A very short history of Sark

Sark (Sercq in French, Cerq in the old Norman tongue) sits in the south-western Channel, a small island off the Normandy coast and part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey. For somewhere barely four miles long, it has an improbably long memory.

People have come and gone here for a very long time. The first written records appear around the sixth century, when Saint Magloire is said to have founded a monastery on the island; but the excavations led by Sir Barry Cunliffe and his team from Oxford, published as Sark: A Sacred Island?, trace human presence far further back, intermittently into the Stone Age. The dolmens to be found on Little Sark speak to this. The island has been, in its time, Roman ground, Norman ground, and from the thirteenth century attached to the English Crown.

Then it emptied. For a stretch of the later medieval centuries Sark stood deserted, which made it useful to the wrong sort of visitor: pirates used it as a base until the middle of the sixteenth century. The French took it in 1549, garrisoning four hundred soldiers under Captain Breuil, and held it for six years, until Elizabeth I granted the island to Helier de Carteret as its first Seigneur, and the arrangement he established has lasted, in its essentials, to this day.

De Carteret brought forty families to settle the island, dividing the land among them. Many Sark people living on Sark now can trace their line directly to those founding households, and so the old names still turn up everywhere: the Guilles, the de Carterets, the Hamons, the Bakers, the Nicoles and many more.

For most purposes Sark aligns to the Bailiwick of Guernsey, but it keeps a court of its own. The Court of Chief Pleas, the Seneschal who judges, the Prévôt who enforces, the Greffier who keeps the record, sitting with the Seigneur and the island’s elected members, still governs Sark. Though democracy has now been introduced, Sark remains one of the last places in the world where the remnants of a feudal settlement, made under the first Elizabeth still, recognisably, runs.

Sark is a self governing Crown Dependency in its own right, within the Bailiwick of Guernsey but not administratively part of Guernsey itself, with its own laws and its own parliament, Chief Pleas. It answers to the Crown directly, not to the United Kingdom or the European Union, and there is no Sark citizenship. Guernsey is the nearest working port, reached by a ferry crossing of about forty five minutes, which is why the two names are so often searched together, but Sark governs itself.

An 1611 charter, codifying the 1565 settlement, entitled the Seigneur to a thirteenth, the treizieme, of every land sale on the island, and to sole rights over flotsam, jetsam and the keeping of doves. The last two of those rights remain operative today. The Seigneur also technically still commands a private army of forty musket armed men, a right tested only once in living memory, in 1990, when a French physicist tried to reclaim the fief by force. The current Seigneur is Christopher Beaumont, who succeeded his father Michael Beaumont, Seigneur from 1974 to 2016, in 2016.

The rest of the island’s story is in the History of Sark collection.