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Shedding Feudalism, A Channel Island Fights Over Its Future

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Bianca
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« on: December 10, 2008, 11:31:00 am »










                                Shedding Feudalism, a Channel Island Fights Over Its Future


             



By SARAH LYALL
Sark Journal
Published:
December 9, 2008
SARK, Channel Islands

— No one ever claimed it was normal to have a feudal government run by a bunch of unelected landowners whose legislative sessions began with rousing recitations of the Lord’s Prayer in French. But the community always seemed to work, in its strange way.
 
“It’s the kind of place where you’d never be left in your house dead for four or five days,” said Peter Gabriel-Byrne, a singer-songwriter and sometime construction worker here.

Maybe not anymore. An angry dispute has poisoned relations among the 600 residents of this tiny island in the English Channel not far from the coast of Normandy as it prepares for its first democratic election, on Wednesday. The fight, over two different visions of Sark’s future, has ripped families apart and turned lifelong friends into implacable enemies.

The mood is “vicious,” said Amanda de Carteret, whose husband is descended from Helier de Carteret, Sark’s first hereditary ruler, or seigneur, who received the island as a feudal landholding from Queen Elizabeth I in 1565. “Everyone’s falling out with each other.”

All the Channel Islands are peculiar in their own ways, but Sark is particularly peculiar. Considered a crown dependency, though by and large independent of Britain, Sark has no cars, income tax, unemployment or social security.

There is one jail cell, rarely occupied. The only way to get here is by boat, weather permitting. People travel on the alternately dusty and muddy roads by bicycle and in horse-drawn carts, goods are transported by tractor, and every year the seigneur pays the queen a sum equal to one-twentieth of a knight’s service fee: £1.79, or about $2.65.

Until now, the legislature, known as Chief Pleas, has been made up mostly of the owners of the island’s 40 plots of land, called tenements (pronounced tai-ne-MONT, in a vaguely Norman French way). This year, however, the legislature voted to replace itself with a fully elected 28-seat body. Wednesday’s election will decide its makeup.

But the happy shift to democracy has been marred by extraordinary amounts of bad blood and ill will, reflected in the candidates running for Chief Pleas. On one side are the people who feel that Sark, in all its sleepy friendliness, should be left to make its own decisions as it always has, albeit now with democracy. The other side supports the development plans of a pair of reclusive identical-twin British billionaires who have bought up more than one-fifth of Sark in the last few years and feel its future should include paved roads, cars and a helicopter landing pad.

The pair, David and Frederick Barclay, also own the Ritz Hotel in London and The Daily Telegraph newspaper, among other things. In 1993, they bought Brecqhou, a 200-acre island next to Sark, from Sark for a reported £2.33 million, or about $3.5 million. (They had to pay a 13th of the price, known as a treizième, to the seigneur, a practice they found irksome; the custom has since been abolished.)

The Barclays built an enormous turreted gothic castle on Brecqhou and live there, traveling by helicopter. Though they rarely visit Sark, they are its largest investors. If things go their way, said Kevin Delaney, their estate manager here, they plan to invest some £5 million a year, or about $7.4 million, in Sark.

According to ancient Norman law, people here who believe their rights are being violated can halt the offending action by dropping to their knees, raising one hand and crying out in front of witnesses “Haro, Haro, Haro!” followed by a French phrase meaning, roughly, “I have been done wrong.” Many of the old-timers appear to wish they could invoke something similar when confronted with the Barclays.

They say that the Barclays’ attitude toward Sark is like that of a woman who professes to love a man and then, after marrying him, proceeds to try to change everything about him.
« Last Edit: December 10, 2008, 11:34:39 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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Bianca
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« Reply #1 on: December 10, 2008, 11:36:43 am »









The critics say that the brothers have run roughshod over a once peaceful community, throwing their money around and then threatening to withdraw it, lobbing continual antigovernment lawsuits and ad hominem attacks at the old feudal rulers and trying to push through an un-Sarkian view of the future.

“We’re in danger of going from feudalism to dictatorship,” said Diane Baker, a member of Chief Pleas who is running in Wednesday’s election. Speaking of the literature put out by the pro-Barclay camp, she added, “They called my husband a feudal Taliban, just because he was on the committee that refused permission to let them build a helipad.”

On the contrary, Mr. Delaney said, the Barclays had all but saved a crumbling community, providing year-round employment, buying up neglected properties and restoring the boarded-up stores on one side of the Avenue, Sark’s main (and only) shopping street.

“What is at stake is the economy, the economy, the economy,” said Mr. Delaney, who is running for a seat in Wednesday’s election, “and the tourist industry is the engine that drives the economy.”

Despite the sudden onslaught of democracy, he said, the island is still operating the way it always has, as a feudal state, with shadowy decisions based on favoritism and patronage being made behind closed doors.

“I haven’t come to ring the doorbell and ask that feudalism come down,” he said. “I’ve come to smash the door down.”

Jacqueline Squires, a 60-year-old housekeeper at the Aval du Creux, a hotel on Sark that is owned by the Barclays, said the old guard was missing the point, which is that the Barclays had been a financial boon to the island. “They’re having their cages rattled, and they don’t like it,” she said of the critics.

But Charles Maitland, a candidate who wears a button with a photograph of a helicopter and the words “No Thanks,” compared the Barclays’ move into Sark to the invasion of Iraq.

“I think the Barclays came in thinking that everyone would be thrilled to get rid of the old tyranny,” he said. “But a lot of old-timers liked the old system.”

Speaking of the Barclays, his wife, Wendy, added, “They should have gone for hearts and minds, but instead they went for shock and awe.”
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