The spirit friend, a guardian spirit identical with the Irish Liannan-Shee. A familiar or household spirit who was implacable in resentment but unchanging in friendship. One of the two familiar spirits known in the Isle of Man, the other being the Dooinney-Oie. The Lhiannan-Shee attached itself to a particular person and could bring either great fortune or great ruin depending on how the relationship was maintained.
Volume 3 of Sir John Malcolm's authoritative three-volume biography of Robert, Lord Clive, drawn from family papers. Covers Clive's governorship in Bengal (1766–1767), including the officers' mutiny over batta reduction, revenue measures, and his return to England. Provides detailed context on East India Company administration, military discipline, and political tensions during the formative period of British rule in India.
A rare breed of sheep native to the Isle of Man, with brown wool and multiple horns. When George Moore was asked to buy twenty Loghtan sheep for Lord Barnard of Durham, the animals were shipped to Whitehaven and refused entry by Customs. The Isle of Man was foreign territory for tariff purposes. Five days later, when the sheep were finally put back ashore at Ramsey, nearly half were dead or dying of starvation. Twenty sheep, legally bought, legally shipped, killed by a system that treated the Island as simultaneously too foreign to trade with freely and too close to leave alone.
A Whitehaven merchant family whose trajectory embodies the conflict of interest at the heart of the Revestment. Walter Lutwidge and Thomas Lutwidge signed the Whitehaven merchants' memorial to the Treasury in the early 1750s, calling for 'purchasing the sovereignty of the said Island' and warning of £200,000 in annual losses to the Crown and 'great damage' to the East India Company. Charles Lutwidge — of the same family — provided the Treasury with a detailed intelligence report on the Duke's revenues in July 1764, estimating annual income at £7,500 and annual Crown losses at £200,000. He was then appointed Receiver-General after the Revestment. The family that lobbied for the seizure administered its consequences. Charles was seldom on the Island, drawing approximately £1,000 per year from an island revenue of £3,500. He seized wrecks, herring customs, fishings, and derelict ground 'under the pretext of their belonging to the Crown.' The 1792 Commissioners found him absent since 1786, sitting on £5,119 in unreported balances. P.J. Heywood's correspondence from the 1780s reports on Lutwidge's continued influence over patronage twenty years after the Revestment.
A verse history of Manannan mac Lir preserved by Train. The metrical history records the tribute paid to Manannan: the rent each landholder paid to him was a bundle of coarse meadow grass yearly. It describes his protection of the Island: he would set a man standing on a hill appear as if he were a hundred, and thus did wild Manannan protect that Island with all its booty. The metrical history is one of the sources that connects the constitutional ceremony at Tynwald to the pre-Christian offering of rushes.
Traditional Manx Christmas carols, sung in Manx Gaelic in the parish churches during the Christmas season. The carvals were composed by local poets and sung in the oie'll voirrey, the vigil service on Christmas Eve. They represent a distinctive Manx musical tradition that combined Christian devotion with vernacular poetry in the native language. The carval tradition was one of the cultural practices sustained by Wilson's church and diminished after the institutional supports were withdrawn.
The tailless cat native to the Isle of Man, one of the most recognisable symbols of the Island worldwide. The breed's origin is debated but the cats have been documented on the Island for centuries. Various folk explanations exist for the missing tail, including that the cat was late boarding Noah's Ark and the door closed on its tail. The Manx cat is a living emblem of the Island's distinctiveness, a creature that exists nowhere else in the same form.
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History recorded that eventually there were over three thousand Manx people and their descendants in the greater Cleveland area. Most settled outside the city proper, in surrounding townships — Newburgh, Warrensville, and the small settlements along the lake. The community was bound by their own Gaelic language, which they used almost exclusively with each other, giving them what Kinvig described as a reputation for clannishness and allowing him to speak of an unmixed descent to the present day, when the sixth generation had been reached.
