Seigneur: owner or gold-digger?

GIVEN that the rights and obligations of a fief-holding seigneur go back at least to the middle ages, the would-be owner of Cobo car park has chosen a particularly modern approach to 'proving' his entitlement of the land there.

Sark-based Thomas Holroyd has uploaded a clutch of documents, the oldest not much more than 20 years old, which, he says, uphold his claim to the freehold of the area and, by inference, to be entitled to £120,000 a year from the Sandpiper supermarket group.

Even a casual reading, however, suggests the opposite, for the first document clearly describes the area as common land and thus not in the ownership of any one individual.

Mr Holroyd also seems to be on shaky ground historically. A fief was generally a grant of land by a lord to a liegeman. In return for what amounted to an income, the liege or vassal paid homage and swore fealty to the lord or, in this case, the Crown.

In any event, since 1974, when the States ruled that the retention of feudal dues in a modern society could not be justified, the conventional benefits of being a seigneur have long fallen away.

These included chef-rentes, varech, or wreck of the sea, tithes and champarts (a tax on cereals grown locally) and poulage, a payment of two fowls that as far back as 1927 was commuted to an annual payment equivalent to 37p.

The then Advisory and Finance Committee said in scrapping feudal dues that the obligations of the seigneurs were 'no longer of practical importance'.

A&F looked into it because private seigneurs, and there were 20 of them, were claiming large sums of money through conge, another feudal due, based on 2% of the sale price of property, which was then rapidly rising in value.

Taking money off individuals for nothing on the basis of a medieval title and an arcane measurement of land was wrong in 1974 - and remains wrong today.

Mr Holroyd needs either to show good title to the Cobo land or risk being accused of cheap opportunism.