YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

deposited BY THE

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THE LITTLE MANX NATION

THE LITTLE

Manx Nation

HALL CAINE Li,
Thamzs 'Ci .", Mail.
AUTHOR OF
••TJJ£ BONDMA-N,- " I'HE DEEMSTER;^ ETC.

NEW YORK
UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY
SUCCESSORS TO
JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY
142 TO 150 WORTH STREET

To the
Reverend T, <?. 'Srown, Mt/f,
Tou see ivhat I send you — my lectures at the ^S^oyal Institution in the
Spring. In making a little book of them I have thought it best to leave
them as they ivere delivered, ivith all the colloquialisms that are natural
to spoken ivords Jrankly exposed to cold print. This does not help
them to any particular distinction as literature, but perhaps it lends
them an ease c^nd familiarity 'which may partly atone to you and to all
good souls Jor their plentiful lack of dignity. T have said so often that
I am not an historian, that I ought to add that "whatever history Ues
hidden here belongs to Train, our only accredited chronicler, and, even
at the risk of bo'veing too loiv, I must needs protest, in our north-country
homespun, that he shall have the pudding if he 'WJll also take the
pudding-bag. Tou knoiv ivhat I mean. nAt some points our history —
especially our early history — is still so vague, so dubious, so full of
mystery. It is all the fault of little c^annanan, our ancient o^anx
magician, xoho enshrouded our island in mist. Or should I say it is to
his credit, for has he not left us through all time some shadoxny figures
to fight about, Hke '* rael, thrue, re^lar " ciA€anxmen P <tAs for the
stories, the ^^yarns" that lie Uke flies — like blue-bottles, like bees, I trust
not Uke "vpasps — in the amber of the history, y-u tuill see that they are
mainly my oivn. On second thought it occurs to me that maybe they are
mainly yours. Let us say that they are both yours and mine, or perhaps^
if the ivorld finds anything good in them, any humour, any pathos, any
racy touches ofour rugged people, you ivill permit me to determine their
ofpnership in the ivay of this paraphrase of Qoleridge^s doggerel version
ofthe tipo Latin hexameters — -
" They're mine and they are likeivise yours,
^hut an if that ivill not do.
Let them be mine, good friend I for I
iAm the poorer ofthe ttfio"
Hawthorns, Keswick^
June i8gi.

CONTENTS
THE STORY OF THE MANX KINGS.
Islanders — Our Island — The Name of our Island — Our History
— King Orry — The Tynwald — The Lost Saga — ^The Manx
Macbeth — The Manx Glo 'ster — Scotch and English Dominion
— The Stanley Dynasty — Iliam Dhoan — The Athol Dynasty
— Smuggling and Wrecking — The Revestment — Home Rule
— Orry's Sons  pp. ^ -52
THE STORY OF THE MANX BISHOPS.
The Druids — Conversion to Christianity — The Early Bishops
of Man — Bishops of the Welsh Dynasty — Bishops of the
Norse Dynasty — Sodor and Man — The Early Bishops of the
House of Stanley — Tithes in Kind — The Gambling Bishop —
The Deemsters — ^The Bishopric Vacant — Bishop Wilson —
Bishop Wilson's Censures — The Great Corn Famine — The
Bishop at Court — Stories of Bishop Wilson — Quarrels of
Church and State — Some Old Ordeals — The Herring Fishery
— The Fishermen's Service — Some Old Laws — Katherine
Kinrade — Bishop Wilson's Last Days — The Athol Bishops PP- S3-I0S
THE STORY OF THE MANX PEOPLE.
The Manx Language — Manx Names — Manx Imagination —
Manx Proverbs — Manx Ballads — Manx Carols — Decay of the
Manx Language — Manx Superstitions — Manx Stories — Manx
"Characters" — Manx Characteristics — Manx Types — Literary
Associations — Manx Progress — Conclusion . . pp. 106-159

THE LITTLE MANX NATION

THE STORY OF THE MANX KINGS
There are just two ideas which are associated in
the popular imagination with the first thought of
the Isle of Man. The one is that Manxmen have
three legs, and the other that Manx cats have no
tails. But whatever the popular conception, or
misconception, of Man and its people, I shall assume
that what you ask from me is that simple knowledge
of simple things which has come to me by the
accident of my parentage. I must confess to you
at the outset that I am not much of a hand at
grave history. Facts and figures I cannot expound
with authority. But I know the history of the Isle
of Man, can see it clear, can see it whole, and perhaps
it will content you if I can show you the soul of it
A

2 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lict. i
and make it to live before you. In attempting to
traverse the history I feel like one who carries a
dark lantern through ten dark centuries. I turn
the bull's eye on this incident and that, take a peep
here and there, a white light now, and then a blank
darkness. Those ten centuries are full of lusty
fights, victories, vanquishments, quarrels, peace
making, shindies big and little, rumpus solemn and
ridiculous, clouds of dust, regal dust, political dust,
and religious dust — you know the way of it. But
beneath it all and behind it all lies the real, true,
living human heart of Manxland. I want to show
it to you, if you will allow me to spare the needful
time from facts and figures. It will get you close
to Man and its people, and it is not to be found in
the history books. Islanders
And now, first, we Manxmen are islanders. It
is not everybody who lives on an island that is an
islander. You know what I mean. I mean by an
islander one whose daily life is affected by the
constant presence of the sea. This is possible
in a big island if it is far enough away from the

LEcT.i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 3
rest of the world, Iceland, for example, but it is
inevitable in a little one. The sea is always
present with Manxmen. Everything they do,
everything they say, gets the colour and shimmer of
the sea. The sea goes into their bones, it comes
out . at their skin. Their talk is full of it. They
buy by it, they sell by it, they quarrel by it, they
fight by it, they swear by it, they pray by it. Of
course they are not conscious of this. Only their
degenerate son, myself to wit, a chiel among them
takin' notes, knows how the sea exudes from the
Manxmen. Say you ask if the Governor is at home.
If he is not, what is the answer ? " He's not on
the island, sir." You inquire for the best hotel.
" So-and-so is the best hotel on the island, sir."
You go to a Manx fair and hear a farraer selling
a cow. " Aw," says he, " she's a ter'ble gran'
craythuer for milkin', sir, and for butter maybe
there isn' the lek of her on the island, sir." Coming
out of church you listen to the talk of two old
Manxwomen discussing the preacher. " Well,
well, ma'am, weU, well ! Aw, the voice at him
and the prayers ! and the beautiful texes ! There
isn' the lek of him on the island at all, at all ' "
Always the island, the island, the island, or else

4 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
the boats, and going out to the herrings. The sea
is always present. You feel it, you hear it, you
see it, you can never forget it. It dominates you.
Manxmen are all sea-folk.
You will think this implies that Manxmen stick
close to their island. They do more than that. I
will tell you a story. Five years ago I went up
into the mountains to seek an old Manx bard, last of
a race of whom I shall have something to tell you
in their turn. All his life he had been a poet. I
did not gather that he had read any poetry except
his own. Up to seventy he had been a bachelor.
Then this good Boaz had lit on his Ruth and
married, and had many children. I found him in
a lonely glen, peopled only in story, and then by
fairies. A bare hill side, not a bush in sight, a
dead stretch of sea in front, rarely brightened by a
sail. I had come through a blinding hail-storm.
The old man was sitting in the chimney nook, a
little red shawl round his head and knotted under
his chin. Within this aureole his face was as
strong as Savonarola's, long and gaunt, and with
skin stretched over it like parchment. He was no
hermit, but a farmer, and had lived on that land,
man and boy, nearly ninety years. He had never

LECT. I] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 5
been off the island, and had strange notions of the
rest of the world. Talked of England, London,
theatres, palaces, king's entertainments, evening
parties. He saw them all through the mists of
rumour, and by the light of his Bible. He
had strange notions, some of them bad shots for
the truth, some of them startlingly true. I dare
not tell you what they were. A Royal Institution
audience would be aghast. They had, as a whole,
a strong smell of sulphur. But the old bard was
not merely an islander, he belonged to his land
more than his land belonged to him. The fishing
town nearest to his fsirm was Peel, the great fishing
centre on the west coast. It was only five miles
away. I asked how long it was since he had been
there ? " Fifteen years," he answered. The next
nearest town was the old capital, on the east
coast, Castletown, the home of the Governor, of the
last of the Manx lords, the place of the Castle,
the Court, the prison, the garrison, the College.
It was just six miles away. How long was it since
he had been there ? " Twenty years." The new
capital, Douglas, the heart of the island, its point of
touch with the world, was nine miles away. How
long since he had been in Douglas ? " Sixty years,"

6 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
said the old bard. God bless him, the sweet, dear
old soul ! Untaught, narrow, self-centred, bred on
his byre like his bullocks, but keeping his soul alive
for all that, caring not a ha'porth for the things of
the world, he was a true Manxman, and I'm proud of
him. One thing I have to thank him for. But for
him, and the like of him, we should not be here to-day.
It is not the cultured Manxman, the Manxman that
goes to the ends of the earth, that makes the Manx
nation valuable to study. Our race is what it is
by virtue of the Manxman who has had no life
outside Man, and so has kept ahve our language,
our customs, our laws and our patriarchal Con
stitution. Our Island
It lies in the middle of the Irish Sea, at about
equal distances from England, Ireland, Scotland, and
Wales. Seen from the sea it is a lovely thing to
look upon. It never fails to bring me a thrill of
the heart as it comes out of the distance. It lies
like a bird on the waters. You see it from end to
end, and from water's edge to topmost peak, often
enshrouded in mists, a dini ghost on a grey sea •

LECT. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION <j
sometimes purple against the setting sun. Then as
you sail up to it, a rugged rocky coast, grand in its
beetling heights on tbe south and west, and broken
into the sweetest bays everywhere. The water
clear as crystal and blue as the sky in summer.
You can see the shingle and the moss through
many fathoms. Then mountains within, not in
peaks, but round foreheads. The colour of the
island is green and gold ; its flavour is that of a
nut. Both colour and flavour come of the gorse.
This covers the mountains and moorlands, for,
except on the north, the island has next to no trees.
But O, the beauty and delight of it in the Spring !
Long, broad stretches glittering under the sun with
the gold of the gorse, and all the air full of the
nutty perfume. There is nothing like it in the
world. Then the glens, such fairy spots, deep,
solemn, musical with the slumberous waters, clad
in dark mosses, brightened Dy the red fuchsia. The
fuchsia is everyTvhere where the gorse is not. At
the cottage doors, by the waysides, in the gardens.
If the gorse should fail the fuchsia might even take
its place on the mountains. Such is Man, but I
am partly conscious that it is Man as seen by a
Manxman. You want a drop of Manx blood in you

8 IHE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
to see it aright. Then you may go the earth over
and see grander things a thousand times, things
more sublime and beautiful, but you will come
back to Manxland and tramp the Mull Hills in
May, long hour in, and long 'hour out, and look
at the flowering gorse and sniff its flavour, or lie
by the chasms and listen to the screams of the sea-
birds, as they whirl and dip and dart and skim over
the Sugar-loaf Rock, and you'll say after all that
God has smiled on our little island, and that it is
the fairest spot in His beautiful world, and, above
all, that it is ours.
The I^iame of our Island
This is a matter in dispute among philologists
and I am no authority. Some say that Caesar
meant the Isle of Man when he spoke of Mona ;
others say he meant Anglesea. The present name
is modern. So is Elian Vannin, its Manx equiva
lent. In the Icelandic Sagas the island is called
Mon. Elsewhere it is called Eubonia. One
historian thinks the island derives its name from
Mannin — in being an old Celtic word for island,
therefore Meadhon-in (pronounced Mannin) would

LECT.i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION g
signify : The middle island. That definition re
quires that the Manxman had no hand in naming
Man. He would never think of describing its
geographical situation on the sea. Manxmen say
the island got its name from a mythical personage
called Mannanan-Beg-Mac-y-Learr, Little Mannanan,
son of Learr. This man was a sort of Prospero, a
magician, and the island's first ruler. The story
goes that if he dreaded an enemy he would en
shroud the island in mist, " and that by art magic."
jfFIappy island, where such faith could ever exist !
Modern science knows that mist, and where it
comes from. Our History
It falls into three periods, first, a period of Celtic
rule, second of Norse rule, third of English
dominion. Manx history is the history of sur
rounding nations. We have no Sagas of our own
heroes. The Sagas are all of our conquerors.
Save for our first three hundred recorded years we
have never been masters in our own house. The first
chapter of our history has yet to be written. We
know we were Celts to begin with, but how we

IO THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
came we have never learnt, whether we walked
dry-shod from Wales or sailed in boats from Ire
land. To find out the facts of our early history
would be like digging up the island of Prospero.
Perhaps we had better leave it alone. Ten to one
we were a gang of political exiles. Perhaps we
left our country for our country's good. Be it so.
It was the first and last time that it could be said
of us. King Orry
Early in the sixth century Man became subject to
fhe kings and princes of Wales, who ruled from
Anglesea. There were twelve of them in succession,
and the last of them fell in the tenth century. We
know next to nothing about them but their names.
Then came the Vikings. The young bloods of Scandi
navia had newly established their Norse kingdom in
Iceland, and were huckstering and sea roving about
the Baltic and among the British Isles. They had
been to the Orkneys and Shetlands, and Faroes,
perhaps to Ireland, certainly to the coast of Cum
berland, making Scandinavian settlements every
where. So they came to Mon early in the tenth

LECT. I] THE LITTLE MANX NATION ii
century, led by one Orry, or Gorree. Some say
this man was nothing but a common sea-rover.
Others say he was a son of the Danish or Nor
wegian monarch. It does not matter much. Orry
had a better claim to regard than that of the son of
a great king. He was himself a great man. The
story of his first landing is a stirring thing. It was
night, a clear, brilliant, starry night, all the dark
heavens lit up. Orry's ships were at anchor
behind him ; and with his men he had touched the
beach, when down came the Celts to face him, and
to challenge him. They demanded to know where
he came from. Then the red-haired sea-warrior
pointed to the milky way going off towards the
North. " That is the way of my country," he
answered. The Celts went down like one man in
awe before him. He was their born king. It is
what the actors call a fine moment. Still, nobody
has ever told us how Orry and the Celts under
stood one another, speaking different tongues. Let
us not ask.
King Orry had come to stay, and sea-warriors
do not usually bring their women over tempestuous
seas. So the Norsemen married the Celtic women,
and from that union came the Manx people. Thus

12 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
the Manxman to begin with was half Norse, half
Celt. He is much the same still. Manxmen
usually marry Manx women, and when they do not,
they often marry Cumberland women. As the
Norseman settled in Cumberland as well as in Man
the race is not seriously affected either way. So
the Manxman, such as he is, taken all the centuries
through, is thoroughbred.
Now what King Orry did in the Isle of Man
was the greatest work that ever was done there.
He established our Constitution. It was on the
model of the Constitution just established in Iceland.
The government was representative and patriarchal.
The Manx people being sea-folk, living by the sea,
a race of fishermen and sea-rovers, he divided the
island into six ship-shires, now called Sheadings.
Each ship-shire elected four men to an assemblage
of law-makers. This assemblage, equivalent to the
Icelandic Logretta, was called the House of Keys.
There is no saying what the word means. Prof.
Rhys thinks it is derived from the Manx name
Iliare-as-Eeed, meaning the four-and-twenty.
Train says the representatives were called Taxiaxi
signifying pledges or hostages, and consequently
were styled Keys. Vigfusson's theory was that

lect.i] the little MANX NATION 13
Keys is from the Norse word fCeise, or chosen
men. The common Manx notion, the idea familiar
to my own boyhood, is, that the twenty-four
members of the House of Keys are the twenty-four
material keys whereby the closed doors of the law
are unlocked. But besides the sea-folk of the
ship-shires King OiT3r remembered the Church.
He found it on the island at his coming, left it
where he found it, and gave it a voice in the
government. He established a Tynwald Court,
equivalent to the Icelandic All Moot, where Church
and State sat together. Then he appointed two
law-men, called Deemsters, one for the north and
the other for the south. These were equivalent to
his Icelandic LOgsOgumadur, speaker of the law
and judge of all offences. Finally, he caused to be
built an artificial Mount of Laws, similar in its
features to the Icelandic Logberg at Thingvellir.
Such was the machinery of the Norse Constitution
which King Orry established in Man. The work
ing of it was very simple. The House of Keys,
the people's delegates, discussed all questions of
interest to the people, and sent up its desires to
the Tynwald Court. This assembly of people and
Church in joint session assented, and the desires ot

14 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
the people became Acts of Tynwald. These Acts
were submitted to the King. Having obtained the
King's sanction they were promulgated on the
Tynwald Hill on the national day in the presence
of the nation. The scene of that promulgation of
the laws was stirring and impressive. Let me
describe it. The Tynwald
Perhaps there were two Tynwald Hills in King
Orry's time, but I shall assume that there was one
only. It stood somewhere about midway in the
island. In the heart of a wide range of hill and
dale, with a long valley to the south, a hill to the
north, a table-land to the east, and to the west the
broad Irish Sea. Not, of course, a place to be
compared with the grand and gloomy valley of the
Logberg, where in a vast amphitheatre of dark hills
and great jokulls tipped with snow, with deep
chasms and yawning black pits, one's heart stands
still. But the place of the Manx Tynwald was an
impressive spot. The Hill itself was a circular
mount cut into broad steps, the apex being only a
few feet in diameter. About it was a flat grass

lect.i] the LITTLE MANX NATION 15
plot. Near it, just a hundred and forty yards
away, connected with the mount by a beaten path,
was a chapel. All around was bare and solitary,
perhaps as bleak and stark as the lonely plains of
Thing-vellir. Such was the scene. Hither came the King and
his people on Tynwald Day. It fell on the
24th of June, the first of the seven days of the
Icelandic gathering of the Althing. What occurred
in Iceland occurred also in Man. The King with
his Keys and his clergy gathered in the chapel.
Thence they passed in procession to the law-rock.
On the top round of the Tynwald the King sat on
a chair and faced to the east. His sword was held
before him, point upwards. His barons and
beneficed men, his deemsters, knights, esquires,
coroners, and yeomen, stood on the lower steps of
the mount. On the grass plot beyond the people
were gathered in crowds. Then the work of the
day began. The coroners proclaimed a warning.
No man should make disturbance at Tynwald on
pain of death. Then the Acts of Tynwald were
read or recited aloud by the deemsters ; first in the
language of the laws, and next in the language of
the people. After other formalities the procession

i6 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
of the King returned to the chapel, where the laws
were signed and attested, and so the annual
Tynwald ended.
Now this primitive ceremonial, begun by King
Orry early in the tenth century, is observed to this
day. On Midsummer-day of this year of grace a
ceremony similar in all its essentials will be
observed by the present Governor, his Keys, clergy,
deemsters, coroners, and people, on or near the
same spot. It is the old Icelandic ordinance, but it
has gone from Iceland. The year 1800 saw the
last of it on the lava law-rock of Thing-vellir. It is
gone from every other Norse kingdom founded by
the old sea-rovers among the Western Isles.
Manxmen alone have held on to it. Shall we also
let it go ? Shall we laugh at it as a bit of mummery
that is useless in an age of books and newspapers,
and foolish and pompous in days of frock-coats
and chimney-pot hats ? I think not. We cannot
afford to lose it. Remember, it is the last visible
sign of our independence as a nation. It is our
hand-grasp with the past. Our little nation is the
only Norse nation now on earth that can shake
hands with the days of the Sagas, and the Sea-
Kings. Then let him who will laugh at our

lect.i] the little MANX NATION i-j
primitive ceremonial. It is the badge of our
ancient liberty, and we need not envy the man who
can look on it unmoved.

