It is not quite as momentous as the storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall, but this Wednesday’s election on the Channel Island of Sark is no less of a revolution for Europe’s last feudal state.

The 473 voters will choose 28 conseillers to sit in Sark’s first all-elected parliament. This will end more than four centuries of government by a legislature dominated by the owners of the 40 plots of land into which the island was divided during the reign of Britain’s first Queen Elizabeth in Tudor times.