La Signeurie On Sark

Originally uploaded by Will_Tom.

This month on the independent isle of Sark in the English Channel, what was once the world’s only surviving feudal system has been dragged into the 21st century by the European Convention on Human Rights. It seems that the island’s 600 or so residents were not all ready to throw off the velvet yoke of rural privilege for the dirty, pedestrian tedium that democracy will bring:

“Feudalism is a great system and has worked very well for the island. What people wanted was an option of no change at all,” resident Jennifer Cochrane said by telephone from her island home.

Since the 1560s when a group of colonists settled there from another small, obscure self-governing island in the Channel, the Island has been officially owned by the Queen but not part of the UK. It has been ruled, since then, by the holder of the Signeurie, essentially the Lord of the Manor.

There are no cars. The island is very small and from a recent radio show, those on it seen to have rural, upper class English accents.

This little island reminds me of the Peter Sellers movie “The Mouse who Roared” where the backwards inhabitants of a miniscule island kingdom stuck in the Middle Ages some how manage to steal the newest of the new Q-Bomb form the United States and thus become world powers.

I am sure the Bush Administration is sleeping easier at night knowing one more tyrannical regime has given way to the enlightenment of democracy. Sark Today, Iraq tomorrow… or the next day.