The Lost Saga
Of King Orry himself we learn very little. He
was not only the first of our kings, but also the
greatest. We may be sure of that ; first, by what
we know ; and next, by what we do not know. He
was a conqueror, and yet we do not learn that he
ever attempted to curtail the liberties of his sub
jects. He found us free men, and did not try to
make us slaves. On the contrary, he gave us a
representative Constitution, which has lasted a
thousand years. We might call him our Manx
King Alfred, if the indirections of history did not
rather tempt us to christen him our Manx King
Lear. His Saga has never been written, or else it
is lost. Would that we could recover it ! Oh, that
imagination had the authority of history to vitalise
the old man and his times ! I seem to see him as
he lived. There are hints of his character in his
laws, that are as stage directions, telling of the
entrances and exits of his people, though the drama
B

tS THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
of their day is gone. For example, in that pre
liminary warning of the coroner at Tynwald, there
is a clause which says that none shall " bawl or
quarrel or lye or lounge or sit." Do you not see
what that implies ? Again, there is another clause
which forbids any man, " on paine of life and lyme,"
to make disturbance or stir in the time of Tynwald,
or any murmur or rising in the king's presence.
Can you not read between the lines of that edict ?
Once more, no inquest of a deemster, no judge or
jury, was necessary to the death-sentence of a man
who rose against the king or his governor on his
seat on Tynwald. Nobody can miss the meaning
of that. Once again, it was a common right of the
people to present petitions at Tynwald, a common
privilege of persons unjustly punished to appeal
against judgment, and a common prerogative of out
laws to ask at the foot of the Tynwald Mount on
Tynwald Day for the removal of their outlawry.
All these old rights and regulations came from
Iceland, and by the help of the Sagas it needs
no special imagination to make the scenes of their
action live again. I seem to see King Orry sitting
on his chair on the Tynwald with his face towards
he east. He has long given up sea-roving.

lect.i] the little MANX NATION 19
His long red hair is become grey or white.
But the old lion has the muscles and fiery eye of
the warrior still. His deemsters and barpns are
about him, and his people are on the sward below.
They are free men ; they mean to have their rights,
both from him and from each other. Disputes run
high, there are loud voices, mighty oaths, sometimes
blows, fights, and terrific hurly-burlies. Then old
Orry comes down with a great voice and a sword,
and ploughs a way through the fighters and scatters
them. No man dare lift his hand on the king.
Peace is restored, and the king goes back to his
seat. Then up from the valley comes a woe-begone
man in tatters, grim and gaunt and dirty, a famished
and hunted wolf. He is an outlaw, has killed
a man, is pursued in a blood-feud, and asks for
relief of his outlawry. And so on and so on, a
scene of rugged, lusty pas-sions, hate and revenge,
but also love and brotherhood ; drinking, laughing, i
swearing, fighting, savage vices but also savage
virtues, noble contempt of death, and magnificent
self-sacrifice. The chapter is lost, but we know what it must
have been. King Orry was its hero. Our Manx

20 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
Alfred, our Manx Arthur, our Manx Lear. Then
room for him among our heroes ! he must stand
high. The Manx Macbeth
The line of Orry came to an end at the beginning
of the eleventh century. Scotland was then under
the sway of the tyrant Macbeth, and, oddly enough,
a parallel tragedy to that of Duncan and his kinsman
was being enacted in Man. A son of Harold the
Black, of Iceland, Goddard Crovan, a mighty sol
dier, conquered the island and took the crowm by
treachery, coming first as a guest of the Manx king.
Treachery breeds treachery, duplicity is a bad seed
to sow for loyalty, and the Manx people were
divided in their allegiance. About twenty years after
Crovan's conquest the people of the south of the
island took up arms against the people of the north,
and the story goes that, when victory wavered, the
women of the north rushed out to the help of their
husbands, and so. won the fight. For that day's
work, the northern wives were given the right to
half of all their husband's goods immovable, while
the wives of the south had only a third. The last

lect.i] the little MANX NATION 21
of the line of Goddard Crovan died in 1265, and
so ended the dynasty of the Norsemen in Man.
They had been three hundred years there. They
found us a people of the race and language of the
people of Ireland, and they left us Manxmen.
They were our only true Manx kings, and when
they fell, our independence as a nation ceased.

The Manx Glo'ster
Then the first pretender to the throne was one
Ivar, a murderer, a sort of Richard III., not all bad,
but nearly all ; said to possess virtues enough to
save the island and vices enough to ruin it. The
island was surrendered to Scotland by treaty with
Norway. The Manx hated the Scotch. They knew
them as a race of pirates. Some three centuries
later there was one Cutlar MacCullock, whose name
was a terror, so merciless were his ravages. Over
the cradles of their infants the Manx mothers sang
this song : —
God keep the good corn, the sheep and the bullocks,
From Satan, from sin and from Cullar MacCullock.
Bad as Ivar was, the Scotch threatened to be worse.

22 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
So the Manx, fearing that their kingdom might
become a part of the kingdom of Scotland, sup
ported Ivar. They were beaten. Ivar was a brave
tiger, and died fighting.
Scotch and English Dominion
Man was conquered, and the King of Scotland
appointed a lieutenant to rule the island. But the
Manx loved the Scotch no better as masters than
as pirates, and they petitioned the English king,
Edward I., to take them under his protection. He
came, and the Scotch were driven out. But King
Robert Bruce reconquered the island for the Scotch.
Yet again the island fell to English dominion.
This was in the time of Henry IV. It is a sorry
story. Henry gave the island to the Earl of
Salisbury. Salisbury sold it to one Sir William le
Scroop. A copy of the deed of sale exists. It
puts a Manxman's teeth on edge. " With all the
right of being crowned with a golden crown."
Scroop was beheaded by Henry, who confiscated
his estate, and gave the island to the Earl of
Northumberland. It is a silly inventory, but let us
get through with it. Northumberland was banished,

lect.i] the little MANX NATION 23
and finally Henry made a grant of the island to Sir
John de Stanley. This was in 1407. Thus there
had been four Kings of Man — not one of whom had,
so far as I know, set foot on its soil — ^three grants
of the island, and one miserable sale. Where the
carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered to

gether.

The Stanley Dynasty
When the crown came to Sir John Stanley he
was in no hurry to put it on. He paid no heed to
his Manx subjects, and never saw his Manx king
dom. I dare say he thought the gift horse was
something of a white elephant. No wonder if he
did, for words could not exaggerate the wretched
condition of the island and its people. The houses
ofthe poor were hovels built of sod, with floors of clay,
and sooty rafters of briar and straw and dried gorse.
The people were hardly better fed than their beasts.
So Stanley left the island alone. It will be in
teresting to mark how different was the mood of
his children, and his children's children. The
second Stanley went over to Man and did good
work there. He promulgated our laws, and had

24 the little MANX NATION [lect.i
them written down for the first time — they had
hitherto been locked in the breasts of the deem
sters in imitation of the practice of the Druids.
The line of the Stanleys lasted more than three
hundred years. Their rule was good for the island.
They gave the tenants security of tenure, and
the landowners an act of settlement. They lifted
the material condition of our people, gave us the
enjoyment of our venerable laws, and ratified our
patriarchal Constitution. Honour to the Stanleys
of the Manx dynasty ! They have left a good mark
on Man. Iliam Dhoan
And now I come to the one incident in modern
Manx history which shares, with the three legs of
Man and the Manx cat, the consciousness of every
body who knows anything about our island and its
people. This is the incident of the betrayal of
Man and the Stanleys to the Parliament in the time
of Cromwell. It was a stirring drama, and though
the curtain has long fallen on it, the dark stage is
still haunted by the ghosts of its characters. Chief
among these was William Christian, the Man.xman

lect.i] the little MANX NATION 25
called IHam Dhoan, Brown William, a famihar
name that seems to hint of a fine type of man.
You will find him in " Peveril of the Peak." He
is there mixed up with Edward Christian, a very
different person, just as Peel Castle is mixed up
with Castle Rushen, consciously no doubt, and with
an eye to imaginative effects, for Scott had a brother
in the Isle of Man who could have kept him from
error if fact had been of any great consequence in
the novelist's reckoning.
Christian was Receiver-General, a sort of
Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the great Earl of
Derby. The Earl had faith in him, and put nearly
everything under his command that fell within the
province of his lordship. Then came the struggle
with Rigby at Latham House, and the imprisonment
of the Earl's six children by Fairfax. The Manx
were against the Parliament, and subscribed ;!fS00,
probably the best part of the money in the island,
in support of the king. Then the Earl of Derby
left the island with a body of volunteers, and in
going away committed his wife to the care of
Christian. You know what happened to him. He
was taken prisoner in Lancashire, charged with
bearing arms for Charles Stuart and holding the

26 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
Isle of Man against the Commons, condemned, and
executed at Bolton.
With the forfeiture of the Earl the lordship of
the island was granted by Parliament to Lord
F-iirfax. He sent an army to take possession, but
the Countess-Dowager still held the island.
Christian commanded the Manx militia. At this
moment the Manx people showed signs of disaffec
tion. They suddenly remembered two grievances,
one was a grievance of land tenure, the other was
that a troop of soldiers was kept at free quarterage.
I cannot but wish they had bethought them of both
a little earlier. They formed an association, and
broke into rebellion against the Countess-Dowager
within eight days of the Earl's execution. Perhaps
they did not know of the Earl's death, for news
travelled slowly over sea in those days. But at
least they knew of his absence. As a Manxman I
am not proud of them.
During these eight days Mr. Receiver-General
had begun to trim his sails. He had a lively wit,
and saw which way things were going. Rumour
says he was at the root of the secret association.
Be that as it may, he carried the demands of the
people to the Countess. She had no choice but to

LECT. I] TllE LITTLE MANX NATION 27
yield. The troops were disbanded. It was a bad
victory. A fortnight before, when her husband lay under
his death sentence, the Countess had offered the
island in exchange for his life. So now Mr.
Receiver-General used this .act of love against her.
He seized some of the forts, saying the Countess
was selhng the island to the Parliament. Then the
army of the Parliament landed, and Christian
straightway delivered the island up to it, protesting
that he had taken the forts on its behalf. Some
say the Countess was imprisoned in the vaults of
the Castle. Others say she had a free pass to
England. So ended act one.
When the act-drop rose on act two, Mr. Receiver-
General was in office under the Parliament. From
the place of Receiver-General he was promoted to
the place of Governor. He had then the money of
the island under his control, and he used it badly.
Deficits were found in his accounts. He fled to
London, was arrested for a large debt, and clapped
into the Fleet. Then the Commonwealth fell, the
Dowager Countess went upstairs again, and Charles
II. restored the son of the great Earl to the lordship
of Man. After that came the Act of Indemnity, a

28 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
general pardon for all who had taken part against
the royal cause. Thereupon Christian went back
to the Isle of Man, was arrested on a charge of
treason to the Countess-Dowager of Derby, pleaded
the royal act of general pardon against all proceed
ings libelled against him, was tried by the House of
Keys, and condemned to death. So ended act
two. Christian had a nephew, Edward Christian, who
was one of the two deemsters. This man dis
sented from the voice of the court, and hastened
to London to petition the king. Charles is said to
have heard his plea, and to have sent an order to
suspend sentence. Some say the order came too
late ; some say the Governor had it early enough
and ignored it. At all events Christian was shot.
He protested that he had never been anything but
a faithful servant to the Derbys, and made a brave
end. The place of his execution was Hango Hill,
a bleak, bare stretch of land with the broad sea under
it. The soldiers wished to bind Christian. " Trouble
not yourselves for me," he said/ " for I that dare
face death in whatever shape he comes, will not
start at your fire and bullets." He pinned a piece
of white paper on his breast, and said : " Hit this.

LECT.I] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 29
and you do your own work and mine." Then he
stretched forth his arms as a signa], was shot through
the heart, and fell. Such was the end of Brown
William. He may have been a traitor, but he was
no coward.
When the chief actor in the tragedy had fallen.
King Charles appeared, as Fortinbras appeal's in
" Hamlet," to make a review and a reckoning, and
to take the spoils. He ordered the Governor, the
remaining Deemsters, and three of the Keys to be
brought before him, pronounced the execution of
Christian to be a violation of his general pardon,
and imposed severe penalties of fine and imprison
ment. " The rest " in this drama has not been
" silence." One long clamour has followed. Chris
tian's guilt has been questioned, the legality of his
trial has been disputed, the validity of Charles's
censure of the judges has been denied. The
case is a mass of tangle, as every case must
be that stands between the two stools of the
Royal cause and the Commonwealth. But I
shall make bold to summarise the truth in a very
few words :
First, that Christian was untrue to the house of
Derby is as clear as noonday. If he had been

30 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
their loyal servant he could never have taken office
under the Parliament.
Second, though untrue to the Countess-Dowager,
Christian could not be guilty of treason to her,
because she had ceased to be the sovereign when her
husband was executed. Fairfax was then the Lord
of Man, and Christian was guilty of no treason to him.
Third, whether true or untrue to the Countess-
Dowager, the act of pardon had nothing on earth
to do with Christian, who was not charged with
treason to King Charles, but to the Manx reigning
family. The Isle of Man was not a dominion of
England, and if Charles's order had arrived before
Christian's execution, the Governor, Keys, and Deem
ster would' have been fully justified in shooting the
man in defiance of the king.
I feel some diffidence in offering this opinion,
but I can have none whatever in saying what I
think of Christian. My fellow Manxmen are for the
most part his ardent supporters. They affinn his
innocence, and protest that he was a martyr-hero,
declaring that at least he met his fate by asserting
the rights of his countrymen. I shall net hesitate
to say that I read the facts another way. This is
how I see the man :

LECT. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 31
First, he was a servant of the Derbj's, honoured,
empowered, entrusted with the care of his mistress,
the Countess, when his master, the Earl, left the
island to fight for the king. Second, eight days
after his master's fate, he rose in rebellion against
his mistress and seized some of the forts of
defence. Third, he delivered the island to the army
of the Parliament, and continued to hold his ofiice
under it. Fourth, he robbed the treasury of the
island and fled from his new masters, the Parlia
ment. Fifth, when the new master fell he chopped
round, became a king's man once more, and
returned to the island on the strength of the general
pardon. Sixth, when he was condemned to death
he, who had held office under the Parliament,
protested that he had never been anything but a
faithful seivant to the Derbys.
Such is Christian. He a hero ! No, but a
poor, sorry, knock-kneed time-server. A thing of
rags and patches. A Manx Vicar of Bray. Let
us talk of him as little as we may, and boast of him
not at all. Man and Manxmen have no need ot
him. No, thank God, we can tell of better men.
Let us turn his picture to the wall.

32 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
The Athol Dynasty
The last of the Stanleys of the Manx dynasty
died childless in 1735, and then the lordship of Man
devolved by the female line on the second Duke of
Athol by right of his grandmother, who was a
daughter of the great Earl of Derby. There is
little that is good to say of the Lords of the House
of Athol except that they sold the island. Almost
the first, and quite the best, thing they did on coming
to Man, was to try to get out of it. Let us make
no disguise of the clear truth. The Manx Athols
were bad, and nearly everything about them was bad.
Never was the condition of the island so abject as
during their day. Never were the poor so poor.
Never was the name of Manxman so deservedly a
badge of disgrace. The chief dishonour was that
of the Athols. They kept a swashbuckler court
in their little Manx kingdom. Gentlemen of the
type of Barry Lyndon overran it. Captain
Macheaths, Jonathan Wilds, and worse, were mas
ters of the island, which was now a refuge for
debtors and felons. Roystering, philandering,
gambhng, fighting, such was the order of things.

lect.i] the little MANX NATION 33
What days they had ! What nights ! His Grace
of Athol was himself in the thick of it all. He
kept a deal of company, chiefly rogues and rascals.
For example, among his " lord captains " was one
Captain Fletcher. This Blue Beard had a magni
ficent horse, to which, when he was merry, he
made his wife, who was a religious woman, kneel
down and say her prayers. The mother of my
friend, the Reverend T. E. Brown, came upon the
dead body of one of these Barry Lyndons, who had
fallen in a duel, and the blue mark was on the
white forehead, where the pistol shot had been.
I remember to have heard of another Sir Lucius
O'Trigger, whose body lay exposed in the hold of a
fishing-smack, while a parson read the burial service
from the quay. This was some artifice to prevent
seizure for debt. Oh, these good old times, with
their soiled and dirty splendours 1 There was no
lively chronicler, no Pepys, no Walpole then, to
give us a picture of the Court of these Kings of
Man. What a picture it must have been ! Can
you not see it ? The troops of gentlemen debtors
from the Coffee Houses of London, with their periwigs,
their canes, and fine linen ; down on their luck, but
still berufiled, besnuffed, and red-heeled. I can
c

34 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
see them strutting with noses up, through old
Douglas market-place on market morning, past the
Manx folk in their homespun, their curranes and
undyed stockings. Then out at Mount Murray, the
home of the Athols, their imitations of Vauxhall,
torches, dancings, bows and conges, bankrupt
shows, perhaps, but the bankrupt Barrys making
the best of them — one seems to see it all. And then
again, their genteel quarrels — quarrels were easily
bred in that atmosphere. " Sir, I have the honour
to tell you that you are a pimp, lately escaped from
the Fleet." " My lord, permit me to say that
you lie, that you are the son of a lady, and
were born in a sponging-house." Then out leapt
the weapons, and presently two men were crossing
swords under the trees, and by-and-by one of
them was left under the moonlight, with the
shadow of the leaves playing on his white face.
Poor gay dogs, they are dead ! The page of
their history is lost. Perhaps that is just as well.
It must have been a dark page, maybe a little red
too, even as blood runs red. You can see the scene
of their revelries. It is an inn now. The walls
seem to echo to their voices. But the tables
they ate at are hke themselves — worm-eaten.

lect.i] the LITTLE MANX NATION 35
Good-bye to them ! They have gone over the
Styx. Smuggling and Wrecking
Meanwhile, what of the Manx people ? Their
condition was pitiful. An author who wrote fifty
years after the advent of the Athols gives a descrip
tion of such misery that one's flesh creeps as one
reads it. Badly housed, badly clad, badly fed, and
hardly taught at all, the very poor were in a state
of abjectness unfit for dogs. Treat men as dogs
and they speedily acquire the habits of dogs, the
vices of dogs, and none of their virtues. That was
what happened to a part of the Manx people ; they
developed the instincts of dogs, while their masters,
the other dogs, the gay dogs, were playing their
bad game together. Smuggling became common on
the coasts of Man. Spirits and tobacco were the
goods chiefly smuggled, and the illicit trade rose
to a great height. There was no way to check it.
The island was an independent kingdom. My lord
of Athol swept in the ill-gotten gains, and his
people got what they could. It was a game of grab.
Meantime the trade of the surrounding countries,

35 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
England, Wales, and Ireland, was suffering griev
ously. The name of the island must have smelt
strong in those days.
But there was a fouler odour than that of
smuggling. Wrecking was not unknown. The
island lent itself naturally to that evil work. The
mists of Little Mannanan, son of Lear, did not for
sake our island when Saint Patrick swept him out
of it. They continued to come up from the south,
and to conspire with the rapid currents from the
north to drive ships on to our rocks. Our coasts
were badly lighted, or lighted not at all. An open
flare stuck out from a pole at the end of a pier was
often all that a dangerous headland had to keep
vessels away from it. Nothing was easier than
for a fishing smack to run down pole and flare
together, as if by accident, on returning to harbour.
But there was a worse danger than bad lights, and
that was false lights. It was so easy to set them.
Sometimes they were there of themselves, without
evil intention of any human soul, luring sailors to
their destruction. Then when ships came ashore
it was so easy to juggle with one's conscience and
say it was the will of God, and no bad doings of
any man's. The poor sea-going men were at the

lect.i] the little MANX NATION 37
bottom of the sea by this time, and their cargo was
drifting up with the tide, so there was nothing to
do but to take it. Such was the way of things.
The Manxman could find his excuses. He was
miserably poor, he had bad masters, smuggling was
his best occupation, his coasts were indifferently
lighted, ships came ashore of themselves — what was
he to do ? That the name of Manxman did not
become a curse, an execration, and a reproach in
these evil days of the Athols seems to say that
behind all this wicked work there were splendid
virtues doing noble duty somewhere. The real sap,
the true human heart of Manxland, was somehow
kept alive. Besides cut-throats in ruffles, and
wreckers in homespun, there were true, sweet,
simple-hearted people v/ho would not sell their souls
to fill their mouths.
Does it surprise you that some of all this comes
within the memory of men still living ? I am
myself well within the period of middle life, and,
though too young to touch these evil days, I can
remember men and women who must have been in
the thick of them. On the north of the island is
Kirk Maughold Head, a bold, rugged headland
going far out into the sea. Within this rocky fore-

38 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
land lie two bays, svi^eet coverlets of blue waters,
washing a shingly shore under shelter of dark cliffs.
One of these bays is called Port-y-Vullin, and just
outside of it, between the mainland and the head, is
a rock, known as the Carrick, a treacherous grey
reef, visible at low water, and hidden at flood-tide.
On the low brews of Port-y-Vullin stood two
houses, the one a mill, worked by the waters coming
down from the near mountain of Barrule, the other
a weaver's cottage. Three weavers lived together
there, all bachelors, and all old, and never a woman
or child among them — Jemmy of eighty years, Danny
of seventy, and Billy or sixty something. Year in,
year out, they worked at their looms, and early or
late, whenever you passed on the road behind, you
heard the click of them. Fishermen coming back
to harbour late at night always looked for the light
of their windows. " Yander's Jemmy-Danny-
Billy's," they would say, and steer home by that
landmark. But the light which guided the native
seamen misled the stranger, and many a ship in the
old days was torn to pieces on the jagged teeth of
that sea-lion, the Carrick. Then, hearing loud
human cries above the shrieks of wind and wave,
the three helpless old men would come tottering

LECT. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 39
down to the beach, like three innocent witches,
trembling and wailing, holding each other's hands
like little children, and never once dreaming of
what bad work the candles over their looms had
done. But there were those who were not so guileless.
Among them was a sad old salt, whom I shall call
Hommy-Billy-mooar, Tommy, son of big Billy.
Did I know him, or do I only imagine him as I
have heard of him ? I cannot say, but nevertheless
I see him plainly. One of his eyes was gone, and
the other was badly damaged. His face was of
stained mahogany, one side of his mouth turned up,
the other side turned down, he could laugh and cry
together. He was half landsman, tilling his own
croft, half seaman, going out with the boats to
the herrings. In his youth he had sailed on a
smuggler, running in from Whitehaven with spirits.
The joy of " the trade," as they called smugghng,
was that a man could buy spirits at two shillings a
gallon for sale on the island, and drink as much as
he " plazed abooard for nothin'." When Ilommy
married, he lived in a house near the church, the
venerable St. Maughold away on the headland, with
its lonely churchyard within sound of the sea.

