How the Isle of Man was sold three times and kept its assembly

Who lived on Man before the Norse arrived

Man became an island around 8,500 years ago, when rising seas from the melting glaciers cut Mesolithic Britain off from the continent for the last time. An earlier land bridge ran to Cumbria, though where it lay and when it opened are still poorly understood. The first residents lived in small natural shelters and hunted, gathered and fished with flint and bone tools, examples of which have turned up near the coast.

Farming, pottery and better stone tools came with the Neolithic, and so did the megaliths: Cashtal yn Ard near Maughold, King Orry's Grave at Laxey, the Meayll Circle near Cregneash and the Ballaharra Stones at St John's. A local Ronaldsway culture ran alongside them from the late Neolithic into the Bronze Age. Iron Age builders put large hill forts on the summits and smaller promontory forts on the cliffs.

Rome left almost nothing. One amphora from the settlement on South Barrule is the only evidence of Roman contact, and whether it arrived by trade or by plunder is unknown.

The oldest language on the island is Archaic Irish, cut in the ogham alphabet on stones of around the 5th century. The stones in the south are in Irish alone and those in the north are in Irish and Latin. Orosius, writing in the 5th century, recorded Menavia as inhabited by the Irish, and the Annals of Ulster record an expedition by the Ulaid in 577 and its withdrawal the following year. Irish settlement is generally taken to be the root of the Manx language.

Christianity came from two directions. Manx tradition credits Saint Patrick, who is said to have sent the missionary Maughold; Muirchú's 7th-century Life of Patrick says Maughold found Christians already there, led by two men with Romano-British names. Long cist burials, known from almost 100 sites, have been radiocarbon dated as early as the 4th to 5th century, and more than 200 small chapels called keeills are scattered over the island. A cross of the 8th or 9th century from the north-east coast names one Guriat, probably the father of Merfyn Frych, who ruled Gwynedd from 825 to 844.

How Norse kings built a kingdom on Man

The Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde, following the Irish annals, puts the first Viking landing on Man in 798 and the conquest and settlement by 820. The fuller Wikipedia chronology divides the period in three: raids for plunder between about 800 and 815, settlement under the Scandinavian kings of Dublin between about 850 and 990, and subjection to the Earls of Orkney from 990 to 1079. A mint struck coins on the island from about 1025 to about 1065, using a penny die imported from Dublin.

The graves show who came. At Ballateare, excavated in 1946, a warrior of around 800 was buried with a sword broken deliberately into three pieces, three iron spearheads and a shield once painted red, white and black, beside a woman killed by a blow across the back of the skull. The boat grave at Balladoole, dated 850 to 950, held a ship of 11 metres. Excavation at Peel Castle from 1982 found seven pagan burials, among them a woman whose necklace of 73 glass and amber beads dates to the late 900s. Stone crosses carved between 1000 and 1100 at Andreas, Jurby, Malew and Maughold tell the story of Sigurd and the dragon.

Godred Crovan, born on Islay and a fighter at Stamford Bridge in 1066 according to the Chronicles of the Kings of Mann and the Isles, took the island at his third attempt in 1079 and ruled it for 16 years. He founded the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles, which took in the Hebrides and the smaller western islands of Scotland, the Suðreyjar or southern isles, with its capital on St Patrick's Isle at Peel. The Diocese of Sodor and Man, named for those southern isles, was formed in 1154. His grandson lost the islands off Argyll to Somerled in 1156, and the kingdom was divided into two in 1164.

Norway held suzerainty over the whole of it and asserted it rarely: Magnus Barelegs at the turn of the 12th century, and Haakon Haakonsson on his expedition of 1263.

How old the assembly at Tynwald actually is

Two accounts of Tynwald's age are in print, and they are far apart.

Tynwald's own account says the annual outdoor sitting at St John's has continued "unchanged, except in detail, for more than 1,000 years" and dates it to the Viking settlements of the 8th century. It credits the Norse with an administrative system that "continued even while the Island's ownership passed between Scotland and England", and thinks the institution was probably fixed for good under Godred Crovan. The Viking Ship Museum states that the Vikings founded Tynwald in 800 and connects the name, open assembly in Old Norse, to the assemblies at Þingvellir in Iceland and on the Faroe Islands. The royal household's page on the Crown Dependencies says the legislative system "is thought to have been introduced around 800 AD".

The documentary record starts later. The millennium celebrated in 1979 used a year that officials picked arbitrarily, and no evidence shows an assembly met in 979 or resembled the modern court if it did. The place name first appears in the Chronicles of Mann, compiled in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the first description of an assembly's role and membership on the site dates from the early 15th century. One of those chronicle entries is not ceremonial at all: on 25 October 1237 a convention of the Manx people at Tynwald broke up into a pitched battle in which two sons of a claimant named Neil were killed.

