Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Sark No Longer Feudal

No, not the guy from Alias. The island. The one that's part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey. I am not making this up. I couldn't make this up.

Sark is a small island in the English channel that, until now, was rented from the English Crown by a "seigneur," who ruled the island as its feudal lord, dispensing rents to citizens, given permission to staff the island with a military force, and who was the only person on the island allowed to keep pigeons or an unspayed female dog.

I was going to post the article, but the Wikipedia entry about the whole island is amazing.

Apparently to make it in the EU, they had to give up being feudal, which is sort of disappointing.

2 comments:

ex.contrail said...

i was going to make a joke about "prima noctae" but now that i think about it, having first dibs of going to bed with the women on an island that's probably been inbreeding for 500 years doesnt sound so hot. i can just picture taking the pants off a lady and finding a giant horntooth down there like the giant squid from that jules verne story

George F.K. said...

I wonder if this was the island Neal Stephenson used as the model for "Qwhlgm" or whatever the name of it was in the Cryptonomicon/Baroque Cycle books.

I'm going to keep wondering because there's no way I'm going to look this up.