40 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
There on tempestuous nights the old eagle looked
out from his eyrie on the doings of the sea, over
the back of the cottage of the old weavers to the
Canick. If anything came ashore he awakened his
boys, scunied over to the bay, seized all they could
carry, stole back home, hid his treasures in the
thatch of the roof, or among the straw of the loft,
went off to bed, and rose in the morning with an
innocent look, and listened to the story of last
night's doings with a face full of surprise. They
say that Hommy carried on this work for years,
and though many suspected, none detected him, not
even his wife, who was a good Methodist. The
poor woman found him out at last, and, being
troubled with a conscience, she died, and Hommy
buried her in Kirk Maughold churchyard, and put a
stone over her with a good inscription. Then he
went on as before. But one morning there was a
mighty hue and cry. A ship had been wrecked on
the Carrick, and the crew who were saved had seen
some rascals carrying off in the darkness certain
rolls of Irish cloth which they had thrown over
board. Suspicion lit on Hommy and his boys.
Hommy was quite hurt. " Wrecking was it ?
Lord a-massy ! To think, to think ! " Revenue

lect.i] the LITTLE MANX NATION 41
officers were to come to-morrow to search his house.
Those rolls of Irish cloth were under the thatch,
above the dry gorse stored up on the " lath " in
his cowhouse. That night he carried them off to
the churchyard, took up the stone from over his
wife's grave, dug the grave open and put in the
cloth. 'Next day his one eye wept a good deal
while the officers of revenue made their fruitless
search. " Aw well, well, did they think because a
man was poor he had no feelings ? " Afterwards
he pretended to become a Methodist, and then he
removed the cloth from his wife's grave because he
had doubts about how she could rise in the
resurrection with such a weight on her coffin.
Poor old Hommy, he came to a bad end. He
spent his last days in jail in Castle Rushen. A
one-eyed mate of his told me he saw him there.
Hommy was unhappy. He said " Castle Rushen
wasn't no place for a poor man when he was gettin'
anyways ould." The Revestment
It is hardly a matter for much surprise that the
British Government did what it could to curb the

42 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
smuggling that was rife in Man in the days of the
Athols. The bad work had begun in the days
of the Derbys, when an Act was passed which
authorised the Earl of Derby to dispose of his
royalty and revenue in the island, and empowered
the Lords of the Treasury to treat with him for the
sale of it. The Earl would not sell, and when the
Duke of Athol was asked to do so, he tried to put
matters off. But the evil had by this time grown
so grievously that the British Government threatened
to strip the Duke without remuneration. Then he
agreed to accept ;^70,ooo as compensation for the
absolute surrender of the island. He was also to
have ;^2000 out of the Irish revenue, which, as well
as the English revenue, was to benefit by the
suppression of the clandestine trade. This was in
exchange for some ^6ooo a year which was the
Duke's Manx revenue, much of it from duties and
customs paid in goods which were afterwards
smuggled into England, Ireland, and Scotland. So
much for his Grace of Athol. Of course the Manx
people got nothing. The thief was punished, the
receiver was enriched ; it is the way of the world.
In our history of Man, we call this sweet trans
action, which occurred in 1765, "The Revestment,"

lect.i] the little MANX NATION 43
meaning the revesting of the island in the crown of
England. Our Manx people did not like it at all.
I have heard a rugged old song on the subject sung
at Manx inns :
For the babes unborn shall rue the day
When the Isle of Man was sold away ;
And there's ne'er an old wife that loves a dram
But she will lament for the Isle of Man.
Clearly drams became scarce when " the trade "
was put down. But, indeed, the Manx had the
most strange fears and ludicrous sorrows. The
one came of their anxiety about the fate of their
ancient Constitution, the other came of their foolish
generosity. They dreaded that the government of
the island would be merged into that of England,
and they imagined that because the Duke of Athol
had been compelled to surrender, he had been
badly treated. Their patriotism was satisfied when
the Duke of Athol was made Governor-in-Chief
under the English crown, for then it was clear that
they were to be left alone ; but their sympathy was
moved to see him come back as sei"vant who had
once been lord. They had dishked the Duke of
Athol down to that hour, but they forgot their
hatred in sight of his humiliation, and when he

44 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
landed in his new character, they received him with
acclamations. I am touched by the thought of
my countrymen's unselfish conduct in that hour ;
but I thank God I was not alive to witness it.
I should have shrieked with laughter. The ab
surdity of the situation passes the limits even of a
farce. A certain Duke, who had received £6000
a year, whereof a large part came of an immoral
trade, had been to London and sold his interest in
it for ;£"7o,ooo, because if he had not taken that, he
would probably have got nothing. With thirteen
years' purchase of his insecure revenue in his
pocket, and ;£'2000 a year promised, and his
salary as Governor-in-Chief besides, he returns to
the island where half the people are impoverished
by his sale of the island, and nobody else has
received a copper coin, and everybody is doomed to
pay back interest on what the Duke has received !
What is the picture ? The Duke lands at the old
jetty, and there his carriage is waiting to take
him to the house, where he and his have kept
swashbuckler courts, with troops of fine gentlemen
debtors frora London. The Manxmen forget every
thing except that his dignity is reduced. They
unyoke his horses, get into his shafts, drag him

LECT..I] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 45
through the streets, toss up their caps and cry
hurrah ! hurrah ! One seems to see the Duke
sitting there with his arms folded, and his head on
his breast. He can't help laughing. The thing-
is too ridiculous. Oh, if Swift had been there
to see it, what a scorching satire we should have
had! But the Athols soon spirited away their popu
larity. First they clamoured for a further sum on
account of the lost revenues, and they got it. Then
they tried to appropriate part of the income of the
clergy. Again, they put members of their family
into the bishopric, and one of them sold his tithes
to a factor who tried to extort thera by strong
measures, which led to green crop riots. In the
end, their gross selfishness, which thought of their
own kisses but forgot the losses of the people,
raised such open marks of aversion in the island
that they finally signified to the king their desire
to sell all their remaining rights, their land and
manorial rights. This they did in 1829, receiving
altogether, for custom, revenue, tithes, patronage
of the bishopric, and quit rents, the sura of
;^4i6,000. Such was the value to the last of the
Athols of the Manx dynasty, of that little hungry

46 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
island of the Irish Sea, which Henry IV. gave to
the Stanleys, and Sir John de Stanley did not think
worth while to look at. So there was an end of
the House of Athol. Exit the House of Athol !
The play goes on without them.
Home Rule
It might be said that with the final sale of 1829
the history of the Isle of Man came to a close.
Since then we have been in the happy condition of
the nation without a history. Man is now a de
pendency of the English crown. The crown is
represented by a Lieutenant-Governor. Our old
Norse Constitution remains. We have Home Rule,
and it works well. The Manx people are attached
to the throne of England, and her Majesty has not
more loyal subjects in her dominions. We are
deeply interested in Iraperial affairs, but we have no
voice in thera. I do not think we have ever dreamt
of a day when we should send representatives to
Westminster. Our sympathies as a nation are not
altogether, I think, with the party of progress. We
are devoted to old institutions, and hold fast to such
of thera as are our own. All this is, perhaps, what

lect. i] tiie LITTLE MANX NATION 47
you would expect of a race of islanders with our
antecedents. Our social history has not been brilliant. I do
not gather that the Isle of Man was ever Merry
Man. Not even in its gayest days do we catch any
note of merriment amid the rumpus of its revelries.
It is an odd thing that woman plays next to no part
whatever in the history of the island. Surely ours
is the only national pie in which woman has not
had a finger. In this respect the island justifies
the ungallant reading of its narae — it is distinctly
the Isle of Man. Not even amid the glitter and
gewgaws of our Captain Macheaths do you catch
the ghnt of the gown of a PoUy. No bevy of ladies,
no merry parties, no pageants worthy of the name.
No, our social history gives no idea of Merry
Man. Our civil history is not glorious. We are com
pelled to allow that it has no heroism in it. There
has been no fight for principle, no brave endurance
of wrong. Since the days of Orry, we have had
nothing to tell in Saga, if the Sagaraan were here.
We have played no part in the work of the world.
The great world has been going on for ten centuries
without taking much note of us. We are a little

48 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
nation, but even little nations have held their own.
We have not.
One great king we have had. King Orry. He
gave us our patriarchal Constitution, and it is a fine
thing. It combines most of the best qualities of
representative government. Its freedora is more
free than that of some republics. The people seem
to be raore seen, and their voice more heard, than in
any other form of government whose operation I
have witnessed. Yet there is nothing noisy, about
our Home Rule. And this Constitution we have
kept alive for a thousand years, while it has died
out of every other Norse kingdom. That is, per
haps, our highest national honour. We may have
played a timid part ; we may have accepted rulers
frora anywhere ; we may never have made a
struggle for independence ; and no Manxman may
ever have been strong enough to stand up alone for
his people. It is like our character that we have
taken things easily, and instead of resisting our
eneraies, or throwing them frora our rocky island
into the sea, we have been law abiding under law
less masters and peaceful under oppression. But
this one thing we have done : we have clung to our
patriarchal Constitution, not caring a ha'p'orth who

lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 49
administered our laws so long as the laws were our
own. That is something ; I think it is a good deal.
It mearis that through raany changes undergone
by the greater peoples of the world, we are King
Orry's men still. Let me in a last word tell you a
story which shows what that description implies.
Orry's Sons
On the west coast of the Isle of Man stands the
town of Peel. It is a little fishing port, looking
out on the Irish Sea. To the north of it there is a
broad shore, to the south lies the harbour with a
rocky headland called Contrary Head ; in front —
until lately divided from the mainland by a narrow
strait — is a rugged island rock. On this rock stand
the broken ruins of a castle. Peel Castle, and never
did castle stand on a grander spot. The sea flows
round it, beating on the jagged cliffs beneath, and
behind it are the wilder cliffs of Contrary. In the
water between and around Contrary contrary cur
rents flow, and when the wind is high they race
and prance there like an unbroken horse. It is a
grand scene, but a perilous place for ships.
One afternoon in October of 1889 a Norwegian

50 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i
ship (strange chance ! ), the St. George (name
surely chosen by the Fates ! ), in a fearful tempest
was drifting on to Contrary Head. She was
labouring hard in the heavy sea, rearing, plunging,
creaking, groaning,and driving fast through clamour
ing winds and threshing breakers on to the cruel,
black, steep horns of rock. All Peel was down at
the beach watching her. Flakes of sea-foam were
flying around, and the waves breaking on the
beach were scooping up the shingle and flinging it
through the air like sleet.
Peel has a lifeboat, and it was got out. There
were so many volunteers that the harbour-master
had difficulties of selection. The boat got off; the
coxswain was called Charlie Cain ; one of his crew
was named Gorry, otherwise Orry. It was a
perilous adventure. The Norwegian had lost her
masts, and her spars were floating around her in the
snow-like surf. She was dangerous to approach,
but the lifeboat reached her. Charlie cried out to
the Norwegian captain : " How many of you ? "
The answer came back, " Twenty-two ! " Charlie
counted them as they hung on at the ship's side,
and said : " I only see twenty-one ; not a man shall
leave the ship until you bring the odd one on

lect. i] the little MANX NATION 51
deck." The odd one, a disabled man, had been
left below to his fate. Now he was brought up,
and all were taken aboard the lifeboat.
On landing at Peel there was great excitement,
men cheering and women crying. The Manx
women spotted a baby among the Norwegians,
fought for it, one woman got it, and carried it off to
a fire and dry clothing. It was the captain's wife's
baby, and an hour afterwards the poor captain's wife,
like a creature distracted, was searching for it all
over the town. And to heighten the scene, report
says that at that treraendous raoment a splendid
rainbow spanned the bay from side to side. That
ought to be true if it is not.
It was a brilliant rescue, but the moving part of
the story is yet to tell. The Norwegian Govern
raent, touched by the splendid heroisra of the
Manxmen, struck medals for the lifeboat men and
sent them across to the Govemor. These medals
were distributed last suraraer on the island rock
within the ruins of old Peel Castle. Think of it !
One thousand years before, not far frora that same
place, Orry the Viking carae ashore frora Denmark
or Norway. And now his Manx sons, still bearing
his very name, Orry, save frora the sea the sons of

52 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i
the brethren he left behind, and down the milky way,
whence Orry himself once caracj come now to the
Manxmen the thanks and the blessings of their
kinsmen, Orry's father's children.
Such a story as this thrills one to the heart. It
links Manxmen to the great past. What are a
thousand years before it ? Time sinks away, and
the old sea-warrior seems to speak to us still
through the surf of that storm at Peel.

THE STORY OF THE MANX BISHOPS
Some years ago, in going down the valley of
Foxdale, towards the mouth of Glen Rushen, I lost
my way on a rough and unbeaten path under the
mountain called Slieu Whallin. There I was met
by a typical old Manx farmer, who climbed the
hillside some distance to serve as my guide. " Aw,
man," said he, " many a Sunday I've crossed these
mountains in snow and hail together." I asked
why on Sunday. " You see," said the old fellow,
"I'm one of those men that have been guilty of
what St. Paul calls the foolishness of preaching."
It turned out that he was a local preacher to the
Wesleyans, and that for two score years or more, in
all seasons, in all weathers, every Sunday, year in,
year out, he had made the journey frora his farra in
Foxdale to the wisstern villages of Kirk Patrick,

54 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
where his voluntary duty lay. He left me with a
laugh and a cheery word. " Ask again at the cottage
at the top of the brew," he shouted. " An ould
widda lives there -with her gel." At the summit of
the hill, just under South Barrule, with Cronk-ny-
arrey-Lhaa to the west, I came upon a disused lead
mine, called the old Cross Vein, its shaft open save
for a plank or two thrown across it, and filled with
water almost to the surface of the ground. And
there, under the lee of the roofless walls of the
ruined engine-house, stood the tiny one-story
cottage where I had been directed to inquire my
way again. I knocked, and then saw the outer
conditions of an existence about as miserable as the
mind of raan can conceive. The door was opened
by a youngish woman, having a thin, white face,
and within the little house an elderly woman was
breaking scraps of vegetables into a pot that s-wung
from a hook above a handful of turf fire, which
burned on the ground. They were the -widow and
daughter. Their house consisted of two rooms, a
living room and a sleeping closet, both open to the
thatch, which was sooty with smoke. The floor
was of bare earth, trodden hard and shiny. There
was one little window in each apartment, but after

lect. ii] the little MANX NATION 55
the breakages of years, the panes were obscured
by rags stuffed into the gaps to keep out the
weather. The roof bore traces of damp, and I
asked if the rain came into the house. " Och, yes,
and bad, bad, bad ! " said the elder woman. " He
left us, sir, years ago." That was her way of
saying that her husband was dead, and that since
his death there had been no man to do an odd
job about the place. The two women lived by
working in the fields, at weeding, at planting
potatoes, at thinning cabbages, and at the hay in
its season. Their little bankrupt barn belonged to
thera, and it was all they had. In that they lived,
or lingered, on the raountain top, a long stretch of
bare hillside, away from any neighbour, alone in
their poverty, with mountains before and behind,
the broad grey sea, without ship or sail, down a
gully to the west, nothing visible to the east save
the smoke from the valley where lay the habitations
of men, nothing audible anywhere but the deep
rumble of the waves' bellow, or the chii-p of the
birds overhead, or, perhaps, when the wind was
southerly, the church bells on Sunday morning.
Never have I looked upon such lonely penury,
and yet there, even there, these forlorn women

56 THE little MANX NATION [lect. ii
kept their souls alive. " Yes," they said, " we're
working when we can get the work, and trusting,
trusting, trusting still."
I have lingered too long over this poor adventure
of losing my way to Glen Rushen, but my little
sketch may perhaps get you close to that side of
Manx life whereon I wish to speak to-day. I
want to tell the history of religion in Man, so far
as we know it ; and better, to my thinking, than a
grave or solid disquisition on the ways and doings
of Bishops or Spiritual Barons, are any peeps into
the hearts and home lives of the Manx, which will
show what is called the " innate religiosity " of the
humblest of the people. To this end also, when I
have discharged my scant duty to church history,
or perhaps in the course of my hasty exposition of
it, I shall dwell on some of those homely manners
and customs, which, more than prayer-books and
printed services, tell us what our fathers believed)
what we still believe, and how we stand towards
that other life, that inner life, that is not concerned
with what we eat and what we drink, and where
withal we shall be clothed.

lect. ii] the little MANX NATION 57
The Druids
And now, just as the first chapter of our Manx
civil history is lost, so the first chapter of our
church history is lost. That the Druids occupied
the island seems to some people to be clear frora
many Celtic naraes and sorae remains, such as we
are accustomed to call Druidical, and certain cus
toms still observed. Perhaps worthy of a word is
the circumstance that in the parish where the Bishop
now lives, and has always lived, Kirk Michael, there
is a place called by a name which in the Manx
signifies Chief Druid. Strangely are the faiths or
the ages linked together.
Conversion to Christianity
We do not know, with any certainty, at what
time the island was converted to Christianity. The
accepted opinion is that Christianity was established
in Man by St. Patrick about the raiddle of the fifth
century. The story goes that the Saint of Ireland
was on a voyage thither from England, -\Vhen a
storm cast him ashore on a httle islet on the western

