



Produced by David Widger





THE LITTLE MANX NATION

By Hall Caine

Published by William Heinemann - 1891


To the REVEREND T. S. BROWN, M.A.

You see what I send you--my lectures at the Royal Institution in the
Spring. In making a little book of them I have thought it best to
leave them as they were delivered, with all the colloquialisms that are
natural to spoken words frankly exposed to cold print. This does not
help them to any particular distinction as literature, but perhaps it
lends them an ease and familiarity which may partly atone to you and to
all good souls for their plentiful lack of dignity. I have said so often
that I am not an historian, that I ought to add that whatever history
lies hidden here belongs to Train, our only accredited chronicler,
and, even at the risk of bowing too low, I must needs protest, in our
north-country homespun, that he shall have the pudding if he will
also take the pudding-bag. You know what I mean. At 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 Mannanan, our ancient
Manx magician, who enshrouded our island in mist. Or should I say it
is to his credit, for has he not left us through all time some shadowy
figures to fight about, like "rael, thrue, reg'lar" Manxmen. As for the
stories, the "yarns" that lie like flies--like blue-bottles, like bees,
I trust not like wasps--in the amber of the history, you will see that
they are mainly my own. 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 world finds anything good in them, any humour, any
pathos, any racy touches of our rugged people, you will permit me to
determine their ownership in the way of this paraphrase of Coleridge's
doggerel version of the two Latin hexameters--

"They're mine and they are likewise yours, But an if that will not do,
Let them be mine, good friend! for I Am the poorer of the two."

Hawthorns, Keswick, June 1891.




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


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.


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




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 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, peacemaking,
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 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 farmer
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, well, 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 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 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 farm 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," 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 alive our
language, our customs, our laws and our patriarchal Constitution.


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 dim ghost on a grey sea; sometimes purple against
the setting sun. Then as you sail up to it, a rugged rocky coast, grand
in its beetling heights on the 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 by the red fuchsia. The fuchsia is everywhere
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 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 NAME 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 equivalent. 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 signify: The middle island. That
definition requires 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 enshroud the island in mist,
"and that by art magic." Happy 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
surrounding 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 came we have never learnt, whether we walked dry-shod from Wales
or sailed in boats from Ireland. 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 the 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 Scandinavia 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 Cumberland, making
Scandinavian settlements everywhere. So they came to Moen early in