The Fencibles were the island's own response to the Napoleonic crisis — and they were, in their way, the most Manx thing about the entire period. Fencible regiments were defensive forces raised for home service. In the 1790s, Mann raised its own — officered by Manx families, recruited from the parishes, trained on the island's own ground. This was not the British garrison. These were Manx men, serving in the Manx military tradition that the Edward Christians and Illiam Dhones had served in before them. They were raised from an island that Parliament treated as a revenue line. Their families were living in collapsed economy, ruined harbours, sixpence-a-day wages. And they volunteered anyway — not out of loyalty to Parliament, but out of something older: the habit of service woven into the island's identity.
The Lord of Mann's military establishment. A community force numbering perhaps fifty men across the entire Island. The disbursement accounts from 1670 to 1765 preserve the names: the Brew family serving across four generations, the Killeys father and son, the Quayleys and Corins and Christians. These were tradesmen who happened to draw garrison pay. William Corris was a soldier and also the slater who kept Castle Rushen in repair. They answered to the Lord of Mann through his officers. They were Manx. They knew the people they served alongside, because they were the same people. A garrison made of neighbours is not an occupying force. It is a community maintaining its own defences.
A historical chapter examining the 1703 Act of Settlement, the foundational land tenure reform in the Isle of Man under Bishop Wilson and the 10th Earl of Derby. The text traces the evolution of Manx land tenure from Goddard Crovan through the problematic 1645 leasehold system, explaining how Wilson persuaded Derby to restore customary inheritance rights and fix rents. The author draws parallels to contemporary Irish land reform debates (1845-1870), positioning the Manx settlement as a model that Ireland should have followed.
Chapter 12 from 'Land of Home Rule' (1893) examining the 1703 Act of Settlement, which reformed Manx land tenure by converting leaseholders to perpetual tenants at low quit-rents. The chapter discusses Bishop Wilson's pivotal role in persuading the 10th Earl of Derby to resolve the land question that had troubled the island since the 7th Earl's 1645 lease reforms, and compares the Manx settlement with contemporary Irish land grievances.
In the autumn of 1811, twenty-seven Manx soldiers captured while serving in Wellington's army were held in French prisoner-of-war depots scattered across the continent. Thomas Crellin of Peel — himself a prisoner at Longwy — wrote to Robert Cannell in Douglas reporting the distribution of forty pounds that the Bishop of Sodor and Man had raised for their relief. The letter names every man and traces each to his parish: John Lace of Kirk Onchan, Thomas Faragher of Peel, Robert Quay of Kirk Maughold. Two of those men had been prisoners for ten years, captured in 1803. The relief came not from the Crown but from the island itself — ordinary Manx people contributing what they could for men they would have known by family if not by face.
A summer-long project. You are George Moore, merchant of Douglas, and it’s 1750.
Keep a trade ledger for the summer — a real notebook, handwritten. Each week, research one real cargo that arrived at a Manx harbour. Enter it in your ledger: the ship’s name, where it came from, what it carried, what the duty was, and what the goods might sell for on the other side of the Irish Sea.
By the end of the summer, you’ll have a working picture of what the running trade actually looked like — not the caricature, but the reality.
The twist: also record what the same goods would cost today, and where they’d come from. Tea still comes from China. Brandy still comes from France. The routes haven’t changed as much as you’d think.
The waters surrounding the Isle of Man support a rich marine ecosystem. The basking sharks that visit in summer, the seal colonies, the seabird populations on the Calf of Man, and the marine life of the Irish Sea are all part of the Island's natural heritage. The sea was not just a barrier or a highway but a living environment that Manx people depended on for food, for transport, and for their understanding of the world they lived in. Manannan's kingdom was not empty.
By 1779, Major Paul Crebbin was reporting that the militia had collapsed entirely. Without the Lord's administration to maintain it, without equipment or funding, the militia decayed as surely as the harbours and the prison and the court buildings. The men who had served as the island's defenders for centuries were left without arms, without training, without any structure to organise them. By 1801, the men of Mann were reduced to pikes. An island in the Irish Sea, sitting across the shipping lanes between Britain, Ireland, and France, defended by men with pikes — while the same island's fishermen were being pressed into the Royal Navy to crew the ships that defended the Empire.