58 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
coast of Man. This islet was afterwards called
St. Patrick's Isle. St. Patrick built his church on
it. The church was rebuilt eight centuries later
within the walls of a castle which rose on the same
rocky site. It became the cathedral church of the
island. When the Norwegians came they renamed
the islet Holm Isle. Tradition says that St.
Patrick's coming was in the time of Mannanan, the
magician, our little Manx Prospero. It also says
that St. Patrick drove Mannanan away, and that
St. Patrick's successor, St. Germain, followed up
the good work of exterminating evil spirits by driving
out of the island all venomous creatures whatever.
We sometiraes bless the memory of St. Germain,
and wish he would come again.
The Early Bishops of Man
After St. Germain came St. Maughold. This
Bishop was a sort of transfigured Manx Caliban. I
trust the name does him no wrong. He had been
an Irish prince, had lived a bad, gross life as a
robber at the head of a band of robbers, had been
converted by St. Patrick, and, resolving to abandon
the temptations of the world, had embarked on the

lect. ii] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 59
sea in a wicker boat without oar or helm. Alraost
he had his will at once, but the north wind, which
threatened to reraove hira frora the temptations of
this world, cast him ashore on the north of the Isle
of Man. There he built his church, and the rocky
headland whereon it stands is still known by his
name. High on the craggy cliff-side, looking
towards the sea, is a seat hewn out of the rock.
This is called St. Maughold's Chair. Not far
away there is a well supposed to possess miracu
lous properties. It is called St. Maughold's Well.
Thus tradition has perpetuated the odour of his
great sanctity, which is the raore extraordinary in
a variation of his legend, which says that it was not
after his conversion, and in submission to the will
of God, that he put forth frora Ireland in his wicker
boat, but that he was thrust out thus, with hands
and feet bound, by way of punishraent for his criraes
as a captain of banditti.
But if Maughold was Caliban in Ireland, he
was more than Prospero in Man. Rumour of his
piety went back to Ireland, and St. Bridget, who
had founded a nunnery at Kildare, resolved on a
pilgrimage to the good raan's island. She crossed
the water, attended by her virgins, called her

6o THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
daughters of fire, founded a nunnery near Douglas,
worked rairacles there, touched the altar in testi
mony of her virginity, whereupon it grew green
and flourished. This, if I may be pardoned the
continued parallel, is our Manx Miranda. And in
deed it is difficult to shake off the idea that Shake
speare raust have known soraething of the early
story of Man, its raagicians and its saints. We
know the perfidy of circurastance, the lying tricks
that fact is always playing with us, too well and
painfully to say anything of the kind with certainty.
But the angles of resemblance are many between
the groundwork of the " Tempest " and the earliest
of Manx records. Mannanan-beg-Mac-y-Lear, the
magician who surrounded the island with mists
when enemies came near in ships ; Maughold, the
robber and libertine, bound hand and foot, and
driven ashore in a wicker boat ; and then Bridget,
the virgin saint. Moreover, the stories of Little Man
nanan, of St. Patrick, and of St. Maughold were
printed in Manx in the sixteenth century. Truly
that is not enough, for, after all, we have no evidence
that Shakespeare, who knew everything, knew
Manx. But then Man has long been famous for its
seamen. We h.id one of them at Trafalgar, hold-

lect. ii] the little MANX NATION 6i
ing Nelson in his arms when he died. The best
days, or the worst days — which ? — of the trade of
the West Coast of Africa saw Manx captains in the
thick of it. Shall I confess to you that in the bad
days of the English slave trade the four merchant-
raen that brought the largest black cargo to the big
human auction mart at the Goree Piazza at Liver
pool were commanded by four Manxmen ! They
were a sad quartet. One of them had only one arra
and an iron hook ; another had only one arra and
one eye ; a third had only one leg and a sturap ; the
fourth was covered with scars frora the iron of the
chains of a slave which he had worn twelve months
at Barbadoes. Just about enough humanity in the
four to make one complete man. But with vigour
enough, fire enough, heart enough — I daren't say
soul enough — in their dismerabered old trunks to
make ten men apiece ; born sea-rovers, true sons of
Orry, their blood half brine. Well, is it not con
ceivable that in those earlier days of treasure seek
ing, when Elizabeth's English captains were spoiling
the' Spaniard in the Indies, Manx sailors were also
there ? If so, why raight not Shakespeare, who
raust have ferreted out many a stranger creature,
have found in some London tavern an old Manx

62 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
sea-dog, who could tell hira of the Manx Prospero,
the Manx Caliban, and the Manx Miranda ?
But I have rarabled on about my sailors ; I must
return to my Bishops. They seem to have been a
line of pious, humble, charitable, godly men at the
beginning. Irishmen, chiefly, living the lives of
hermits and saints. Apparently they were at first
appointed by the people themselves. Would it be
interesting to know the grounds of selection ? One
was selected for his sanctity, a natural qualification,
but another was chosen because he had a pleasant
face, and a fine portly figure ; not bad qualifications,
either. Thus things went on for about a hundred
years, and, for all we know, Celtic Bishops and
Celtic people lived together in their little island in
peace, hearing nothing of the loud religious hubbub
that was disturbing Europe.
Bishops of the Welsh Dynasty
Then came the rule of the Welsh kings, and,
though we know but little with certainty, we seem to
realise that it brought great changes to the religious
life of Man. The Church began to possess itself of
lands ; the baronial territories of the island fell into

LECT. ii] TIIE LITTLE MANX NATION 63
the hands of the clergy ; the early Bishops became
Barons. This gave the Church certain powers of
government. The Bishops became judges, and as
judges they possessed great power over the person
of the subject. Sometimes they stood in the
highest place of all, being also Governor to the
Welsh Kings. Then they were called Sword-
Bishops. Their power at such tiraes, when the
crosier and sword were in the two hands of one
man, must have been portentous, and even terrible.
We have no records that picture what came of that.
But it is not difficult to imagine the condition.
The old order of things had passed away. The
hermit-saints, the saintly hermits, had gone, and in
their place were monkish barons, living in abbeys
and monasteries, whipping the poor bodies of their
people, as well as comforting their torn hearts,
fattening on broad lands, praying each with his
lips : " Give us this day our daily bread," but
saying each to his soul : " Soul, thou hast much
goods laid up for many years ; take thine ease ;
eat, drink, and be merry."

64 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii

Bishops of the Norse Dynasty
Little as we know of these times, we see that
things must have corae to a pretty pass, for when
the Scandinavian dynasty came in the ecclesiastical
authorities were forbidden to exercise civil control
over any subjects of the king that were not also the
tenants of their own baronies. So the Bishops
were required to confine themselves to keeping
their own house in order. The Norse Constitution
established in Man by King Orry raade no effort to
overthrow the Celtic Church founded by St. Patrick,
and corrupted by his Welsh successors, but it cur
tailed its liberties, and reduced its dignity. It
deraanded as an act of fealty that the Bishop or
chief Baron should hold the stirrup of the King's
saddle, as he raounted his horse at Tynwald. But
it still suffered the Bishop and certain of his clergy
to sit in the highest court of the legislature. The
Church ceased to be purely Celtic ; it becarae Celto-
Scandinavian, otherwise Manx. It was under the
Archbishop of Drontheira for its Metropolitan, and
its young clergy were sent over to Drontheira to be
educated. Its revenues were apportioned after the

LECT. ii] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 65
most apostolic manner ; one-third of the tithes to
the Bishop for his maintenance, the support of his
courts, his churches, and (miserable conclusion ! )
his prisons ; one-third to the priests, and the
remaining third to the relief of the poor and tlie
education of youth. It is a curious and significant
fact that when the Reformation carae the last third
was seized by the lord. Good old lordly trick, we
know it well ! Sodor and Man
The Bishopric of the island was now no longer
called the Bishopric of Man, but Sodor and Man.
The title has given rise to rauch speculation.
One authority derives it frora Soterenssis, a name
given by Danish writers to the western islands,
and afterwards corrupted to Soderensis. Another
authority derives it from Sudreyjas, signifying
in the Norwegian the Southern Isles. A third
derives it from the Greek Soter, Saviour, to
whose name the cathedral of Iona was dedicated.
And yet a fourth authority derives it from the
supposed third name of the little islet rock
called variously Holm Isle, Sodor, Peel, and

66 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
St. Patrick's Isle, whereon St. Patrick or St.
Germain built his church. I can claim no right to
an opinion where these good doctors differ, and
shall content myself with saying that the balance
of belief is in favour of the Norwegian derivation,
which offers this explanation of the title of Bishop
of Sodor and Man, that the Isle of Man was not
included by the Norsemen in the southern cluster
of islands called the Sudereys, and that the Bishop
was sometimes called the Bishop of Man and the
Isles, and sometiraes Bishop of the Sudereys and
the Isle of Man. Only one warning note shall I
dare, as an ignorant layman, to strike on that
definition, and it is this : that the title of Bishop of
Sodor dates back to the seventh century certainly,
and that the Norseman did not come south until
three centuries later.

The Early Bishops of the House
of Stanley
But now I come to matters whereon I have more
authority to speak. When the Isle of Man passed
to the Stanley family, the Bishopric fell to their

lect. ii] the LITTLE MANX NATION 67
patronage, and they lost no time in putting their
own people into it. It was then under the English
metropolitan of Canterbury, but early in the six
teenth century it became part of the province of
York. About that time the baronies, the abbeys,
and the nunneries were suppressed. It does
not appear that the change of metropolitan had
made much change of religious life. Apparently
the clergy kept the Manx people in miserable ig
norance. It was not until the seventeenth century
that the Book of Comraon Prayer was traiislated
into the Manx language. The Gospels and the
Acts were unknown to the Manx until nearly a
century later. Nor was this due to ignorance of
the clergy of the Manx tongue, for raost of them
must have been Manxmen, and several of the
Bishops were Manxmen also. But grievous abuses
had by this tirae attached themselves to the Manx
Church, and some of them were flagrant and wicked,
and some were impudent and arausing.
Tithes in Kind
Naturally the more outrageous of the latter sort
gathered about the process of collecting tithes.

68 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
Tithes were paid in kind in those days. It was
not until well within our own century that they
were commuted to a money payment. The Manx
man paid tithe on everything. He began to pay
tithe before coraing into the world, and he went on
paying tithe even after he had gone out of it. This
is a hard saying, but nevertheless a simple truth.
Throughout his journey from the cradle to the
grave, the Manxman paid tithe on all he inherited,
on all he had, on all he did, on all his wife did, and
on all he left behind him. We have the equivalent
of this in England at the present hour, but it was
yet raore tyrannical, and infinitely more ludicrous, in
the Isle of Man down to the year 1839. It is only
vanity and folly and vexation of spirit to quarrel
with the raodern English taxgatherer ; you are sure
to go the wall, with humiliation and with disgrace.
It was not always so when taxes were paid in kind.
There was, at least, the satisfaction of cheating.
The Manx people could not always deny themselves
that satisfaction. For instance, they were required
to pay tithe of herring as soon as the herring boats
were brought above full sea mark, and there were
ways of counting known to the fishermen with
which the black-coated arithmeticians of the Church

lect. ii] the little MANX NATION 69
were not able to cope. A man paid tithe on such
goods and even such clothes as his wife "Jjossessed
on their wedding day, and young brides became
wondrous wise in the selection for the vicarage of
the garments that were out of fashion. A corpse-
present was demanded over the grave of a dead man
out ofthe horses and cattle whereof he died possessed,
and dying men left verbal wills which consigned their
broken-winded horses and dry cows to the mercy
and care of the clergyman. You will not marvel
much that such dealings led to disputes, sometimes
to quarrels, occasionally to riots. In my boyhood
I heard old people over the farm-house fire chuckle
and tell of various wise doings, to out-wit the par
son. One of these concerned the oats harvest.
When the oats were in sheaf, the parson's cart
carae up, driven by the suraner, the parson's
official servant. The gate of the field was thrown
open, and honestly and religiously one sheaf out of
every ten was thrown into the cart. But the hus-
bandraan had been thrifty in advance. The par
son's sheaves had all been grouped thick about the
gate, and they were the shortest, and the thinnest,
and the blackest, and the dirtiest, and the poorest
that the field had yielded. Sirailar were the doings

70 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
at the digging of the potatoes, but the scenes of
recrimination which often ensued were usually
confined to the farraer and the sumner. More
outrageous contentions with the priest himself sorae
times occurred within the very walls of the church.
It was the practice to bring tithe of butter and
cheese and eggs, and lay it on the altar on Sunday.
This had to be done under pain of exclusion frora
the communion, and that was a penalty raost
grievous to raaterial welfare. So the Manxmen and
Manxwomen were compelled to go to church much
as they went to market, with their butter- and egg-
baskets over their arms. It is a ludicrous .picture,
as one sees it in one's mind's eye, but what comes
after reaches the extreraity of farce. Say the
scene is Maughold old church, once the temple of
the saintly hermit. It is Sunday morning, the
bells are ringing, and Juan-beg-Marry-a-thruss,
a rascally old skinflint, is coming along with
a basket. It contains some butter that he could
not sell at Rarasey market yesterday because it was
rank, and a few eggs which he knows to be stale
and addled — the old hen has sat on them, and
they have brought forth nothing. These he places
reverently on the altar. But the parson knows

lect. ii] the LITTLE MANX NATION 71
Juan, and proceeds to exaraine his tithe. May I
take so rauch liberty with history, and with the
desecrated old church, as to im'agine the scene which
follows ?
Priest, pointing contemptuously towards the
altar : " Juan-beg-Marry-a-thruss, what is this ? "
" Butter and eggs, so plaze your reverence."
" Pig-swill ahd chalk you raean, man ! "
" Aw 'deed if I'd known your reverence was so
morthal partic'lar the ould hen herself should have
been layin' some fresh eggs for your reverence."
" Take them away, you thief of the Church !
Do you think what isn't fit for your pig is good
enough for your priest ? Bring better, or never let
me look on your wizened old wicked face again."
Exit Juan-beg-Marry-a-thruss, perhaps with butter
and eggs flying after his retreating figure.
The Gambling Bishop
This is an imaiginary picture, but no less outrageous
things happened whereof the records remain. A
deraoralised laity usually co-exists Vi?ith a deraoral-
ised clergy, and there are sorae bad stories of the
Bishops who preceded the Reformation. There is

72 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
one story of a Bishop of that period, who was a gross
drunkard and notorious gambler. He played with
his clergy as long as they had anything to lose, and
then he played with a deemster and lost five hundred
pounds hiraself. Poor little island, that had two
such raen for its masters, the one its master in
the things of this world, the other its master in the
things of the world to come ! If anything is need
ful to complete the picture of wretchedness in which
the poor Manx people must have existed then, it is
the knowledge of what manner of man a deemster
was in those days, what his powers were, and how
he exercised them. The Deemsters
The two deemsters — a name of obvious sig
nificance, deera-sters, such as deera the laws —
were then the only judges of the island, all other
legal functionaries being of more recent date. On
entering into office, the deemster took an oath,
which is sworn by all deemsters to this day,
declaring by the wonderful works which God hath
miraculously wrought in six days and seven nights,
that he would execute the laws of the Island justly

LECT. ii] the little MANX NATION 73
" betwixt party and party, as indifferently as the
herring's backbone doth he in the midst of the
fish." But these laws down to the time of the
second Stanley existed only in the breasts of the
deemsters themselves, being therefore called Breast
Laws, and thus they were supposed to be handed
down orally from deemster to deemster. The
superstition fostered corruption as well as incapacity,
and it will not be wronging the truth to say that
some of the deemsters of old time were both ignorant
and unprincipled. Their jurisdiction was absolute
in all that were then thought to be temporal affairs,
beginning with a debt of a shilling, and going up to
murder. They kept their courts in the centres of
their districts', one of them being in the north of the
island, the other in the south, but they were free
to hold a court anywhere, and at any time. A
deemster riding from Ramsey to Peel might find
his way stopped by a noisy claimant, who held his
defendant by the lug, having dragged him bodily from
the field to the highway, to receive instant judg
ment from the judge riding past. Or at midnight,
in his own horae, a deemster might be broken in
upon by a clamorous gang of disputants and their
witnesses, who came frora the pot-house for the

74 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
settlement of their differences. On such occasions,
the deemster invariably acted on the sound old
legal maxira, once recognised by an Act of Parlia
ment, that suits not likely to bear good costs should
always be settled out of court. First, the deemster
demanded his fee. If neither claimant nor defend
ant could give it, he probably troubled himself no
further than to take up his horse-whip and drive
both out into the road. I dare say there were
raany good men araong deemsters of the old order,
who loved justice for its own sake, and liked to see
the poor and the weak righted, but the raemory of
deemsters of this kind is not green. The bulk
of raen are not better than their opportunities, and
the teraptations of the deemsters of old were neither
Cew nor shght. The Bishopric Vacant
With such masters in the State, and such
masters in the Church, the island fell low in
material welfare, and its poverty reacted on both.
Within fifty years the Bishopric was nineteen years
vacant, though it may be that at the beginning ofthe
seventeenth century this was partly due to religious

lect. Il] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 75
disturbances. Then in 1697, with the monasteries
and nunneries dispersed, the abbeys in ruins, the
cathedral church a wreck, the clergy sunk in sloth
and ignorance, there came to the Bishopric, four
years vacant, a true man whose name on the page
of Manx Church history is like a star on a
dark night, when only one is shining — Bishop
Thomas Wilson. He was a strange and complex
creature, half angel, only half man, the serenest of
saints, and yet almost the bitterest of tyrants. Let
me tell you about him.
Bishop Wilson
Thomas Wilson was from Trinity College,
Dublin, and became domestic chaplain to William,
Earl of Derby, and preceptor to the Earl's son,
who died young. While he held this position,
the Bishopric of Sodor and Man became vacant,
and it was offered to hira. He declined it, think
ing hiraself unworthy of so high a trust. The
Bishopric continued vacant. Perhaps the can
didates for it were few ; certainly the emoluments
were small ; perhaps the patron was slothful —
certainly he gave little attention to the Church. At

76 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
length complaint was made to the King that the
spiritual needs of the island were being neglected.
The Earl was coraraanded to fill the Bishopric, and
once again he offered it to his chaplain. Then
Wilson yielded. He took possession in 1698, and
was enthroned at Peel Castle. The picture of his
enthronement must have been something to remem
ber. Peel Castle was already tumbling to its fall, and
the cathedral church was a woful -wreck. It is
even said that frora a hole in the roof the soil and
rain could enter, and blades of grass were shooting
up on the altar. The Bishop's house at Kirk
Michael, which had been long shut up, was in a
similar phght ; damp, mouldy, broken-windowed,
green with moss within and without. What would
one give to turn back the centuries and look on
at that primitive cereraony in St. Germain's Chapel
in April 1698 ! There would be the clergy, a
sorry troop, with wise and good men among them,
no doubt, but a poor, battered, bedraggled,
neglected lot, chiefly learned in dubious arts of
collecting tithes. And the Bishop himself, the
good chaplain of Earl Derby, the preceptor of his
son, what a face he must have had to watch and
to study, as he stood there that April morning,

LECT. ii] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 77
and saw for the first time what work he had come
to tackle ! Bishop Wilson's Censures
But Bishop Wilson set about his task with a
strong heart, and a resolute hand. He found him
self in a twofold trust. Since the Reformation, the
monasteries and nunneries had been dispersed,
and all the baronies had been broken up, save one,
the barony of the Bishop. Thus Bishop Wilson
was the head of the court of his barony. This was
a civil court with power of jurisdiction over felonies.
Its separate criminal control came to an end in 1777.
Such was Bishop Wilson's position as last and sole
Baron of Man. Then as head of the Church he
had powers over offences which were once called
offences against coraraon law. Irregular behaviour,
cursing, quarrelling, and drinking, as well as trans
gressions of the moral code, adultery, seduction,
prostitution, and the like, were punishable by the
Church and the Church courts. The censures of
Bishop Wilson on such offences did not err on the
side of clemency. He was the enemy of sin, and
no " G-cntle foe of sinners." He was a believer in

78 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
witchcraft, and for suspicion of commerce with evil
spirits and possession of the evil eye he punished
many a blameless old body. For open and con
victed adultery he caused the offenders to stand for
an hour at high fair at each of the market-places
of Douglas, Peel, Rarasey, and Castletown, bearing
labels on their breasts calling on all people to take
warning lest they came under the sarae Church cen
sure. Comraon unchastity he punished by expo
sure in church at full congregation, when the
guilty man or the poor victimised girl stepped up
from the west porch to the altar, covered from neck
to heels in a white sheet. Slanderers and evil
speakers he clapped into the Peel, or perhaps the
whipping-stocks, with tongue in a noose of leather,
and when after a lapse of time the gag was re
moved the liberated tongue was obliged to denounce
itself by saying thrice, clearly, boldly, probably with
good accent and discretion, " False tongue, thou
hast lied.'
It is perhaps as well that some of us did not live
in Bishop Wilson's tirae. We might not have
lived long. If the Church still held and exercised
the sarae powers over evil speakers we should
never hear our own ears in the streets for the din

