlOur correspondent reports from Sark, where not all the residents wanted Europes last feudal regime to be toppled.
FOR an island that has just toppled the last feudal regime in Europe, there is a disappointing lack of severed heads on pikestaffs around Sarks rocky little harbour.
There is no blood on the unpaved lanes that pass for streets on this tiny, car-free island. And Michael Beaumont, the deposed overlord, is still holding court in his beautiful 17thcentury manor, not mouldering in Sarks primitive two-room lock-up.
Indeed, life appears as serene as ever in what will soon become the worlds newest democracy. Tourists still arrive on the Guernsey ferry to ride in its horse-drawn carts; the 600 Sarkees still greet strangers with extravagant friendliness; the sun still shines on the neat stone cottages with their gorgeous views across the Channel.
You would never think that this Crown dependency has just been rocked by revolution, but it has. Last week it agreed to abolish 450 years of feudal rule and introduce universal suffrage. Mr Beaumont will be stripped progressively of his ancient powers and privileges. Eventually, he could lose even his right to keep the islands only pigeons and unspayed female dogs, and anything washed up on its shores.
But there is no jubilation because this was the most reluctant of peasants revolts. The serfs were mostly content with their lot. They did not hanker for democracy. It was bequeathed to them in the name of human rights, and championed by two billionaire knights the Barclay twins who live in a mock-Gothic castle on the next-door island.
Nobody wanted to change, the island as a whole was perfectly happy with the way things were going, said Mr Beaumont, 79, a genial, old-school gentleman who fails dismally to live up to the image of a despot. In gentle self- parody he displays letters in his lavatory addressed to His Highness Sire of Sark and King of Sark Island .
Scarcely an islander approached by The Times disagreed. Its been done in the name of human rights, but none of us ever felt our human rights were being trampled on, said Linda Williams, owner of a bed-and-breakfast. Nobody was baying for change, said Adrian Guille, Mr Beaumonts head gardener. Everyone appreciated the system and the way it worked.
Mr Guille was actually a leader of Sarks pro-democracy movement, but backed universal suffrage only from fear that London might impose something worse such as rule from Guernsey. Ultimately, for the same reason, even Mr Beaumont voted for his own demise.
Mervyn Peake wrote his Gothic fantasy the Gormenghast trilogy on Sark, and set his whimsical novel Mr Pye there. Sarks tale seems only a little less fanciful. In 1565 Elizabeth I, fearing French encroachment and marauding pirates, granted a Jersey nobleman named Helier De Carteret the right to hold Sark in perpetuity provided he settled 40 armed families on its five square miles and paid her a twentieth of a knights fee annually.
That right has passed down through the generations to Mr Beaumont, who became the islands 22nd Seigneur in 1974 after the death of his grandmother, Sybil Hathaway, the formidable Dame of Sark who famously stood up to the Germans when they occupied the island during the Second World War. Mr Beaumont, a former aircraft engineer, still sends the Queen a yearly cheque for £1.79, the knights fee. The descendants of the 40 original families known as tenants must still obtain his approval to sell their tenements , and purchasers must still pay him a thirteenth of the lands value a treizieme .
The tenants have to give the Seigneur a live chicken each year, or the monetary equivalent. They have to keep a musket to defend the island (most make do with a shotgun). Until now these hereditary landowners have also formed the islands parliament, the Chief Pleas, though 12 elected deputies were added in 1920. Mr Beaumont appoints the islands three senior officials: the Seneschal (judge), Greffier (court clerk), and Prévôt (sheriff).
There are umpteen other bizarre anachronisms. The Seigneur still has the front pew in the church, and the tenants each pay 2p a seat each year in pew rent. An islander who feels wronged by another can invoke the Clameur de Haro by throwing his hat to the ground, falling to one knee, and reciting the Lords Prayer in Norman French: the transgressor must immediately cease whatever he is doing pending arbitration. In theory, at least, a man can beat his wife provided he uses a rod no thicker than his finger and does not draw blood, and men may not knit in daytime when they should be in the fields.
Sarks strange ways might well have continued had two things not happened. First, it signed up to the European convention on Human Rights; nobody can quite remember when or why. Then in 1993 Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, owners of The Ritz and The Daily Telegraph, paid £2.3 million for Brecqhou, an even tinier island that is separated from Sark by a few yards of churning water and although the Barclays dispute it comes under Sarks jurisdiction. They proceeded to build a huge castle, with towers, battlements and helipad.
The Barclays had to pay a treizieme totalling £179,, which went straight into Mr Beaumonts pocket. The twins, who between them have three sons and a daughter, were even less amused by Sarks law of primogeniture obliging them to bequeath their property to the eldest brothers eldest son.
They took Sark to the European Court of Human Rights for breaching the Convention. Sark beat a partial retreat, saying that the Barclays could leave the property to any one of their children provided it was not divided. But the genie was out of the bottle. Sark, and its Whitehall overseers, realised that the island was breaching the convention in numerous other ways, not least in its feudal governance. Moreover the Barclays were now determined to change a system they thought oppressive and unacceptable.
In many ways that system appears a Conservatives dream a model of small government and individual responsibility. Sarkees pay no income tax nor VAT. The island has no full-time civil servants, no health, safety or employment regulations, no public health service and no pension or unemployment benefits; any islander who falls on hard times can seek help from a committee called the douzaine . What you earn you keep, what you use you pay for, one islander explained. People pitch in. Crime barely exists Sarks two part-time constables dealt last year with six alleged thefts, four cases of vandalism, three alleged assaults and two forced entries. The island does not even have street lights, and its entire annual budget is only £859,, financed largely by a modest property tax, duty on alcohol and tobacco, and licences for the islands 918 bicycles, 78 tractors and 61 horses. However, the human rights convention rendered the feudal status quo untenable and the battle to devise a new form of government has been long and heated, with some tenants fighting furiously to preserve their special status.
The Barclays seldom set foot on Sark, and command little affection among the islanders, but they and their lawyers have weighed in with articles and full-page advertisements in the local newspaper bearing headlines such as Injustice and abuse of power under Sarks feudal system .
Late last year the Chief Pleas agreed to a parliament of 16 tenants and 16 elected representatives, but the Barclays objected and Whitehall told Sark to withdraw it. Finally, last month, the islanders were given a choice of a 28-member assembly elected entirely by universal suffrage, or one with eight places reserved for the tenants. By 234 to 184 the islanders opted for the former, and last week the Chief Pleas concurred.
Mr Beaumont will lose his vote in the new parliament, but the Barclays also want him divested of his powers to appoint officials, block ordinances for 28 days and levy the treizieme. We do not believe that a fully modern, democratic government should have such a constitutionally powerful but unelected and unaccountable figure at its heart, Sir David wrote to the Chief Pleas last month. The general consensus is that Mr Beaumont will end up as a mere figurehead. It s sad, he says. I just dont like to see heritage thrown away.
The Seigneur believes that the election of Sarks first fully democratic Chief Pleas next year will make not the blindest scrap of difference , but in fact the first big issue confronting it could change the island for ever. The one real grievance amongst Sarks serfs is that they all have to lease their properties from the 40 tenants .
They want the right to buy the freeholds so they have security. That would mean breaking up Sarks hitherto indivisible tenements , making new development possible right across a delightfully unspoiled island, but a democratic parliament might just approve a reform that a feudal one blocked.
For that and other reasons Phyllis Rang, a tenant whose family has lived on Sark since 1565, is appalled by its embrace of democracy.
I never thought Id live to see it, she said. Our ancestors would be turning in their graves.
