The Kingdom of Man and the Isles included the Hebridean Islands as well as Man. It was not until 1263 that the Manx lost the Western Islands to Scotland following the battle of Largs. The last independent king of the island, Magnus, died in 1266. He ceded the kingship to Alexander III of Scotland. But the English also coveted the island, and there began a series of conflicts and occupations through which the Manx still managed to govern their own domestic affairs through their ancient parliament, Tynwald (Thingvöllr), which has the longest continuous history of any legislature in the world. If one accepts the English claim that Westminster is “the mother of parliaments,” then Tynwald is surely the great-grandmother! The elected house in the Tynwald is the House of Keys (from Manx kiares-es-feed—twenty-four—the number of elected members). In 1346 the English finally drove out the Scots and set up permanent rule on the island. Edward III appointed William de Montecute as “King of Mann” on the condition that de Montecute acknowledge him as his suzerain.

In 1504 the title was changed to “Lord of Mann.” In 1736 this lordship was inherited by the duke of Atholl, who sold it to the English government to pay his debts. In May 1866, after threatening to annex the island, the English government recognised the Tynwald as a popularly elected parliament and the island became a Crown dependency outside the territory of the United Kingdom.

Manx

The language of the Isle of Man, closely related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic and descending from a Common Gaelic (Old Irish) form. Manx emerged as a identifiable written language in 1610, the date of the Manx translation of The Book of Common Prayer. Manx shared a common Old Irish literature and, indeed, Aodh De Blacam has observed: “Manxmen were among writers of scholastic verse that survives in the corpus of Irish letters” [Gaelic Literature Surveyed, Talbot Press, Dublin, 1929, p. 366]. It has become hard to discern what writing in Old and Middle Irish is of Manx provenance and what is Irish or Scottish. That the same literary heritage was shared in this early period is illustrated by an account of a visit to the Isle of Man by the chief bard of Ireland, Seanchán Torpéist (ca. a.d. 570–647). It is recorded that he arrived on the island with 50 of his followers and entered into a literary contest there.