LECT. ii] the LITTLE MANX NATION ^9
of the voices of the penitents ; and if it still
punished unchastity in a white sheet the trade of
the linen weaver would be brisk.
You will say that I have justified my statement
that Bishop Wilson was the bitterest of tyrants.
Let me now establish my opinion that he was also
the serenest of saints. I have told you how low
was the condition of the Church, how lax its rule,
how deep its clergy lay in sloth and ignorance, and
perhaps also in vice, when Bishop Wilson carae to
Man in 1698. Well, in 1703, only five years later,
the Lord Chancellor King said this : " If the an
cient discipline of the Church were lost elsewhere it
raight be found in all its force lathe Isle of Man."
This points first to force and vigour on the Bishop's
part, but surely it also points to purity of character
and nobility of aim. Bishop Wilson began by
putting his own house in order. His clergy ceased
to garable and to drink, and they were obliged to
collect their tithes with mercy. " He once suspended
a clergyman for an opinion on a minor point, but
many times he punished his clergy for offences
against the moral law and the material welfare of
the poor. In a stiff fight for integrity of life and
purity of thought, he spared none. I truly beheve

So TIIE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
that if he had caught hiraself in an act of gross in
justice he would have clambered up into the pillory.
He was a brave, strong-hearted creature, of the build
of a great man. Yes ! In spite of all his contradic
tions, he was a great man. We Manxmen shall
never look upon his like again !
The Great Corn Famine
Towards 1740 a long and terrible corn famine
fell upon our island. The fisheries had failed that
season, and the crops had been blighted two years
running. Miserably poor at all tiraes, ill-clad, ill-
housed, ill-fed at the best, the people were in
danger of sheer destitution. In that day of their
bitter trouble the poorest of the poor trooped off to
Bishop's court. The Bishop threw open his house
to thera all, good and bad, improvident and thrifty,
lazy and industrious, drunken and sober ; he made
no distinctions in that bad hour. He asked no
man for his name who couldn't give it, no woman
for her marriage lines who hadn't got them, no
child whether it was born in wedlock. That they
were all hungry was all he knew, and he saved
their lives in thousands. He bought ship-loads 01

LECT. Il] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 8l
English corn and served it out in bushels ; also
tons of Irish potatoes, and served them out in
kischens. He gave orders that the measure was to
De piled as high as it would hold, and never
smoothed flat a.gain. Yet he was himself a poor
man. While he had money he spent it. When
every penny was gone he pledged his revenue in
advance. After his credit was done he begged in
England for his poor people in Man — he begged for us
who would not have held out his hat to save his
own life ! God bless him ! But we repaid him.
Oh yes, we repaid him. His money he never got
back, but gold is not the currency of the other
world. Prayers and blessings are the wealth that
is there, and these went up after him to the great
White Throne frora the swelling throats of his
people. The Bishop at Court
Not of Bishop Wilson could it be said, as it was
said of another, that he " flattered princes in the
teraple of God." One day, when he was coming to
Court, Queen Caroline saw him and said to a com
pany of Bishops and Archbishops that surrounded

82 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.ii
her, " See, my lords, here is a Bishop who does
not come for a translation." " No, indeed, and
please your Majesty," said Bishop Wilson, " I will
not leave my wife in her old age because she is
poor." When Bishop Wilson -was an old man,
Cardinal Fleury sent over to ask after his age and
health, saying that they were the two oldest and
poorest Bishops in the world. At the same time
he got an order that no French privateer should
ever ravage the Isle of Man. The order has long
lapsed, but I am told that to this day French sea
men respect a Manxman. It touches me to think of
it that thus does the glory of this good man's life
shine on our faces still.
Stories of Bishop Wilson
How his people must have loved him ! Many of
the stories told of him are of rather general applica
tion, but some of thera ought to be true if they
are not.
One day in the old three-cornered market-place
at Rarasey a little maiden of seven crossed his
path. She was like sunshine, rosy-cheeked, bright-
eyed, bare-footed and bare-headed, and for love of

LECT. Il] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 83
her sweetness the grey old Bishop patted her head
and blest her. " God bless you, my child ; God bless
you," he said. The child curtseyed and answered,
" God bless you, too, sir." " Thank you, child,
thank you," the Bishop said again ; " I dare say your
blessing will be as good as raine."
It was custoraary in those days, and indeed
down to my own time, when a suit of clothes was
wanted, to have the journeyman tailor at home to
make it. One, Danny of that ilk, was once at
Bishop's Court making a long walking coat for the
Bishop. In trying it on in its nebulous condition,
that leprosy of open white seams and stitches,
Danny made numerous chalk marks to indicate the
places of the buttons. " No, no, Danny," said the
Bishop, " no more buttons than enough to fasten it
— only one, that will do. It would ill become a
poor priest like me to go a-glitter with things like
those." Now, Danny had already bought his
buttons, and had thera at that moment in his
pocket. So, pulling a woful face, he said, " Mercy
me, my lord, what would happen to the poor button-
makers, if everybody was of your opinion ? "
" Button it all over, Danny," said the Bishop. A
coat of Bishop Wilson's still exists. Would that

84 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
we had that one of the numerous buttons, and could
get a few more raade of the sarae pattern ! It would
be out of fashion — Danny's progeny have taken
care of that. There are not many of us that it
would fit — we have few men of Bishop Wilson's
build nowadays. But human kindliness is never
old-fashioned, and there are none of us .that the
garment of sweet grace would not suit.
Quarrels of Church and State
So far from " flattering princes in the temple of
God," Bishop Wilson was even morbidly jealous of
the authority of the Church, and he resisted that of
the State when the civil powers seemed to encroach
upon it. More than once he came into collision
with the State's highest functionary, the Lieutenant-
Governor, representative of the Lord of Man hira
self. One day the Governor's wife falsely defaraed
a lady, and the lady appealed to the Bishop.
Thereupon the Bishop interdicted the Governor's
wife from receiving the communion. But the
Governor's chaplain adraitted her. Straightway the
Bishop suspended the Governor's chaplain. Then
the Governor fined the Bishop in the sum of fifty

lect.ii] the little MANX NATION 85
pounds. The Bishop refused to pay, and was com
mitted to Castle Rushen, and lay there two raonths.
They show us his cell, a poor, dingy little box, so
darap in his day that he lost the use of some of
his fingers. After that the Bishop appealed to the
Lord, who declared the iraprisonraent illegal. The
Bishop was liberated, and half the island went to
the prison gate to fetch hira forth in triumph. The
only result was that the Bishop lost ;£"SOO, whereof
;£"300 were subscribed by the people. One hardly
knows whether to laugh or cry at it all. It is a
sorry and silly farce. Of course it raade a tremen
dous hurly-burly in its day, but it is gone now, and
doesn't matter a ha'porth to anybody. Nevertheless
because Gessler's cap goes up so often nowadays,
and so raany of us are kneeling to it, it is good and
wholesorae to hear of a poor Bishop who was brave
enough to take a shot at it instead.

¦*&'

Some Old Ordeals
Notwithstanding Bishop Wilson's severity, his
tyranny, his undue pride in the authority of the
Church, and his morbid jealousy of the powers of
the State, his rule was a wise and just one, and he

86 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.ii
was a spiritual statesman, who needed not to be
asharaed. He raised the tone of life in the Isle of
Man, raade it possible to accept a man's -yea and
nay, even in those perilous issues of life where the
\veakness and meanness of poor humanity reveals
itself in lies and subterfuges. This he did by
making false swearing a terror. One ancient
ordeal of swearing he set his face against, but
another he encouraged, and often practised. Let
me describe both.
In the old days, when a man died intestate,
leaving no record of his debts, a creditor might
establish a claim by going with the Bishop to the
grave of .he dead man at midnight, stretching hira
self on it with face towards heaven and a Bible on
his breast, and then saying solemnly, " I swear that
So-and-so, who lies buried here, died in my debt by
so much." After that the debt was allowed. What
warning the Bishop first pronounced I do not know,
but the scene is a vivid one, even if we think of the
creditor as swearing truly, and a startling and
terrible one if we think of hira as about to swear
to what is false. The dark night, the dark figures
moving in it, the churchyard, the debtor's grave, the
sham creditor, who had been loud in his protests

lect. ii] the LITTLE MANX NATION 87
under the light of the inn of the village, now
quaking and trerabling as the Bishop's warning
comes out of the gloom, then stamraering, and
breaking down, and finally, with ghostly visions of
a dead hand clutching at him from the grave,
starting up, shrieking, and flying away. It is a
nightmare. Let us not remember it when the
candles are put out.
This ordeal was in force until the seventeenth
¦ century, but Bishop Wilson judged it un-Christian,
and never practised it. The old Roman canon law
of Purgation, a similar ordeal, he used not rarely.
It was designed to meet cases of slander in which
there was no direct and positive evidence. If a
good woman had been accused of unchastity in that
vague way of rumour which is always more
daraaging and de-vilish than open accusation, she
might of her own free choice, or by compulsion of
the Bishop, put to silence her false accusers by
appearing in church, with witnesses ready to take
oath that they believed her, and there swearing at
the altar that coramon farae and suspicion had
wronged her. If a man doubted her word he had
to challenge it, or keep silence for ever after. The
severest censures of the Church were passed upon

88 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
those who dared to repeat an unproved accusation
after the oaths of Purgation and Compurgation had
been taken unchallenged. It is a fine, honest
ordeal, very old, good for the right, only bad for
the -wTong, giving strength to the weak and
humbling the mighty. But it would be folly and
mummery in our day. The Church has lost its
powers over life and limb, and no one capable of
defaming a pure woman would care a brass penny
about the Church's excommunication. Yet a
woman's good name is the silver thread that runs
through the pearl chain of her -virtues. Pity that
nowadays it can be so easily snapped. Conver
sation at five o'clock tea is enough to do that. The
ordeal of compulsory Purgation was abolished in
Man as late as 1737.
The Herring Fishery
Bishop Wilson began, or revived, a forra of
service which was so beautiful, so picturesque, and
withal so Manx that I regret the loss of scarce any
custora so much as the discontinuance of this one.
it was the fishermen's service on the shore at the
beginning of the herring-season. But in order to

lect.ii] the little MANX NATION 89
appreciate it you must first know something of the
herring fishing itself. It is the chief industry of
the island. Half the population is connected with
it in some way. A great proportion of the men of
the humbler classes are half seamen, half landsmen,
tilhng their little crofts in the spring and autumn,
and going out with the herring boats in summer.
The herring is the national fish. The Manxman
swears by its flavour. The deemsters, as we have
seen, literally swear by its backbone. Potatoes
and herrings constitute a common dish of the
country people. They are ready for it at any
hour of the day or night. I have had it for
dinner, I have taken it for supper, I have seen it
for tea, and even known it for breakfast. It is
served without ceremony. In the middle of the
table two great crocks, one of potatoes boiled in
their jackets, the other of herrings fresh or salted ;
a plate and a bowl of new milk at every seat, and
lumps of salt here and there. To be a Manxman
you must eat Manx herrings ; there is a story that
to transforra hiraself into a Manxman one of the
Dukes of Athol ate twenty-four of thera at break
fast, a herring for every member of his House
of Keys.

go THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
The Manx herring fishery is interesting and very
picturesque. You know that the herrings come
from northern latitudes. Towards raid-winter a
vast colony of them set out from the arctic seas,
closely pursued by innumerable sea-fowl, which deal
death among the little emigrants. They raove in
two divisions, one westward towards the coasts of
Araerica, the other eastward in the direction of
Europe. They reach the Shetlands in April and
the Isle of Man about June. The herring is fished
at night. To be out with the herring boats is a
glorious experience on a calra night. You have set
sail with the fleet of herring boats about sun-down,
and you are running before a light breeze through
the dusk. The sea-gulls are skiraraing about the
brown sails of your boat. They know what you
are going to do, and have come to help you.
Presently you come upon a flight of them wheeling
and diving in the gathering darkness. Then you
know that you have lit on the herring shoal. The
boat is brought head to the wind and left to drift.
By this time the stars are out, perhaps the moon
also — though too much moon is not good for the
fishing — and you can just descry the dim outline
of the land against the dark blue of the sky.

lect. ii] THE LITTLE MANX NATION gi
Luminous patches of phosphorescent light begin to
move in the water. " The mar-fire's rising," say
the fisherraen, the herring are stirring. " Let's
make a shot ; up with the gear," cries the skipper,
and nets are hauled frora below, passed over the
bank-board, and paid out into the sea — a solid wall
of meshes, floating upright, nine feet deep and a
quarter of a mile long. It is a calm, clear night,
just light enough to see the buoys on the back of
the first net. The lamp is fixed on the raitch-board.
All is silence, only the steady plash, plash, plash of
the slow waters on the boat's side ; no singing
araong the raen, no chaff", no laughter, all quiet
aboard, for the fisherraen believe that the fish can
hear ; all quiet around, where the deep black of the
watery pavement is brightened by the reflection of
stars. Then out of the white phosphorescent
patches come minute points of silver and countless
faint popping sounds. The herrings are at play
about the nets. You see them in numbers exceed
ing imagination, shoals on shoals. " PuH up now,
there's a heavy strike," cries the skipper, and the
nets are hauled up, and come in white and moving
— a solid block of fish, cheep, cheep, cheeping like
birds in the early morning. At the grey of dawn

92 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
the boats begin to run for home, and the sun is
shining as the fleet makes the harbour. Men and
woraen are waiting there to buy the night's catch.
The quay is full of them, bustling, shouting,
laughing, quarrelling, counting the herrings, and
so forth. The Fishermen's Service
Such is the herring fishery of Man. Bishop
Wilson knew how bitter a thing it could be if this
industry failed the island even for a single season.
So, with absolute belief in the Divine government of
the world, he -wrote a Service to be held on the first
day of the herring season, asking for God's blessing
on the harvest of the sea. The scene of that
service must have been wondrously beautiful and
impressive. Why does not some great painter
paint it ? Let me, by the less effectual vehicle of
words, attempt to realise what it must have been.
The place of it was Peel bay, a wide stretch of
beach, with a gentle slope to the left, dotted over
with grey houses ; the little town farther on, with its
nooks and corners, its blind alleys and dark lanes,
its narrow, crabbed, crooked streets. Behind this

lECT. Il] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 93
the old pier and the herring boats rocking in the
harbour, with their brown sails half set, waiting for
the top of the tide. In the distance the broad
breast of Contrary Head_, and, a musket-shot outside
of it, the little rocky islet whereon stand the stately
ruins of the noble old Peel Castle. The beach is
dotted over with people — old men, in their curranes
and undyed stockings, leaning on their sticks ; chil
dren playing on the shingle ; young women in groups,
dressed in sickle-shaped white sun-bonnets, and
with petticoats tucked up ; old women in long blue
homespun cloaks. But these are only the back
ground of the human picture. In the centre of it
is a wide circle of fishermen, men and boys, of all
sizes and sorts, from the old Adrairal of the herring
fleet to the lad that helps the cook — rude figures in
blue and with great sea-boots. They are on their
knees on the sand, with their knitted caps at their
rusty faces, and in the middle of them, standing in
an old broken boat, is the Bishop himself, bare
headed, white-headed, with upturned face praying
for the fishing season that is about to begin. The
June day is sweet and beautiful, and the sun is
going down behind the castle. Some sea-gulls are
disporting on the rock outside, and, save for their

94

THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii

jabbering cries, and the boom of the sea from the
red horizon, and the gentle plash of the wavelets on
the pebbles of the shore, nothing is heard but the
slow tones of the Bishop and the fishermen's deep
Amen. Such was Bishop Wilson's fisheraien's
service. It is gone ; more's the pity.
Some Old Laws
The spiritual laws of Man were no dead letters
when Bishop Wilson presided over its spiritual
courts. He was good to illegitimate children,
making thera legitimate if their parents married
within two years of their birth, and often putting
them on the same level with their less injured
brothers and sisters where inheritance was in ques
tion. But he was unmerciful to the parents them
selves. There is one story of his treatment of a
woraan which passes all others in its tyranny. It
is, perhaps, the only deep stain on his character.
I thank God that it can never have corae to the
ears of Victor Hugo. Told as Hugo would have
told it, surely it must have blasted for ever the
name of a good man. It is the dark story of
Katherine Kinrade.

lect. ii] the little MANX NATION 95
Katherine Kinrade
She was a poor ruin of a woman, belonging to
Kirk Christ, but wandering like a vagrant over the
island. The fact of first consequence is, that she
was only half sane. In the language of the clergy
of the time, she " had a degree of unsettledness and
defect of understanding." Thus she was the sort
of human wreck that the world finds it easy to
fling away. Katherine fell victim to the sin that
was not her own. A child was born. The Church
censured her. She did penance in a white sheet
at the church doors. But her poor, dull brain had
no power to restrain her. A second child was
born. Then the Bishop coraraitted her for twenty-
one days to his prison at the Peel. Let me tell
you what the place is like. It is a crypt of the
cathedral church. You enter it by a little door in
the choir, leading to a tortuous flight of steep steps
going down. It is a chamber cut out of the rock
of the little island, dark, darap, and noisome. A
small aperture lets in the hght, as well as the sound
of the sea beating on the rocks below. The roof,
if you could see it in the gloom, is groined and

9C THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
ribbed, and above it is the mould of many graves,
for in the old days bodies were buried in the choir.
Can you imagine a prison more terrible for any
prisoner, the strongest man or the bravest soldier ?
Think of it on a tempestuous night in winter. The
lonely islet rock, with the swift seas rushing around
it ; the castle half a ruin, its guard-room empty, its
banqueting hall roofless, its sally port silent ; then
the cathedral church falling to decay ; and under
the floor of its choir, where lie the graves of dead
men, this black, grim, cold cell, silent as the graves
themselves, save for the roar of the sea as it beats
in the darkness on the rocks outside ! But that is
not enough. We have to think of this gloomy pile
as inhabited on such a night of terrors by only one
human soul — this poor, bedraggled, sin-laden woman
with " the defect of understanding." Can anything
be more awful ? Yet there is worse to follow.
The records tell us that Katherine Kinrade sub
mitted to her punishment " with as much discretion
as could be expected of the like of her." But
such punishraents do not cleanse the soul that
is " drenched with unhallowed fire." Perhaps
Katherine did not know that she was wronged ;
nevertheless God's iraage was being trodden out of
her. She went frora bad to worse, became a

lect.ii] the LITTLE MANX NATION 97
notorious strurapet, strolled about the island, and
led " a scandalous life on other accounts." A
third child was born. Then the Bishop concluded
that for the honour of the Christian name, " to pre
vent her own utter destruction, and for the example
of others," at imely and thorough reformation raust
be made by a further and severer punishraent. It
was the 15th day of March, and he ordered that on
the 17th day, being -the fair of St. Patrick, at the
height of the market, the said Katherine Kinrade
should be taken to Peel Town in charge of the
general sumner, and the constables and soldiers of
the garrison, and there dragged after a boat in the
sea ! Think of it ! On a bitter day in March this
wretched woman with the " defect of understanding "
was to be dragged through the sea by a rope tied
to the tail of a boat ! And if any owner, master, and
crew of any boat proved refractory by refusing to
perforra this service for the restraining of vice, they
were to be subject to fine and iraprisonraent ! When
St. Patrick's Day came the weather was so stormy
that no boat could live in the bay, but on St.
Germain's Day, about the height of the market, the
censure was performed. After undergoing the
punishraent the miserable soul was apparently ,G

g8 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.ii
penitent, " according to her capacity," took the
coramunion, and was " received into the peace of
the Church." Poor huraan ruin, defaced iraage of
a woraan, begrimed and buried soul, unchaste, mis
shapen, incorrigible, no "juice of God's distilling"
ever " dropped into the core of her life," to such
punishment she was doomed by the tribunal of that
saintly man. Bishop Thomas Wilson ! She has met
him at another tribunal since then ; not where she
has crouched before hira, but where she has stood by
his side. She has carried her great account against
hira, to Hira before whom the proudest are as chaff.
None spake when Wilson stood before
The Throne ;
And He that sat thereon
Spake not ; and all the presence-floor
Burnt deep with blushes, and the angels cast
Their faces downwards. — Then, at last,
Awe-stricken, he was ware
How on the emerald stair
A woman sat divinely clothed in white,
And at her knees four cherubs bright,
That laid
Their heads within her lap. Then, trembling, he essayed
To speak — '• Christ's mother, pity me ! "
Then answered she,
" Sir, I am Katherine Kinrade."*

