In 1565, a holding of land on Sark came with a defence obligation. The tenant had to maintain a house and provide an armed man. Fields supported the household; the household helped defend the island.

The familiar account describes forty tenements and forty muskets. Over the following centuries, fields were detached, estates were divided and new houses acquired their own plots. Some divisions were challenged. Others survived. The old tenement names remained, even where the land attached to them had changed.

The settlement also brought women and children. Their documented lives are explored in The Women of Sark’s 1565 Settlement.

1565 Land in return for defence

Elizabeth I’s grant to Helier de Carteret required Sark to be occupied by at least forty men loyal to the Crown. A permanently settled population would help prevent the island becoming a base for hostile forces or pirates. [1]

De Carteret offered holdings large enough to support families. His tenants were required to build and maintain a house, pay an annual rent and supply a man with a musket, ammunition and provisions when needed for the island’s defence. In return, their contracts protected possession by the tenant and his heirs. [2]

Ewen and de Carteret explain the arrangement as thirty-nine tenant holdings, with the Seigneur or his deputy completing the forty. The defence body was the Quarantaine. Its members were armed inhabitants, not forty knights. [2]

Farms spread around the island

A tenement could include a house, cultivated fields, separate pieces of land and coastal ground. It was not necessarily one compact block. Ewen and de Carteret describe cultivated holdings ranging from ten to forty vergées, excluding the cliff land. Boundary stones marked the holdings, and contracts set out responsibility for the hedges between them. [3]

Water and access from the sea helped determine where the households settled. La Moinerie, La Perronerie, L’Ecluse and their neighbours stood near the valley above Port du Moulin. Another cluster occupied the land above La Grève. Five tenements in Little Sark shared the area around the spring near La Sablonnerie. [3, 4]

These were working farms placed where people could live, cultivate the land and reach vulnerable approaches to the island.

Beauregard was divided from the beginning

Beauregard had a particular place in the settlement. De Carteret granted Nicolas Gosselin a substantial holding on Sark’s western side, confirmed by a contract dated 10 October 1567. Gosselin was required to supply four men for defence. [5]

To meet that obligation, he established three smaller tenements in the northern part of his grant: Le Petit Beauregard, Le Port à la Jument and Le Vieux Port. Those divisions belonged to the founding settlement. They were not a modern subdivision of an estate that had remained intact since 1565. [5]

Further land left Le Grand Beauregard later. La Frégondée was separated and sold in 1598. La Petite Vaurocque was detached in 1606. These were additional changes, with their own dates and circumstances. [6]

A comparison of the old and modern maps therefore needs more than four new labels beneath one old name. It needs to distinguish the original grant, the tenements created within it and the properties subsequently separated from them.

1592 Dos d’Ane becomes three parts

At Dos d’Ane, division began within a generation of the settlement. The tenant, Nicolas Guille, divided the original holding into three parts in 1592. In 1596/7 he sold the house and one-third of the land to Elie Vaudin. The southern third developed separately as Plaisance. [6, 7]

The portion containing the house changed hands and was later shared between two daughters. In 1703, the Seigneur required their heirs to reunite those two shares and sell them together. That did not restore every part of the original tenement: Plaisance retained its separate history. [7]

In 1735, permission was granted to build a house at Plaisance on condition that its holder supplied a man for the island’s defence. The obligation was recorded without a corresponding right to vote in Chief Pleas. [6]

1611 A prohibition on further division

Subdivision raised a problem for the settlement’s organisation. The original holdings carried obligations as well as land. Breaking them into smaller properties could separate a house, its means of support and the duties attached to it.

Letters Patent issued in 1611 prohibited further subdivision of the tenements and the charging of Sark land. The restriction became a defining feature of the island’s property system. [8]

It did not leave every boundary untouched. The histories of individual tenements record later separations, disputes and exceptions. At La Valette de Bas, Jean Le Gros detached fields before selling the house and adjoining land in 1647. At La Ville Roussel de Bas, a field at Les Camps was sold separately in 1911 with the Seigneur’s consent. Ewen and de Carteret record a clause requiring repayment if that sale was subsequently overturned. [9]

1720 One holding becomes Duval and La Duvallerie

Little Sark provides another clear example. In 1710, La Duvallerie was granted to Elie Hamon with express permission for it to be divided between his two sons after his death. [10]

When he died in 1720, Jean took the half known as La Haie d’Aval, subsequently called Duval. Samuel received the other half, which retained the name La Duvallerie. The historical right to a seat in Chief Pleas remained attached to the Duval holding. [10]

Other new properties came from the Seigneur’s own estate. Between 1691 and 1719, plots at Le Manoir were sold with permission to build houses. La Hêche and Clos du Normand were among the resulting properties. A growing number of houses and separately held plots could therefore exist alongside the older tenement system. [11]

2021 Parts of tenements can be sold under a new law

The Land Reform (Sark) Law, 2019 came into force on 1 February 2021. It introduced a framework for subdividing tenements into parcels that could be conveyed, left by will or mortgaged. [12]

On 5 March 2021, Collas Crill completed what it reported as the first conveyance of part of a tenement under the new arrangements. The property was a cottage and land belonging to Le Dos d’Ane. The transaction required plans, boundaries, access rights and provision for services. [12]

Dos d’Ane had been divided in the sixteenth century, and part of it had been reunited in the eighteenth. More than four hundred years after its first division, it became the setting for another change in how Sark land could be held.

Reading the tenement names today

The modern map records a more detailed pattern of landholdings than the familiar list of forty names. A separate colour or named plot does not, by itself, establish when that land became independent or what rights accompanied it. Those answers come from contracts and the history of the particular holding.

For someone exploring Sark, the names provide a starting point. Le Petit Beauregard belongs to the first organisation of the settlement. La Frégondée records an early separation from Le Grand Beauregard. Duval and La Duvallerie preserve the outcome of a later division between two brothers.

The forty-man defence requirement explains why the holdings were established. Their subsequent divisions explain why the map contains more than forty simple blocks.

Settlement and land records

Page numbers below are the book’s printed page numbers, not the digital viewer’s sheet numbers.

Jersey and Guernsey Law Review, “Sark land reform”, paragraphs 14-17, discussing the 1565 and 1611 Letters Patent.
A. H. Ewen and Allan R. de Carteret, The Fief of Sark (1969), pp. 35 and 42. The supplied photograph of p. 138 gives the historical tenement and tenant table.
Ewen and de Carteret, pp. 38-39.
Ewen and de Carteret, pp. 40-41.
Ewen and de Carteret, pp. 36-37.
Ewen and de Carteret, pp. 136-137, entries for La Frégondée, La Petite Vaurocque and Plaisance.
Ewen and de Carteret, pp. 128-129, Dosdane entry.
Jersey and Guernsey Law Review, source 1, paragraph 15. Its description of the ban as still in force belongs to its 2019 account, before commencement of the later reform.
Ewen and de Carteret, pp. 125 and 127, La Ville Roussel de Bas and La Valette de Bas.
Ewen and de Carteret, pp. 132-134, La Duvallerie and Duval.
Ewen and de Carteret, pp. 134-135, houses built on Le Manoir estate.
Collas Crill, “Property history made in Sark”, 8 March 2021, a first-hand account from the firm handling the conveyance.

40 Men and 40 Muskets