The House of Keys has its earliest surviving record in 1417. It had 24 members, four from each of the six sheadings, who sat for life and chose their own replacements, so that seats passed down through the leading families. A Royal Commission reported in 1792 that the earliest Manx laws on record dated from 1417 and the continuous statute book from 1422. The Keys met irregularly through the 16th century, more like a jury summoned for advice on the law, became a permanent body in 1600, and took on the making of new law around 1610.

This catalogue records both datings and does not choose between them.

Why Norway sold Man to Scotland

Alexander III of Scotland sent envoys to Norway in 1261 to buy the isles and got nowhere. The war that followed ended with the indecisive Battle of Largs in 1263, and Haakon Haakonsson died that winter. Magnus Olafsson, King of Mann and the Isles, had fought on the Norwegian side and had to give up every island he ruled except Man, for which he did homage to Alexander. In 1266 Magnus VI of Norway ceded the islands, Man included, in the Treaty of Perth, for 4,000 marks and an annuity of 100 marks. The Viking Ship Museum dates the end of Viking rule to 1265, the year Man passed to Alexander III.

Scottish rule was not firm until 1275, when a Manx rising was defeated at the Battle of Ronaldsway near Castletown. Seizure and reseizure followed. Edward I of England sent Walter de Huntercombe to take the island in 1290; Robert the Bruce took it back in 1313 after besieging Castle Rushen for five weeks; John Bacach of Argyll retook it for England in 1314 and Thomas Randolph for Scotland in 1317. Britannica dates final English control to 1341, the Wikipedia history to 1346.

In about 1333 Edward III granted Man to William de Montacute as his absolute possession, reserving no service to the Crown. In 1392 Montacute's son sold the island, sovereignty included, to Sir William le Scrope. Henry IV had Scrope beheaded in 1399, granted the island to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and after Percy's attainder made a lifetime grant of it to Sir John Stanley. Tynwald dates the Stanley lordship from 1405, Britannica from 1406. The Wikipedia history reconciles the two: the lifetime grant came in 1405 and was extended to Stanley's heirs in 1406, on a feudal fee of homage and two falcons presented to every future king of England at his coronation.

What the Stanleys changed as Lords of Mann

Thirteen Stanleys ruled Man and few of them visited. They governed through appointed governors, curbed the church's barons, replaced trial by battle with trial by jury and had the laws written down. The first act on record, of 1417, restricted the church's right of sanctuary. The statute book opens by calling Sir John Stanley "King and Lord" of the land, and Britannica records that the family refused the royal title and adopted "lord of Mann", which the British monarch still holds.

A Tynwald Day of 1691, written up among the papers of Roger Kenyon, the governor from 1690 to 1693, shows how the system worked under an absentee family. The 9th Earl of Derby rode from Castle Rushen to St John's, where a guard of a thousand firelocks was drawn up. The Keys could petition, and a law the Lord accepted went into the statute book under the words "Be it enacted as it is desired". Every new law was then proclaimed from the hill by a crier "in Manckes", dictated to him by the eldest deemster.

The civil wars broke that arrangement. James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby, came home in June 1643 to an island near revolt over tithes and his attempt to convert the customary "tenure of straw" into commercial leases. In August 1651 he landed in Lancashire with 300 Manxmen, lost at Wigan Lane on 25 August, was captured after Worcester and was executed at Bolton on 15 October. The Manx militia under William Christian, Illiam Dhone in Manx, rose against the Countess and took every fort except Rushen and Peel. Cromwell appointed Thomas Fairfax Lord of Mann in September 1651, which left the island's relation to England unchanged.

After the Restoration in 1660 Charles Stanley had Christian tried and executed; Charles II pardoned the others by Order in Council and punished the judges. The land question dragged on until 1704, when the 10th Earl agreed the Act of Settlement with his tenants, securing their holdings in perpetuity for a fixed rent. It has been called the Manx Magna Carta. As the estates rose in value the fixed rent became almost nominal, and it was extinguished by purchase in 1916.

Why the British Parliament bought the lordship

The lordship passed in 1736 to James Murray, 2nd Duke of Atholl, who presided at Tynwald on Midsummer Day that year. Tynwald records it as the last time a Lord of Mann attended in person until 1945. In 1737 Tynwald's consent became necessary for all taxation.