* Unpublished poem by the author of "Fo'c's'le Yarns."

lect.ii] the little MANX NATION 99
Bishop Wilson's Last Days
Have I dashed your faith in my hero ? Was he
indeed the bitterest of tyrants as well as the
serenest of saints ? Yet bethink you of the other
good men who have done evil deeds ? King David
and the wife of Uriah, Mahomet and his adopted
son ; the gallery of raeraory is hung round with
many such portraits. Poor humanity, weak at the
strongest, impure at the purest ; best take it as it
is, and be content. Remeraber that a good raan's
vices are generally the excess of his virtues. It was
so with Bishop Wilson. Remember, too, that it is
not for what a man does, but for what he means to
do, that we love him or hate him in the end. And
in the end the Manx people loved Bishop Wilson,
and still they bless his memory.
We have a glimpse of his last days, and it is full
of tender beauty. True to his lights, siraple and
frugal of life. God-fearing and strong of heart, he
lived to be old. Very feeble, his beautiful face
grown mellower even as his heart was softer for
his many years, tottering on his staff, drooping hke
a white flower, he went in and out among his

100 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.ii
people, laying his trembling hands on the children's
heads and blessing them, remerabering their fathers
and their fathers' fathers. Beloved by the young,
reverenced by the old, honoured by the great,
worshipped by the poor, living in sweet patience,
ready to die in hope. His day was done, his
night was near, and the weary toiler was willing
to go to his rest. Thus passed some peaceful
years. He died in 1755, and was followed to his
grave by the whole Manx nation. His tomb is our
most sacred shrine. We know his faults, but we
do not speak of them there. Call a truce over the
place of the old man's rest. There he lies, who
was once the saviour of our people. God bless
him ! He was our fathers' bishop, and his saintly
face still shines on our fathers' children.
The Athol Bishops
Let me in a last clause attempt a sketch of the
history of the Manx Church in the century or more
that has followed Bishop Wilson's death. The
last fifty years of it are featureless, save for an
attempt to abolish the Bishopric. This foolish
effort first succeeded and then failed, and was a

lect. ii] the LITTLE MANX NATION loi
poor bit of mummery altogether, ending in nothing
but waste of raoney and tirae, and breath and temper.
The fifty years immediately succeeding Bishop
Wilson were full of activity. But so far as the
Church was concerned, the activity was not always
wholesome. If religion was kept alive in Man in
those evil days, and the soul hunger of the poor
Manx people was satisfied, it was not by the
masters of the Manx Church, the Pharisees who
gave alms in the streets to the sound of a trumpet
going before them, or by the Levites who passed
by on the other side when a man had fallen among
thieves. It was partly by dissent, which was begun
by Wesley in 1775 (after Quakerism had been
suppressed), and partly by a small minority of the
Manx clergy, who kept going the early evangeli
calism of Newton and Cowper and Cecil — dear,
sunny, simple-hearted old Manx vicars, who took
sweet counsel together in their old-fashioned horaes,
where you found grace in all senses of the word,
purity of soul, the life of the mind, and gentle
courthness of manners.
Bishop Wilson's successor was Doctor Mark
Hildlesley, in all respects a worthy man. He
completed the translation of the Scriptures into

102 The LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
Manx, which had been begun by his predecessor,
and established Sunday-schools in Man before they
had been commenced in any other country. But
after him came a line of worthless prelates, Dr.
Richmond, remembered for his unbending haughti
ness ; Dr. Mason, disgraced by his debts ; and
Claudius Cregan, a bishop unfit to be a curate.
Do you not read between the broad lines of such
facts ? The Athol dynasty was now some thirty
years estabhshed in Man, and the swashbuckler
Court of fine gentlemen was in full swing. In that
costurae drama of soiled lace and uproarious
pleasures, what part did the Church play ? Was it
that of the man clad in camel's skin, hving on
locusts and wild honey, and calling on the genera
tion of revellers to flee from the wrath to come ?
No ; but that of the lover of cakes and ale. The
records of this period are few and scanty, but they
are full enough to show that some of the clergy of
the Athols knew more of backgammon than of
theology. While they pandered to the dissolute
Court they lived under, going the errands of their
masters in the State, fetching and carrying for
thera, and hcking their shoes, they tyrannised over
the poor ignorant Manx people and fleeced them

lect.ii] the little MANX NATION 103
unmercifully. Perhaps this was in a way only
natural. Corruption was in the air throughout
Europe. Dr. Youngs were grovelling for preferments
at the feet of kings' mistresses, and Dr. Warners
were kissing the shoebuckles of great ladies for
sheer love of their faces, plastered red and white.
The parasites of the Manx clergy were not far
behind some of their English brethren. There is a
story told of their life among themselves which casts
lurid light on their character and ways of life.
It is said that two of the Vicars-general summoned
a large nuraber of the Manx people to Bishop's
Court on some business of the spiritual court.
Many of the people had come long distances,
chiefly a-foot, without food, and probably without
money. After a short sitting the court was
adjourned for dinner. The people had no dinner,
and they starved. The Vicars-general went into
the palace to dine with the Bishop. Some hours
passed. The night was gathering. Then a
message came out to say that no more business
could be done that day. Some of the poor people
were old, and had to travel fifteen miles to their
homes. The record tefls us that the Bishop gave
his guests " most excellent wine." What of a

104 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.ii
scene like that ? Outside, a sharp day in Spring,
two score famished folks tramping the glen and the
gravel-path, the gravel-path and the glen, to and
fro, to and fro, minute after minute, hour after
hour. Inside, my lord Bishop, drenched in debt,
dining with his clergy, drinking " most excellent
wine " with them, unbending his mighty raind with
thera, exchanging boisterous stories -with thera,
jesting vnth them, laughing with them, until his
face grows as red as the glowing turf on his hearth.
Presently a footfall on the gravel, and outside the
window a hungry, pinched, anxious face looking
nervously into the room. Then this coUoquy :
" Ah, the court, plague on't, I'd forgotten it."
"Adjourn it, gentlemen."
" Wine like yours, my lord, would make a man
forget Paradise."
" Sit down again, gentleraen. Juan, go out and
tell the people to corae back to-morrow."
" Your right good health, my lord ! "
" And yours, gentleraen both ! "
Oh, if there is any truth in religion, if this world
is God's, if a day is coraing when the weak shall
be exalted and the mighty laid low, what a reckon
ing they have gone to whose people cried for bread

lect. ii] the little MANX NATION 105
and they gave them a stone ! And if there is not,
if the hope is vain, if it is all a shara and a
mockery, still the justice of this world is sure.
Where are they now, these parasites ? Their
game is played out. They are bones and ashes ;
they are in their forgotten graves.

THE STORY OF THE MANX PEOPLE

The Manx Language
A friend asked me the other day if there was any
reason why I should not deliver these lectures in
Manx. I answered that there were just forty good
and sufficient reasons. The first was that I did
not speak Manx. Like the wise queen in the story
of the bells, he then spared me the recital of the
remaining nine-and-thirty. But there is at least
one of the number that will appeal strongly to most
of my hearers. What that is you shall judge for
yourselves after I have braved the pitfaUs of pronun
ciation in a tongue I do not know, and given you
some clauses of the Lord's Prayer in Manx.
Ayr ain t'ayns niau.
(Father our who art in heaven.)
Caskerick dy row dty ennyvt.
(Holy be Thy name.)

LECT. tn] THE LITTLE MANX NATION. 107
Dyjig dty reeriaght.
(Come Thy kingdom.)
Dty aigney dy rowjeant er y thalloo mry te ay-its niaii.
(Thy will be done on the earth even as in heaven.)
* * * * * « «
Son dy bragh, as dy bragh, Amen.
(For ever and ever. Amen.)
I asked a friend — it was Mr. Wilson Barrett
— if in its fulness, its fine chest-notes, its force
and music, this old language did not sound like
Italian. " Well, no," he answered, " it sounds more like
hard swearing."
I think you must now understand why the
greater part of these lectures should be delivered in
English. Manx is a dialect mainly Celtic, and differing
only slightly frora the ancient Scottish Gaelic. I
have heard my father say that when he was a boy
in Ramsey, sixty years ago, a Scotch ship came
ashore on the Carrick, and next morning after the
wreck a long, lank, bony creature, with bare legs,
and in short petticoats, came into the market
place and played a tune on a little shrieking pair of
smithy bellows, and then sang a song. It was a

I08 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect, hi
Highland piper, and he sang in his Gaelic, but the
Manx boys and girls who gathered round him
understood almost every word of his song, though
they thought his pronunciation bad. Perhaps they
took him for a poor old Manxman, somehow
strayed and lost, a sort of Manx Rip Van Winkle
who had slept a century in Scotland, and thereby
lost part of his clothes.
You will wonder that there is not more Norse in
our language, remerabering how much of the Norse
is in our blood. But the predominance of the
Celtic is quite natural. Our mothers were Celts,
speaking Celtic, before our Norse fathers came.
Was it likely that our Celtic mothers should learn
much of the tongue of their Norse husbands ?
Then, is it not our mother, rather than our father,
who teaches us to speak when we are children ?
So our Celtic mothers taught us Celtic, and thus
Celtic became the dorainant language of our race.
Manx Names
But though our Norse fathers could not impose
their Norse tongue on their children, they gave thera
Norse naraes, and to the island they gave Norse

lect. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 109
place-names. Hence we find that though Manx
names show a preponderance of the Celtic, yet that
the Norse are nuraerous and important. Thus
we have many dales, fells, ga-rths, and ghylls. Indeed,
we have many pure Scandinavian surnames and
place-names. When I was in Iceland I sometimes
found rayself face to face with naraes which almost
persuaded rae that I was at home in our little
island of the Irish Sea. There is, for example, a
Snaefell in Man as well as in Iceland. Then, our
Norwegian surnames often took Celtic prefixes, such
as Mac, and thus became Scandio-Gaelic. But
this is a subject on which I have no right to speak
with authority. You will find it written down
with learning and judgment in the good book of
my friend Mr. A. W. Moore, of Cronkbourne. What
concerns me more than the scientific aspect of the
language is its literary character. I seera to realise
that it was the language of a poetic race. The
early generations of a people are often poetic.
They are child-like, and to be hke a child is the
best half of being like a poet. They narae their
places by help of their observatory powers. These
are fresh and full of wonder, and Nature herself is
beautiful or strange until man tampers with her.

no THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. in
So when an untaught and uncorrupted mind looks
upon a new scene and bethinks itself of a name to
fit it, the name is almost certainly full of charm or
rugged power. Thus we find in Man such mixed
Norse and Celtic names as : Booildooholl-y (Black
fold of the wood), Douglas (Black stream), Sode-
rick (South creek), Trollaby (Troll's farm), Gansy
(Magic isle), Cronk-y-Clagh Bane (Hill of the white
stone), Cronk-ny-hey (Hill of the grave), Cronk-ny-
arrey-lhaa (Hill of the day watch).
Manx Imagination
This poetic character of the place-names of the
island is a standing reproach to us as a race. We
have degenerated in poetic spirit since such naraes
were the natural expression of our feelings. I
tremble to think what our place-names would be if
we had to make them now. Our few modern
christenings set ray teeth on edge. We are not a
race of poets. We are the prosiest of the prosy. I
have never in my life met with any race, except
Icelanders and Norwegians, who are so completely
the slave of hard fact. It is astounding how
difficult the average Manxman finds it to put

LECT. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION iii
hiraself into the mood of the poet. T'hat anything
could come out of nothing, that there is such a
thing as imagination, that any huraan brother of an
honest raan could say that a thing had been, which
had not been, and yet not lie — these are bewilder
ing difficulties to the raodern Manxman. That a
novel can be false and yet true — that, well that's
foolishness. I vnrote a Manx romance called " The
Deemster ; " and I did not expect my fellow-country
men of the primitive kind to tolerate it for a moment.
It was merely a fiction, and the true Manxman of the
old sort only believes in what is true. He does
not read very much, and when he does read it is
not novels. But he could not keep his hands off"
this novel, and on the whole, and in the long run,
he liked it — that is, as he would say, " middling,"
you know ! But there was only one condition on
which he could take it to his bosora — it must be
true. There was the rub, for clearly it transgressed
certain poor little facts that were patent to every
body. Never mind. Hall Caine did not know poor
Man, or somebody had told hira wrong. But the
story itself! The Bishop, Dan, Ewan, Mona, the
body coming ashore at the Mooragh, the poor boy
under the curse by the Calf, lord-a-massy, that was

112 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi
thrue as gospel ! What do you think happened ?
I have got the letters by me, and can show thera to
anybody. A good Manxman wrote to remonstrate
with me for caUing the book a " romance." How
dare I do so ? It was all true. Another wrote
saying that maybe I would like to know that in his
youth he knew ray poor hero, Dan Mylrea, well.
They often drank together. In fact, they were the
same as brothers. For his part he had often
warned poor Dan the way he was going. After
the murder, Dan came to hira and gave hira the
knife with which he had killed Ewan. He had got
it StiU !
Later than the " Deeraster," I published another
Manx romance, " The Bondman." In that book I
raentioned, without thought of mischief, certain
names that must have been lying at the back of my
head since my boyhood. One of them becomes in
the book the name of an old hypocrite who in the
end cheats everybody and yet prays loudly in
pubhc. Now it seeras that there is a man up in
the mountains who owns that narae. When he first
encountered it in the newspapers, where the story
was being pubUshed as a serial, he went about
saying he was in the " Bondman," that it was aU

lect. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION. 113
thrue as gospel, so it was, that he knew me
when I was a boy, over Ramsey way, and used to
give me rides on his donkey, so he did. This was
before the hypocrite was unmasked ; and when that
catastrophe occurred, and his villany stood naked
before all the island, his anger knew no limits. I
ara told that he goes about the raountains now like a
thunder-cloud, and that he wants to raeet me. I
had never heard of the man before in all my
hfe. What I say is true oniy of the typical Manxman,
the natural-man among Manxmen, not of the Manx
man who is Manxman plus man of the world, the
educated Manxman, who finds it as easy as any
body else to put himself into a position of syrapathy
with works of pure imagination. But you raust go
down to the turf if you want the true smell of the
earth. Education levels all human tjrpes, as love is
said to level all ranks ; and to preserve your individu
ality and yet be educated seems to want a strain
of genius, or else a touch of madness.
The Manx must have been the language of a
people with few thoughts to express, but such
thoughts as they had were beautiful in their
simplicity and charm, soraetimes wise and shrewd,
H

114 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi
and not rarely full of feeling. Thus laa-noo is old
Manx. for child, and it means literally half saint —
a sweet conception, which says the best of all that
is contained in Wordsworth's wondrous " Ode on
the Intimations of Iraraortality." Laa-bee is old
Manx for bed, literally half-meat, a profound com
mentary on the value of rest. The old salutation
at the door of a Manx cottage before the visitor
entered was this word spoken frora the porch : Vel
peccaghs thie ? LiteraUy : Any sinner within ?
All humanity being sinners in the common speech
of the Manx people. Manx Proverbs
Nearly akin to the language of a race are its
proverbs, and some of the Manx proverbs are wise,
witty, and racy of the soil. Many of thera are the
common possession of all peoples. Of such kind
is " There's man}' a slip 'twixt the cup and the
lip." Here is one which sounds like an Eastern
saying : " Learning is fine clothes for the rich man,
and riches for the poor man." But I know of no
foreign parentage for a proverb like this : " A green
hiU when far away ; bare, bare when it is near."

tiCT. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 115
That may be Eastern also. It hints of a long
weary desert ; no grass, no water, and then the
cruel mirage that breaks down the heart of the
wayfarer at last. On the other hand, it is not out
of harmony with the landscape of Man, where the
raountains look green soraetimes frora a distance
when they are really bare and stark, and so typify
that waste of heart when life is dry of the moisture
of hope, and all the world is as a parched wilder
ness. However, there is one proverb which is so
Manx in spirit that I could almost take oath on its
paternity, so exactly does it fit the rehgious temper
of our people, though it contains a word that must
strike an English ear as irreverent : " When one
poor man helps another poor man, God himself
laughs." Manx Ballads
Next to the proverbs of a race its songs are the
best expression of its spirit, and though Manx songs
are few, some ot thera are full of Manx character.
Always their best part is the air. A raan called
Barrow compiled the Manx tunes about the begin
ning of the century, but his book is scarce. In

Il6 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
my ignorance of musical science I can only tell
you how the little that is left of Manx music lives
in the ear of a man who does not know one note
from another. Much of it is like a wail of the
wind in a lonely place near to the sea, sometimes
like the soughing of the long grass, sometiraes hke
the rain whipping the panes of a window as with
rods. Nearly always long-drawn like a moan
rarely various, never martial, never inspiriting,
often sad and plaintive, as of a people kept under,
but loving liberty, poor and low down, but with
souls alive, looking for something, and hoping on, —
full of the brine, the salt foam, the sad story of the
sea. Nothing would give you a more vi-vid sense
of the Manx people than some of our old airs.
They would seem to take you into a little white
washed cottage with sooty rafters and earthen
floor, where an old man who looks half like a
sailor and half like a landsman is dozing before a
peat fire that is slumbering out. Have I in my
musical benightedness conveyed an idea of anything
musical ? If not, let me, by the only vehicle
natural to me, give you the rough-shod words of
one or two of our old ballads. There is a ballad,
much in favour, called Ny kirree fo maghiey, the

lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 117
Sheep under the Snow. Another, yet better known,
is called Myle Charaine. This has sometimes been
called the Manx National Air, but that is a fiction.
The song has nothing to do with the Manx as a
nation. Perhaps it is merely a story of a raiser
and his daughter's dowry. Or perhaps it tells of
pillage, probably of wrecking, basely done, and of
how the people cut the guilty one off" from all inte'r-
course with them.
O, Myle Charaine, where got you your gold ?
Lone, lone, you have left me here.
O, not in the curragh, deep under the mould,
Lone, lone, and void of cheer.
This sounds poor enough, but it would be hard
to say how deeply this ballad, wedded to its wailing
music, touches and moves a Manxman. Even to my
ear as I have heard it in Manx, it has seemed to be
one of the weirdest things in old ballad literature,
only to be matched by some of the old Irish songs,
and by the gruesome ditty which teUs how " the
sun shines fair on Cariisle wa'."