The black dog of Peel Castle. Waldron, writing in the 1720s, recorded an apparition in the shape of a large black spaniel with curled shaggy hair that haunted the guard room nightly. The English garrison soldiers grew so accustomed to it that they adjusted their behaviour in its presence, refraining from swearing and profane discourse as though a senior officer were watching. A drunk soldier went alone to test whether the creature was dog or devil. A great noise was heard. He came back unable to speak, and died within three days. The passage where the apparition had appeared was closed up and another way made. Waldron recorded this not as folklore but as something the garrison took seriously enough to alter the architecture of the castle.
The little people, the fairies proper in Manx tradition. They lived under the hills and sometimes helped and sometimes harmed. They were not the gossamer creatures of Victorian illustration. They were neighbours of a kind, powerful, unpredictable, and best treated with respect. Waldron observed that the Manx people would be even refractory to their clergy if the clergy tried to preach against the existence of fairies. The Church knew better than to try. The accommodation between Christianity and the older world meant the fairy faith and the Sunday service coexisted without contradiction.
The dominant mercantile and political family of mid-eighteenth-century Mann. George Moore of Ballamoore was Speaker of the House of Keys and the most successful merchant of his generation — running triangular voyages from Peel to Boston, Barcelona, Barbados, Venice, and Naples. His Letter Books, now among the Bridge House papers in the Manx Museum, reveal a merchant whose sophistication matched his ambition. He maintained correspondence across northern Europe, insured ships in London, dealt in multiple currencies, and arranged a fictitious sale of the Peggy to a Danish captain to continue trading under neutral colours during the French war. His daughter Peggy married John Quayle, the Clerk of the Rolls. Moore spent months in Treasury antechambers at his own expense defending Manx rights after the Revestment. He wrote: 'I am become quite tired about the general Good of the Community of this Island, and of thinking about it, for I find by Experience that it is alike thankless and useless.' Philip Moore, member of the Keys, wrote of 'anarchy and confusion' in July 1765.
Beyond Cleveland itself, Manx emigrants settled in the surrounding townships of Newburgh and Warrensville, and in small settlements along the lake. These communities replicated the parish structures they had left behind — organised around worship, centred on families who knew each other, using the Manx language freely among themselves. Pastor Cannell held services in Manx in his own log house. The communities they built in Ohio were organised around the same chapel networks that had spread Methodism across the island.
Carved stone crosses from the Norse period, found across the Island, combining Norse artistic styles with Christian imagery. They are evidence of the accommodation at work in stone: Norse settlers adopting Christianity and expressing it through their own artistic traditions, creating something that belonged to neither culture alone but to the Island's distinctive fusion of both. The crosses at Kirk Andreas, Kirk Braddan, and Kirk Michael are among the finest examples of Norse art in the British Isles.
The carved stone crosses from the Norse period are among the finest examples of Norse art in the British Isles. They combine Scandinavian artistic traditions with Christian imagery in a fusion that belongs to neither culture alone but to the Island's distinctive accommodation. The ring-chain patterns, the scenes from Norse mythology carved alongside Christian symbols, and the runic inscriptions represent a people expressing their faith through the artistic language they brought with them. The crosses at Kirk Andreas, Kirk Braddan, and Kirk Michael are the physical evidence of the accommodation working in stone.
The departures continued through the 1830s and 1840s, and the press notices accumulated like entries in a parish register of the dying. Seventeen parishioners of Ballaugh in 1835. Several families from Kirk Michael and Ballaugh in 1837, and a week later, some hundred individuals chiefly from Ballaugh. In 1840, five carts laden with emigrants' luggage arrived in Douglas from the north of the Island. In 1842, no fewer than a hundred and ninety emigrants chiefly from Jurby and Ballaugh were about leaving the Island for the United States — a vessel from Liverpool chartered for the express purpose of taking them out. The northern parishes bled the most because they had the least.
Mary's Eve, the vigil service held on Christmas Eve in every parish church. The service was the occasion for the singing of the carvals, the Manx Christmas carols. Young men composed carvals and competed to perform them. The service lasted through the night, combining Christian worship with community gathering and creative expression in the Manx language. The tradition declined as English replaced Manx in the churches, but it represented something the institutional church had sustained: a living connection between faith, language, and community creativity.