The next change came from contraband. The trade had grown sharply by about 1720; Parliament checked it in 1726, and in the last ten years of the Atholl lordship, 1756 to 1765, it grew large enough that Parliament judged it had to be suppressed to protect imperial revenue. The Isle of Man Purchase Act 1765, the Revestment Act to the Manx, bought the Atholls' rights as Lords of Mann, customs revenue included, for £70,000 and an annuity. The Smuggling Act of the same year, which the Manx called the Mischief Act, let Westminster legislate for customs, harbours and merchant shipping, and all customs and taxes now went to the British exchequer. The Atholls kept their manorial rights and the patronage of the bishopric until they sold those too, for £417,144, in 1828.

The island was never merged into Great Britain or into the United Kingdom that followed. Its laws and land tenures survived, but the 1911 Britannica, quoted in the Wikipedia history, says the officials now in charge regarded it as "a pestilent nest of smugglers" from which to extract revenue. Tynwald was left with no money to spend, though it still repealed restrictive labour legislation in 1771. Conditions eased while John Murray, 4th Duke of Atholl, was governor from 1793 to 1826, and after Manx representations to British ministers in 1837, 1844 and 1853 the island won a lighter customs tariff and occasional grants for public works.

How Tynwald recovered what revestment took

How an elected house replaced the self-chosen Keys

The Keys asked the British government to dissolve Tynwald and replace it with an elected parliament, backing the request with a petition of 800 signatures after 1765. A Royal Commission sat in 1791 and reported in 1792 that the Manx appeared "in all ages to have been a distinct people", governed by laws "of their own making, or consented to by themselves". The change took until 1866. The House of Keys Election Act 1866 made the Keys elected for the first time and moved Tynwald's old work as the island's court of appeal to a separate court, while the Legislative Council stayed appointed by the Crown.

In 1881 Tynwald gave women the vote in a general election, on terms that excluded married women. Universal adult suffrage based on residence followed in 1919, and Marion Shimmin of the Manx Labour Party became the first woman elected to the Keys, at a by-election in 1933. In 2006 the voting age went down to 16; of some 2,000 residents of 16 and 17 that year, 718 registered.

How executive power moved to elected members

Discontent with the governor surfaced at Tynwald Day. On 5 July 1916 crowds at St John's met the lieutenant governor, Lord Raglan, with shouts of "Resign!" and cards demanding a new governor, taxation of wealth and revenue from the internment camps for war distress, and he was struck by a clod of turf. In 1918 he cancelled the ceremony altogether after a general strike.

The transfer came in stages from 1949, when an Executive Council chaired by the lieutenant governor took in members of Tynwald. Finance and the police passed to Manx control between 1958 and 1976. Isle of Man Post took over the postal service from the UK General Post Office on 5 July 1973. In 1980 a chairman elected by Tynwald replaced the lieutenant governor at the head of the Executive Council; in 1986 its members became ministers and Sir Miles Walker the first Chief Minister; in 1990 the body became the Council of Ministers, and an elected President of Tynwald took over the chair of Tynwald Court. The lieutenant governor now presides only at the open-air sitting on Tynwald Hill, and the United Kingdom keeps responsibility for defence and international relations.

What the twentieth century changed on Man

The TT races began with a Manx law. The Motor Car Act 1903 held British roads to 20 mph, so in February 1904 Sir Julian Orde of the Automobile Club went to Man, and Tynwald passed the Highways (Light Locomotive) Act 1904 to allow racing on closed public roads. The first motorcycle Tourist Trophy was run on 28 May 1907 on the St John's course, and the races moved to the Snaefell Mountain Course in 1911.

Tourism was already large. Hall Caine, novelist and member for Ramsey, described 15,000 people in holiday dress on the green at Tynwald Day in 1893, brought in hundreds of carriages from Douglas. In both world wars the island held civilian internees from enemy countries: in the First, in a requisitioned holiday camp in Douglas and the purpose-built Knockaloe camp near Peel; in the Second, in smaller camps at Douglas, Peel, Port Erin and Ramsey. The Manx Regiment was raised in 1938.

The holiday trade fell away through the 20th century as English and Irish holidaymakers flew to Spain. The government answered by promoting the island's low taxes and building an offshore financial centre, which critics have tied to the risk of money laundering. On 2 August 1973 a flash fire at the Summerland amusement centre in Douglas killed between 50 and 53 people.

The last native speakers of Manx died in the same century. Britannica records Manx as everyday speech until the first half of the 19th century. When Éamon de Valera, the Irish Taoiseach, visited in July 1947 he was dissatisfied enough with the support for Manx that he sent two recording vans. Ned Maddrell, the last speaker to grow up in a Manx-speaking community, died on 27 December 1974. UNESCO declared the language extinct in 2009, and in the 2016 census 1,800 of 83,314 residents said they could read, speak or write it. The 1960s also produced Manx nationalist parties, Mec Vannin and the Manx National Party, and a direct-action group, Fo Halloo, that ran a campaign of spray-painting and attempted house-burning.