Il8 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
Manx Carols
The paraphrase I have given you was done by
George Borrow, who once visited the island. My
friend the Rev. T. E. Brown met him and showed
hira several coUections of Manx carols, and he
pronounced them all translations from the English,
not excepting our famous Drogh Vraane, or carol
of every bad woman whose story is told in the
Bible, beginning with the story of mother Eve
herself. And, indeed, you will not be surprised that
to the shores of our little island have drifted all
kinds of miscellaneous rubbish, and that the Manx
men, from their very siraplicity and ignorance of
other literatures, have had no raeans of sifting the
flotsam and assigning value to the constituents.
Besides this, they are so irresponsible, have no
literary conscience, and accordingly have appro
priated anything and everything. This is true of
sorae Manx ballads, and perhaps also of many Manx
carols. The carols, called Car\'als in Manx, serve
in Man, as in other countries, the purpose of cele
brating the birth of Jesus, but we have one ancient
custom attached to them which we can certainly

lect. ml THE LITTLE MANX NATION 119
claim for our own, so Manx is it, so quaint, so
grimly serious, and withal so howlingly ludicrous.
It is caUed the service of Oiel Verree, probably a
corruption of Feaill Vorrey, literally the Feast of
Mary, and it is held in the parish church near
to midnight on Christmas Eve. Scott describes it
in " Peveril of the Peak," but without personal
knowledge. Services are still held in many churches on
Christmas Eve ; and I think they are called Oiel
Verree, but the true Oiel Verree, the real, pure,
savage, ridiculous, sacrilegious old Oiel Verree, is
gone. I myself just came in time for it ; I saw the
last bf it, nevertheless I saw it at its prime, for
I saw it when it was so strong that it could not
live any longer. Let me tell you what it was.
The story carries rae back to early boyish years,
when, from the lonely school-house on the bleak
top of Maughold Head, I was taken in secret, one
Christmas Eve, between nine and ten o'clock, to the
old church of Kirk Maughold, a parish which longer
than any other upheld the rougher traditions. My
companion was what is called an original. His
name was Billy Corkill. We were great chums.
I would be thirteen, he was about sixty. Billy

120 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
lived alone in a little cottage on the high-road, and
worked in the fields. He had only one coat all the
years I knew him. It seemed to have been blue
to begin with, but when it had got torn Billy had
patched it with anything that was handy, from green
cloth to red flannel. He called it his Joseph's coat
of many colours. BiUy was a poet and a musical
composer. He could not read a word, but he
would rather have died than confess his ignorance.
He kept books and newspapers always about him,
and when he read out of thera, he usually held
them upside down. If any one reraarked on that,
he said he could read them any way up — that was
where his scholarship came in. Billy was a great
carol singer. He did not know a note, but he
never sang except from rausic. His tunes were
wild harmonies that no human ear ever heard
before. It will be clear to you that old Billy was a
man of genius.
Such was my comrade on that Christmas Eve
long ago. It had been a bitter winter in the Isle
of Man, and the ground was covered with snow-
But the church bells rang merrily over the dark
moorland, for Oiel Verree was peculiarly the
people's service, and the ringers were ringing in the

lect. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 121
one service of the year at which the parishioners
supplanted the Vicar, and appropriated the old
parish church. In spite of the weather, the church
was crowded with a motley throng, chiefly of young
folks, the young men being in the nave, and the
girls (if I remember rightly) in the little loft at the
west end. Most of the men carried tallow dips,
tied about with bits of ribbon in the shape of
rosettes, duly lighted, and guttering grease at inter
vals on to the book-ledge or the tawny fingers
of thera that held them. It appeared that there
had been an ordinary service before we arrived,
and the Vicar was still within the rails of the com
munion. From there he addressed some parting
words of solemn warning to the noisy throng of
candle-carriers. As nearly as I can remember, the
address was this : " My good people, you are
about to celebrate an old custom. For my part, I
have no sympathy -with such customs, but since the
hearts of my parishioners seem to be set on this
one, I have no wish to suppress it. But tumultuous
and disgraceful scenes have occurred on similar
occasions in previous years, and I beg you to
remember that you are in God's house," &c.
&c. The grave injunction was listened to in silence,

122 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii
and when it ended, the Vicar, a worthy but not
very popular man, walked towards the vestry. To
do so, he passed the pew where I sat under the left
arm of my companion, and he stopped before him,
for Billy had long been a notorious transgressor at
Oiel Verree.
"See that you do not disgrace my church to-night,"
said the Vicar. But Billy had a biting tongue.
"Aw, well," said he, "I'm thinking the church
is the people's."
" The people are as ignorant as goats," said the
Vicar. " Aw, then," said Billy, " you are the shepherd,
so just make sheeps of thera."
At that the Vicar gave us the light of his coun
tenance no more. The last glimpse of his robe
going through the vestry door was the signal for a
buzz of low gossip, and straightway the business of
Oiel Verree began.
It raust have been now approaching eleven
o'clock, and two old greybeards with tousled heads
placed themselves abreast at the door of the west
porch. There they struck up a carol in a some
what lofty key. It was a raost doleful ditty.
Certainly I have never since heard the like of it. I
remember that it told the story of the Crucifixion in

LECT. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 123
startling language, full of realism that must have
been horribly ghastly, if it had not been so
comic. At the end of each verse the singers made
one stride towards the communion. There were
some thirty verses, and every mortal verse did
these zealous caroUers give us. They came to an
end at length, and then another old fellow rose in
his pew and sang a ditty in Manx. It told of the
loss of the herring-fleet in Douglas Bay in the last
century. After that there was yet another and
another carol — some that raight be called sacred,
others that would not be badly wronged with the
narae of profane. As I recall thera now, they were
full of a burning earnestness, and pictured the
dangers of the sinner and the punishment of the
damned. They said nothing about the joys of
heaven, or the pleasures of life. Wherever these
old songs came frora they must have dated from
some period of religious revival. The Manxman
may have appropriated them, but if he did so he
was in a deadly earnest mood. It must have been
like stealing a hat-band.
My comrade had been silent all this time, but in
response to various winks, nods, and nudges, he
rose to his feet. Now, in prospect of Oiel Verree I
had written the old man a brand new carol. It

124 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
was a mighty achievement in the sentimental vein.
I can remember only one of its couplets :
Hold your souls in still communion,
Blend them in a holy union.
I am not very sure what this may mean, and
Billy must have been in the same uncertainty.
Shall I ever forget what happened ? Billy standing
in the pew with my paper in his hand the wrong
way up. Myself by his side holding a candle to
hira. Then he began to sing. It was an awful
tune — I think he called it sevens — but he raade
coramon-sense of my doggerel by one alarming
emendation. When he came to the couplet I have
given you, what do you think he sang ?
" Hold your souls in still communion,
Blend them in — a hollow onion ! "
Billy must have been a humorist. He is long
dead, poor old Billy. God rest him !

Decay of the Manx Language
If in this unscientific way I have conveyed my
idea of Manx carvals, Manx ballads, or Manx pro-

lect. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 125
verbs, you will not be surprised to hear me say that
I do not think that any of these can live long apart
from the Manx language. We may have stolen most
of them ; they may have been wrecked on our coast,
and we raay have smuggled them ; but as long as
they wear our native homespun clothes they are
ours, and as soon as they put it off they cease to
belong to us. A Manx proverb is no longer a
Manx proverb when it is in English. The same is
true of a Manx ballad translated, and of a Manx
carval turned into an Enghsh carol. What belongs
to us, our way of saying things, in a word, our
style, is gone. The spirit is departed, and that
which remains is only an English ghost flitting
about in Manx grave-clothes.
Now this is a sad fact, for it implies that little as
we have got of Manx literature, whether written or
oral, we shall soon have none at all. Our Manx
language is fast dying out. If we had any great
work in the Manx tongue, that work alone would
serve to give our language a literary life at least.
But we have no such great work, no fine Manx
poem, no good novel in Manx, not even a Manx
sermon of high mark. Thus far our Manx language
has kept alive our pigmies of Manx literature ; but

126 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
both are going down together. The Manx is not
inuch spoken now. In the remoter viUages, hke
Cregnesh, Ballaugh, Kirk Michael, and Kirk
Andreas, it may still be heard. Moreover, the
Manxman raay hear Manx a hundred tiraes for
every time an Englishraan hears it. But the
younger generation of Manx folk do not speak
Manx, and very often do not understand it. This
is a rapid change on the condition of things in ray
own boyhood. Manx is to me, for all practical
uses, an unknown tongue. I cannot speak it, I
cannot follow it when spoken, I have only a sort of
nodding acquaintance with it out of door, and yet
araong ray earliest recollections is that of a house
hold where nothing but Manx was ever spoken
except to me. A very old woman, almost bent
double over a spinning wheel, and calling rae
Horamy-Veg, and batigh-millish, and so forth. This
will suggest that the Manx people are themselves
responsible for the death of the Manx language.
That is partly true. The Manx tongue was felt to
be an irapediraent to intercourse with the English
people. Then the great English iraraigration set in,
and the Isle of Man becarae a hoUday resort. That
was the doomster of the Manx language. In

lect. hi] the LITTLE MANX NATION 127
another five-and-twenty years the Manx language
will be as dead as a Manx herring.
One cannot but regret this certain fate. I dare
not say that the language itself is so good that it
ought to live. Those who know it better say that
" it's a fine old tongue, rich and musical, full of
meaning and expression."* I know that it is at
least forcible, and loud and deep in sound. I will
engage two Manxmen quarrelling in Manx to make
more noise in a given tirae than any other two
human brethren in Christendora, not excepting two
Irishmen. Also I think the Manx raust be capable
of notes of sweet feeling, and I observe that a
certain higher lilt in a Manx woman's voice,
suggesting the effort to speak about the sound of
the sea, and the whistle of the wind in the gorse, is
lost in the voices of the younger women who speak
English only. But apart from tangible loss, I
regret the death of the Manx tongue on grounds of
sentiment. In this old tongue our fathers played
as children, bought and sold as men, prayed,
preached, gossiped, quarrelled, and made love. It
was their language at Tynwald ; they sang their
grim carvals in it, and their waihng, woful baUads.
* The Rev. T. E. Brown.

128 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
When it is dead more than half of all that makes
us Manxmen will be gone. Our individuality will
be lost, the greater barrier that separates us from
other peoples will be broken down. Perhaps this
may have its advantages, but surely it is not
altogether a base desire not to be submerged into
all the races of the earth. The tower of Babel is
built, the tongues of the builders are confounded,
and we are not all anxious to go back and join the
happy family that lived in one ark.
But aside from all lighter thoughts there is
something very moving and pathetic in the death of
an old language. Perrait me to tell you, not as a
philologist, a character to which I have no claim,
but as an iraaginative writer, how the death of an
ancient tongue affects rae. It is unlike any other
form of death, for an unwritten language is even as
a breath of air which when it is spent leaves no
trace behind. A nation raay die, yet its history
reraains, and that is the tangible part of i^^s past.
A city raay fall to decay and he a thousand 3'cars
under the sands of the desert, yet its rehcs revivify
its hfe. But a language that is dead, a tongue
tljat has no life in its literature, is a breath of wind
that is gone. A little while and it went frora lip to

lect. Ill] TIIE LITTLE MANX NATION 129
lip, from lip to ear ; it came we know not whence ;
it has passed we know not where. It was an
embodied spirit of all man's joys and sorrows, and
like a spirit it has vanished away.
Then if this old language has been that of our
own people its death is a loss to our affections.
Indeed, language gets so close to our heart that we
can hardly separate it from our emotions. If you
do not speak the Italian language, ask youi self
whether Dante comes as close to you as Shake
speare, all questions of genius and temperament
apart. And if Dante seems a thousand miles
away, and Shakespeare enters into your closest
chamber, is it not first of all because the language
of Shakespeare is your own language, alive with
the life that is in your own tongue, vital with your
own ways of thought and even tricks and whims of
speech ? Let English die, and Shakespeare goes
out of your closet, and passes away from you, and is
then your brother-Englishman only in name. So close
is the bond of language, so sweet and so mysterious.
But there is yet a raore sacred bond with the
language of our fathers when it can have no pos
thumous life in books. This is the bond of love.
Think what it is that you miss first and longest

I30 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. m
when death robs you of a friend. Is it not the
living voice ? The living face you can bring back
in memory, and in your dark hours it will shine on
you still ; the good deed can never die ; the noble
thought lives for ever. Death is not conqueror
over such as these, but the huraan voice, the
strange and beautiful part of us that is half spirit
in life, is lost in death. For a while it startles us
as an echo in an erapty charaber, and then it is
gone, and not all the world's wealth could bring
one note of it back. And such as the vanishing
away of the voice of the friend we loved is the
death of the old tongue which our fathers spoke.
It is the death of the dead.
Manx Superstitions
When the Manx tongue is dead there wiU remain,
however, just one badge of our race — our supersti
tion. I am proud to tell you that we are the most
superstitious people now left among the civilised
nations of the world. This is a distinction in these
days when that poetry of hfe, as Goethe names it,
is all but gone frora the face of the earth. Manx
men have not yet taken the poetry out of the moon

LECT. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 131
and the stars, and the raist of the mountains and
the wail of the sea. Of course we are ashamed of
the survival of our old beliefs and try to hide them,
but let nobody say that as a people we believe no
longer in charms, and the evil eye, and good
spirits and bad. I know we do. It would be
easy to give you a hundred illustrations. I
remember an ill-tempered old body living on the
Curragh, who was supposed to possess the evil
eye. If a cow died at calving, she had witched it.
If a baby cried suddenly in its sleep, the old witch
must have been going by on the road. If the
potatoes were bhghted, she had looked over the
hedge at them. There was a charm doctor in
Kirk Andreas, named Teare-Ballawhane. He was
before my time, but I recall many stories of hira.
When a cow was sick of the witching of the woman
of the Curragh, the farmer fled over to Kirk Andreas
for the charra of the charra-doctor. From the
moment Teare-Ballawhane began to boil his herbs
the cow recovered. If the cow died after all, there
was some fault in the farmer. I remember a child,
a girl, who twenty years ago had a birth-mark on
her face — a broad red stain like a hand on her
cheek. Not long since, I saw her as a young

132 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
woman, and the stain was either gone entirely or
hidden by her florid complexion. When I asked
what had been done for her, I heard that a good
woman had charmed her. " Aw, yes," said the
girl's mother, " a few good words do no harra
anyway." Not long ago I met an old fellow in
Onchan village who believed in the Nightman, an
evil spirit who haunts the mountains at night
predicting tempests and the doom of ships, the
dooinney-oie of the Manx, akin to the banshee of the
Irish. " Aw, man," said he, " it was up Snaefell
way, and I was coming from Kirk Michael over,
and it was black dark, and I heard the Nightman
after me, shoutin' and wailin' morthal, how-la-a,
how-a-a. But I didn't do nothin', no, and he
came up to me lek a besom, and went past rae
same as a flood, -who-o-o ! And I lerr hira ! Aw,
yes, man, yes ! "
I remember many a story of fairies, some recited
half in humour, others in grim earnest.- One old
body told me that on the night of her wedding-day,
coming home from the Curragh, whither she had
stolen away in pursuit of a belated calf, she was
chased in the moonlight by a troop of fairies.
They held on to her gown, and chmbed on her back,

lect. hi] TUE LITTLE MANX NATION 133
and perched on her shoulders, and clung to her
hair. There were " hundreds and tons " of them ;
they were about as taU as a wooden broth-ladle,
and all wore cocked-hats and velvet jackets.
A good fairy long inhabited the Isle of Man.
He was called in Manx the Phynnodderee. It
would appear that he had two brothers of like
features with himself, one in Scotland called the
Brownie, the other in Scandinavia called the Swart-
alfar. I have often heard how on a bad night
the Manx folk would go off to bed early so that
the Phynnodderee might come in out of the cold.
Before going upstairs they built up the fire, and set
the kitchen table with crocks of milk and pecks of
oaten cake for the entertainment of their guest.
Then while they slept the Phynnodderee feasted, yet
he always left the table exactly as he found it, eat
ing the cake and drinking the milk, but fiUing up the
peck and the crock afresh. Nobody ever intruded
upon him, so nobody ever saw him, save the Manx
Peeping Tom. I remember hearing an old Manx
man say that his curiosity overcame his reverence,
and he " leff" the wife," stepped out of bed, crept to
the head of the stairs, and peeped over the banisters
into the kitchen. There he saw the Phynnodderee

134 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ui
sitting in his own arm-chair, with a great company
of brother and sister fairies about him, baking bread
on the griddle, and chattering together like linnets
in spring. But he could not understand a word
they were saying.
I have told you that the Manxman is not built
by nature for a gallant. He has one bad fairy,
and she is the embodied spirit of a beautiful
woraan. Manx folk-lore, like Manx caivals, Manx
ballads, and Manx proverbs, takes it for a bad sign
of a woman's character that she has personal
beauty. If she is beautiful, ten to one she is a
witch. That is how it happens that there are so
many witches in the Isle of Man.
The story goes that a beautiful wicked witch
entrapped the men of the island. They would
follow her anywhere. So she led them into the
sea, and they were all drowned. Then the woraen
of the island went forth to punish her, and, to
escape frora thera, she took the form of a wren and
flew away. That is how it coraes about that the
poor little wren is hunted and kiUed on St.
Stephen's Day. The Manx lads do it, though
surely it ought to be the Manx maidens. At
midnight they sally forth in great companies.

LECT. hi] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 135
armed with sticks and carrying torches. They
beat the hedges until they hght on a wren's nest,
and, having started the wren and slaughtered it,
they suspend the tiny mite to the raiddle of a long
pole, which is borne by two lads frora shoulder to
shoulder. They then sing a rollicking native ditty,
of which one version runs : —
We'll hunt the wren, says Robbin the Bobbin;
We'll hunt the wren, says Richard the Robbin ;
We'll hunt the wren, says Jack of the Lan' ;
We'll hunt the wren, says every one.
But Robbin the Bobbin and Richard the Robbin
are not the only creatures who have disappeared
into the sea. The fairies themselves have also
gone there. They inhabit Man no more. A
Wesleyan preacher declared some years ago that
he witnessed the departure of all the Manx fairies
from the Bay of Douglas. They went away in empty
rum puncheons, and scudded before the wind as far
as the eye could reach, in the direction of Jamaica.
So we have done with them, both good and bad.
However, among the witches whom we have left
to us in remote corners of the island is the very
harmless one called the Queen of the Mheillia. Her
rural Majesty is a sort of first cousin of the Queen

136 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi
of the May. The MheiUia is the harvest-home.
It is a picturesque ceremonial, observed differently
in diff'erent parts. Woraen and girls follow the
reapers to gather and bind the corn after it has
fallen to the swish of the sickles. A handful of the
standing corn of the last of the farmer's fields is
tied about with ribbon. Nobody but the farmer
knows where that handful is, and the girl who
comes upon it by chance is raade the Queen of the
Mheillia. She takes it to the highest eminence
near, and waves it, and her fellow-reapers and
gleaners shout huzzas. Their voices are heard
through the valley, where other farmers and other
reapers and gleaners stop in their work and say,
" So-and-so's MheiUia ! " " Ballamona's MheiUia's
took ! " That night the farmer gives a feast in his
barn to celebrate the getting in of his harvest, and
the close of the work of the woraen at the harvest
ing. Sheep's heads for a change on Manx
herrings, EngUsh ale for a change on Manx jough ;
then dancing led by the mistress, to the tune of a
fiddle, played faster and wilder as the night
advances, reel and jig, jig and reel. This pretty
rural festival is still observed, though it has lost
much of its quaintness. I thmk I can just remem-

LECT. Ill] THE LITTLE MA.VX NATION 137
ber to have heard the shouts of the MheiUia from
the breasts of the mountains.
You will have gathered that in no part of the
world could you find a more reckless and ill-
conditioned breeding-ground of suppositions, legends,
traditions, and superstitions than in the Isle of Man.
The custora of hunting the wren is widely spread
throughout Ireland ; and if I were to tell you of
Manx wedding custoras, Manx burial custoras,
Manx birth customs, May day, Laramas, Good
Friday, New Year, and Christmas customs, you
would recognise in the Manxman the same irre
sponsible tendency to appropriate whatever flotsam
drifts tp his shore. What I have told you has
come mainly of my own observation, but for a
complete picture of Manx manners and customs,
beliefs and superstitions, I will refer you to WiUiam
Kennish's " Mona's Isle, and other Poems," a rare
book, with next to no poetic quality, and containing
much that is worthless, but having a good body of
real native stuff in it, such as cannot be found
elsewhere. A still better anthology is likely to be
soon forthcoming from the pen of Mr. A. W. Moore
(the excellent editor of " Manx Names ") and the
press of Mr. Nutt.

I3S THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi
It is easy to laugh at these old superstitions, so
childish do they seem, so foohsh, so ignorant. But
shall we therefore set ourselves so much above
our fathers because they were slaves to them, and
we believe them not ? Bethink you. Are we so
much wiser, after all ? How much farther have we
got ? We know the mists of Mannanan. They are
only the vapours from the south, creeping along
the ridge of our mountains, going north. Is that
enough to know ? We know the cold eye of the
evil man, whose mere presence hurts us, and the
warra eye of the born physician, whose mere
presence heals us. Does that tell us everything ?
We hear the moans which the sea sends up to the
mountains, when storms are coming, and ships are
to be wrecked, and we do not call them the voices of
the Nightman, but only the voices of the wind. We
have changed the name ; but we have taken none
of the mystery and marvel out of the thing itself.
It is the Wind for us ; it was the Nightman for
our fathers. That is neariy all. The wind
bloweth where it listeth. We are as far off" as
ever. Our superstitions reraain, only we caU them
Science, and try not to be afraid of them. But
wc are as little children after all, and the best of us

lect. hi] the little MANX NATION 139
are those that, being wisest, see plainest that,
before the wonders and terrors of the great world
we live in, we are children, walking hand-in-hand
in fear. Manx Stories
You will say that there ought to be many good
stories of a people like the Manx ; and here again I
have to confess to you that the absence of all
literary coliscience, all perception of keeping and
relation, all sense of harmony and congruity in the
Manxman has so demoralised our anecdotal ana
that I hesitate to ofifer you certain of the best of
our Manx yarns from fear that they may be vener
able English, Irish, and Scotch familiars. I will
content myself with a few that bear undoubted
Manx lineaments. As an instance of Manx hos
pitality, simple and rude, but real and hearty, I
think you would go the world over to match this.
The late Rev. Hugh Stowell Brown, a Manxman,
brother of the most famous of living Manxmen,
and hiraself our North-country Spurgeon, with his
wife, his sister, and his mother, were belated one
evening up Baldwin Glen, and stopped at a farm-

I40 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. in
house to inquire their way. But the farmer would
not hear of their going a step further. " Aw, non
sense ! " he said. " What's the use of talkin',
man ? You'U be stoppin' with us to-night. Aw
'deed ye will, though. The women can get along
together aisy, and you're a clane lookin' sort o'
chap ; you'll be sleepin with me."
In the old days of, say, two steamboats a week
to England the old Manx captains of the Steamboat
Company were notorious soakers. There is a
story of one of them who had the Archdeacon of
the island aboard in a storm. It was night. The
reverend Archdeacon was in an agony of pain and
terror. He inquired anxiously of the weather.
The captain, very drunk, answered, " If it doesn't
mend we'll aU be in heaven before morning. Arch
deacon ! " " Oh, God forbid, captain," cried the
Archdeacon. I have said what true work for religion Noncon
formity raust have done in those evil days when the
clergy of the Athols were more busy with back
gammon than -with theology. But the religion of
the old type of Manx Methodist was often an
amusing mixture of puritanism and its opposite, a
sorf cf grim, white-faced sanctity, that was never

lect. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 141
altogether free of the suspicion of a big boisterous
laugh behind it. The Methodist local preachers
ha-ve been the real guardians and repositories of one
side of the Manx genius, a curious, hybrid thing,
deadly earnest, often howlingly ludicrous, siraple,
generally sincere, here and there audaciously hypo
critical. Araong local preachers I remember some
of the sweetest, purest, truest men that ever
walked this world of God ; but I also remember a
man who was brought home frora raarket on
Saturday night, dead drunk, across the bottora of
his cart drawn by his faithful horse, and I saw hira
in the pulpit next morning, and heard his serraon
on the evils of backsliding. There is a story of the
jealousy of two local preachers. The one went to
hear the other preach. The preacher laid out his
subject under a great many heads, firstly, secondly,
thirdly, up to tenthly. His rival down below in
the pew spat and haw'd and tchufd a good deal,
and at last, quite impatient of getting no solid reli
gious food, cried aloud, " Give us mate, raan, give
us mate ! " Whereupon the preacher leaned over
the pulpit cushion, and said, " Hould on, man, tiU
I've done with the carving."
But to teU of Happy Dan, and his wondrous

142 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
sermon on the Prodigal Son at the Clover Stones,
Lonan, and his discourse on the swine possessed of
devils who went " triddlcTtraddle, triddle-traddle
down the brews and were clane drownded ; " and of
the marvellous account of how King David remon
strated in broadest Manx patois with the " pozzle-tree "
for being blown down ; and then of the grim
earnestness of a good man who could never preach
on a certain text without getting wet through to the
waistcoat with perspiration — to open the flood-gates of
this kind of Manx story would be to liberate a reservoir
that would hardly know an end, so I must spare you.
Manx "Characters"
At various points of my narrative I have touched
on certain of our eccentric Manx " characters."
But perhaps more interesting than any such whom
I have myself met with are sorae whom I have
known only by repute. These children of Nature
are after aU the truest touchstones of a nation's
genius. Crooked, distorted, deforraed, they never
theless, and perhaps therefore, show clearly the
bent of their race. If you are without brake or
curb you raay be blind, but you must know when

lect. ni] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 143
you are going down hill. The curb of education, and
the brake of common-sense are the surest checks
on a people's individuality. And these poor half
wits of the Manx race, wiser withal than many of
the Malvolios who smile on them so demurely,
exhibit the two great racial qualities of the Manx
people— the Celtic and the Norse — in vivid com
panionship and contrast. It is an amusing fact
that in some wild way the bardic spirit breaks out
in all of them. They are all singers, either of
their own songs, or the songs of others. That
surely is the Celtic strain in them. But their
songs are never of the joys of earth or of love, or yet
of war ; never, like the rustic poetry of the Scotch,
full of pawky humour ; never cynical, never sar
castic ; only concerned with the terrors of judgment
and damnation and the place of torment. That,
also, may be a fierce and dark development of the
Celtic strain, but I see raore of the Norse spirit in
it. When ray ancient bard in Glen Rushen took
down his thumb-marked, greasy, discoloured poems
from the " lath " against the open-timbered ceiling,
and read them aloud to me in his broad Manx
dialect, with a sing-song of voice and a swinging
motion of body, while the loud hailstorm pelted the

144 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
window pane and the wind whistled round the
house, I found they were all startling and almost
ghastly appeals to the sinner to shun his evil
courses. One of thera ran hke this :
HELL IS HOT.
O sinner, see your dangerous state,
And think of hell ere 'tis too late ;
When worldly cares would drown each thought.
Pray call to mind that hell is hot.
Still to increase your godly fears.
Let this be sounding in your ears,
Still bear in mind that hell is hot,
Remember and forget it not.
There was another poera about a congregation of the
dead in the region of the damned :
I found a reverend parson there,
A congregation too.
Bowed on their bended knees at prayer.
As they were wont to do.
But soon my heart was struck with pain,
I thought it truly odd,
The parson's prayer did not contain
A word concerning God.
You will remember the Danish book called " Letters
frora Hell," containing exactly the same idea, and
conclude that the Manx bard was poking- fun at
some fashionable yet worldly-minded preacher. But
no ; he was too much a child of Nature for that.

lect. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 145
There is not much satire in the Manx character,
and next to no cynifism at all. The true Manxman
is white-hot. I have heard of one, John Gale,
called the Manx Burns, who lampooned the upstarts
about him, and also of one, Tom the Dipper, an
itinerant Manx bard, who sang at fairs ; but in a
general way the Manx bard has been a deadly
earnest person, most at home in churchyards.
There was one such, akin in character to my old
friend Billy of Maughold, but of more universal
popularity, a quite privileged pet of everybody, a
sort of sacred being, though as crazy as man raay
be, called Chalse-a-Killey. Chaise was scarcely a
bard, but a singer of the songs of bards. He was
a religious raonomaniac, who lived before his tirae,
poor fellow ; his madness would not be seen in him
now. The idol of his crazed heart was Bishop
Wilson. He called hira dear and sweet, vowed he
longed to die, just that he might meet him in heaven ,
then Wilson would take hira by the hand, and he
would tell him all his mind, and together they
would set up a printing press, with the types of
diamonds, and print hymns, and send them back to
the Isle of Man. Poor, 'wildered brain, haunted by
" half-born thoughts," not all delusions, but quaint

146 TIIE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi
and grotesque. Full of vaUant fury, Chaise was
always ready to fight for his distorted phantom of
the right. When an uncle of my own died, whose
name I bear, Chaise shocked all the proprieties by
announcing his intention of walking in front of the
funeral procession through the streets and singing
his terrible hymns. He would yield to no persua
sion, no appeals, and no threats. He had promised
the dead raan that he would do this, and he would
not break his oath to save his life. It was agony
to the mourners, but they had to submit. Chaise
fulfiUed his vow, walked ten yards in front, sang
his fierce music with the tears streaming from
his wild eyes down his quivering face. But the
spectacle let loose no unseemly mirth. Nobody
laughed, and surely if the heaven that Chaise feared
was hstening and looking down, his crazy voice was
not the last to pierce the dome of it. My friend the
Rev. T. E. Brown has written a touching and
beautiful poem, " To Chaise in Heaven " :
So you are gone, dear Chaise !
Ah well ; it was enough —
The ways were cold, the ways were rough.
O Heaven ! O home !
No more to roam,
Cli.ilse, poor Chaise 1
And now it's all .=0 plain, dear Chaise !

lect. hi] the LITTLE MANX NATION 147
So plain —
The 'wildered brain,
The joy, the pain
The phantom shapes that iiannted,
The half-born thoughts that daunted :
All, all is plain,
Dear Chaise !
All is plain.
* » » * * if
Ah now, dear Chaise ! of all the radiant host.
Who loves you most ?
I think I know him, kneeling on his knees ;
Is it Saint Francis of Assise ?
Chaise, poor Chaise.

Manx Characteristics
I have rambled on too long about my eccentric
Manx characters, and left myself little space
for a sumraary of the soberer Manx character
istics. These are independence, modesty, a degree
of sloth, a non-sanguine temperament, pride, and
some covetousness. This uncanny combination of
characteristics is perhaps due to our mixed Celtic
and Norse blood. Our independence is pure
Norse. I have never met the like of it, except in
Norway, where a Bergen policeman who had hunted
all the morning for my lost umbreUa would not take
anything for his pains ; and in Iceland, where u

148 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. in
poor old woman in a ragged woollen dress, a torn hufa
on her head, torn skin shoes on her feet, and with
rheumatism playing visible havoc all over her body,
refused a kroner with the dignity, grave look,
stiffened lips, and proud head that would have
become a duchess. But the Manxman's indepen
dence almost reaches a vice. Pie is so unwilling to
owe anything to any man that he is apt to become
self-centred and cold, and to lose one of the
sweetest joys of life — that of receiving great favours
from those we greatly love, between whom and
ourselves there is no such thing as an obligation,
and no such thing as a debt. There is something
in the Manxman's blood that makes him hate rank ;
and though he has a vast respect for wealth, it
must be his own, for he will take off his hat to
nobody else's.
The modesty of the Manxman reaches shyness,
and his shyness is capable of making hira downright
rude. One of my friends tells a charming story,
very characteristic of our people, of a conversation
with the men of the herring-fleet. " We were
comin' home from the Shetland fishing, ten boats
of us ; and we come to an anchor in a bay. And
there was a tremenjis fine castle there, and a

LECT. Ul] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 149
ter'ble great lady. Aw, she was a ter'ble kind
lady ; she axed the lot of us (eighty men and boys,
eight to each boat) to come up and have dinner
with her. So the day come — well, none of us
went ! That shy ! " My friend reproved them
soundly, and said he wished he knew who the lady
was that he might write to her and apologise. Then
followed a long story of how a breeze sprung up
and eight of the boats sailed. After that the crew
of the remaining two boats, sixteen men and boys,
went up to the tremenjis great castle, and the
ter'ble great lady, and had tea. If any lady here
present knows a lady on the north-west coast of
Scotland who a year or two back invited eighty Manx
men and boys to dinner, and received sixteen to
tea, she will redeem the character of our race if she
will explain that it was not because her hospitality
was not appreciated that it was not accepted by our
foolish countrymen.
There is nothing that more broadly indicates the
Norse strain in the Manx character than the non-
sanguine temperament of the Manxmen. Where
the pure Celt will hope anything and promise
everything, the Manxman will hope not at all and
proraise nothing. " Middhng " is the commonest

I50 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
word in a Manxman's mouth. Hardly anything is
entirely good, or whoUy bad, but nearly everything
is middling. It's a middling fine day, or a middling
storray one ; the sea is raiddling sraooth or raiddling
rough ; the herring harvest is middling big or
middling little ; a man is never much more than
middling tired, or middling well, or middling hungry,
or middling thirsty, and the place you are travelling
to is always middling near or middling far. The true
Manxman comraits hiraself to nothing. When Nelson
was shot down at Trafalgar, Cowle, a one-armed
Manx quartermaster, caught him in his reraaining
arm. This was Cowle's story : " He fell right into my
arms, sir. ' Mr. Cowle,' he says, ' do you think I shall
recover ? ' 'I think, ray lord,' I says, ' we had better
wait for the opinion of the medical man.' " Dear
old Cowle, that cautious word showed you were
no Irishman, but a downright middling Manxman.
I have one more story to tell, and that is of
Manx pride, which is a wondrous thing, usuaUy
very ludicrous. A young farraing girl who will go
about barefoot throughout the workdays of the week
would rather perish than not dress in grand attire,
after her own sort, on Sunday afternoon. But
Manx pride ui dress can be very touching and

LECT. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 151
huraan. When the Ughthouse was built on the
Chickens Rock, the men who were to live in it were
transferred from two old lighthouses on the little
islet called the Calf of Man, but their families were
left in the disused lighthouses. Thus the men
were parted from their wives and children, but each
could see the house of the other, and on Sunday
raornings the wives in their old lighthouses always
washed and dressed the children and made thera
" nice " and paraded thera to and fro on the
platforras in front of the doors, and the men
in their new lighthouse always looked across the
Sound at their little ones through their powerful
telescopes.
Manx Types
Surely that is a lovely story, full of real sweet
ness and pathos. It reminds me that araid raaiiy
half-types of dubious quaUty, selfish, covetous,
quarrelsome, litigious, there are at least two types
of Manx character entirely charming and delightful.
The one is the best type of Manx seaman, a true
son of the sea, full of wise saws and proverbs, full
of long yarns and wondrous adventures, up to any-

152 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi
thing, down to anything, pragmatical, a mighty
moralist in his way, but none the less equal to a
round ringing oath ; a sapient adviser putting on
the airs of a philosopher, but as simple as the baby
of a girl — in a word, dear old Tom Baynes of
" Fo'c's'le Yarns," old salt, old friend, old rip. The
other type is that of the Manx parish patriarch.
This good soul it would be hard to beat among all
the peoples of earth. He unites the best qualities
of both sexes ; he is as soft and gentle as a dear
old woman, and as firm of puipose as a strong man.
Garrulous, full of platitudes, easily moved to tears
by a story of sorrow and as easily taken in, but
beloved and trusted and reverenced by all the little
world about him. I have known him as a farmer,
and seen him sitting at the head of his table in the
farm kitchen, with his sons and daughters and men-
servants and women-servants about hira, and, save
for ribald gossip, no one of whatever condition
abridged the flow of talk for his presence. I have
known him as a parson, when he has been the
father of his parish, the patriarch of his people, the
" ould angel " of all the hillside round about. Such
sweetness in his home life, such nobility, such
gentle, old-fashioned ceremoniousness, such delight-

lect. m] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 153
ful simplicity of manners. Then when two of
these " ould angels " met, two of these Parson
Adamses, living in content on seventy pounds a
year, such high talk on great themes, long hour
after long hour in the little low-ceiled Vicarage
study, with no light but the wood fire, which glistened
on the diaraond window-pane ! And when raid
night carae seeing each other home, spending half
the night walking to and fro frora Vicarage to
Vicarage, or turning out to saddle the horse in the
field, but (far away " in wandering raazes lost ")
going blandly up to the old cow and putting on the
blinkers and saying, " Here he is, sir." Have we
anything Uke all this in England ? Their type is
nearly extinct even in the Isle of Man, where they
have longest survived. And indeed they are not
the only good things that are dying out there.

Literary Associations
The island has next to no literary associations,
but it would be unpardonable in a raan of letters if
he were to forget the few it can boast. Joseph
Train, our historian, made the acquaintance of

1 54 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. iii
Scott in 1 8 14, and during the eighteen years
following he rendered important services to " The
Great Unknown " as a collector of some of the
legendary stories used as foundations for what were
then called the Scotch Novels. But it is a comraon
error that Train found the groundwork of the
Manx part of " Peveril of the Peak." It was Scott
who directed Train to the Isle of Man as a fine
subject for study. Scott's brother Thomas lived
there, and no doubt this was the origin of Scott's
interest in the island. Scott himself never set
foot on it. Wordsworth visited the island about
1823, and he recorded his impressions in various
sonnets, and also in the raagnificent lines on Peel
Castle — " I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged
pile." He also had a relative living there — Miss
Hutchinson, his sister-in-law. A brother of this
lady, a mariner, lies buried in Braddan churchyard,
and his tombstone bears an epitaph which Words
worth indited. The poet spent a summer at Peel,
pitching his tent above what is now called Peveril
Terrace. One of my friends tried long ago to pump
up frora this sapless soil sorae mcmo.'-y of Words
worth, but no one could remember anything about
hira. Shelley is another poet of whom there

lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 155
remains no trace in the Isle of Man. He visited
the island early in 18 12, being driven into Douglas
harbour by contrary winds on his voyage from
Cumberland to Ireland. He was then alraost un
known; Harriet was still with hira, and his head
was full of political reforms. The island was in a
state of some turmoil, owing to the unpopularity of
the Athols, who still held manorial rights and the
patronage of the Bishopric. The old Norse Con
stitution was intact, and the House of Keys was
then a self-elected chamber. It is not wonderful
that Shelley raade no irapression on Man in 1 8 12,
but it is surprising that Man seeras to have raade
no impression on Shelley. It made a very sensible
impression on Ha-wthorne, who left his record in the
" English Note Book."

Manx Progress
I am partly conscious that throughout these
lectures I have kept my face towards the past. That
has been because I have been loth to look at the
present, and alraost afraid to peep into the future.
The Isle of Man is not nov/ what it was even five-

156 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ni
and-twenty years ago. It has become too English
of late. The change has been sudden. Quite
within my own recollection England seemed so far
away that there was something beyond conception
moving and impressive in the eff'ect of it and its
people upon the imagination of the Manx. There
were only about two steamers a week between
England and the Isle of Man at that time. Now
there are about two a day. There are lines of
railway on this little plot of land, which you might
cross on foot between breakfast and lunch, and
cover frora end to end in a good day's walk.
This is, of course, a necessity of the altered
conditions, as also, no doubt, are the parades, and
esplanades, and promenades, and iron piers, and
marine carriage drives, and Eiffel Tower, and old
castles turned into Vauxhall Gardens, and fairy
glens into " happy day " Roshervilles. God forbid
that I should grudge the factory hand his breath of
the sea and glimpse of the gorse-bushes ; but I
know what price we are paying that we may
entertain him.
Our young Manxman is already feeling the Eng
lish immigration on his character. He is not as
good a man as his father was before him. I dare

LECT. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 157
say that in his desire to make everything English
that is Manx, he raay some day try to abolish the
House of Keys, or at least dig up the Tynwald
Hill. In one fit of intermittent mania, he has
already attempted to " restore " the grand ruins
of Peel Castle, getting stones from Whitehaven,
filling up loop-holes, and doing other indecencies
with the great works of the dead. All this could
be understood if the young Manxman were likely
to be much the richer for the changes he is bringing
about. But he is not ; the money that comes
from England is largely taken by English people,
and comes back to England.

Conclusion
From these ungracious thoughts let me turn
again, in a last word, to the old island itself, the
true Mannin-veg-Veen of the real Manxman. In
these lectures you have seen it only as in flashes frora
a dark lantern. I ara conscious that an historian
would have told you so much more of solid fact
that you might have carried away tangible ideas.
Fact is not ray domain, and I shall have to be

158 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi
content if in default of it I have got you close to
that less palpable thing, the living heart of Manx-
land, shown you our island, helped you to see its
blue waters and to scent its golden gorse, and to
know the Manxman from other men. Sometimes
I have been half ashamed to ask you to look at
our countrymen, so rude are they and so
primitive — russet-coated, currane-shod men and
women, untaught, superstitious, fishing the sea,
tilling their stony land, playing next to no part
in the world, and only gazing out on it as a mys
tery far away, whereof the rumour comes over the
great waters. No great raan araong us, no great
event in our history, nothing to make us raeraorable.
But I have been re-assured when I have remera
bered that, after all, to look on a life so siraple and
natural might even be a tonic. Here we are in
the heart of the mighty world, which the true
Manxman knows only by vague report ; millions on
miUions huddled together, enough to make five
hundred Isles of Man, more than all the Manxmen
that have lived since the days of Orry, more than
all that now walk on the island, added to all that
rest under it ; streets on streets of us, parks on
parks, living a life that has no touch of Nature in

LECT. Ill] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 159
the ways of it ; save only in our own breasts, which
often rebel against our surroundings, struggling
with weariness under their artificiality, and the wild
travesty of what we are raade for. Do what we
will, and be what we may, sometimes we feel the
falseness of our ways of life, and surely it is then a
good and wholesome thing to go back in thought to
such children of Nature as ray homespun Manx
people, and see them where Nature placed them,
breathing the free air of God's proper world, and
living the right lives of His servants, though so
simple, poor, and rude.

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