Isle of Man

The Isle of Man, in Manx Ellan Vannin, is a self-governing dependency of the British Crown in the middle of the Irish Sea, about equally distant from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. It has some 84,000 people. Its capital is Castletown, the old seat of the Lords of Mann; its parliament and government sit at Douglas, its largest town. It is not part of Great Britain, is not represented in Britain’s Parliament, and is not a colony.

It differs from the Channel Islands in two ways. The King holds it as Lord of Mann, a lordship and not a Crown: the island’s instruments never call it the Crown in right of Man, although the courts treat the Lordship as a Crown for every legal purpose. And it has Tynwald, a parliament of Norse origin that claims a continuous existence of more than a thousand years and meets once a year in the open air, on a hill at St John’s, to proclaim the laws it has made. The Lieutenant-Governor gives assent to most of those laws himself, on the advice of the island’s own ministers, so that no British committee stands between Tynwald and the statute book.

The island governed itself in little before 1866 and controlled its own money only from 1958, and it has used that control to make itself one of the richest places per head in the British Isles, from offshore finance, online gambling and low taxes. It came last in the British Isles to two reforms, the abolition of judicial birching and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and it was pushed to both. It is also the island of the TT, the motorcycle races on its public roads, and of a language that lost its last native speaker in 1974 and has been brought back.

Etymology

The name is usually traced to Manannan mac Lir, the sea god of Irish and Manx legend, who is said to have ruled the island and to hide it in mist from its enemies. The Manx form is Ellan Vannin, the island of Mann. The older English spelling, Mann, survives in the style of the Lordship, the Lord of Mann, and the islanders are Manx.

History

Celtic Man and the Norse kingdom

The island was settled in the Mesolithic and was Celtic-speaking by the Iron Age. Christianity came early from Ireland, and the island is covered with the remains of its first churches, the small chapels called keeills, of which nearly two hundred are known, and with carved stone crosses, some two hundred of them, Celtic and Norse, many with runic inscriptions, the largest collection of its kind in the British Isles.

The Norse arrived in the ninth century and stayed. The ship burial at Balladoole and the grave of the so-called pagan lady at Peel are among the richest Viking burials in Britain and Ireland. In 1079 Godred Crovan won the island at the battle of Sky Hill and founded the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles, which joined Man to the Hebrides under kings of Norse descent for nearly two centuries. Tynwald, from the Norse thing-völlr, the assembly field, is the kingdom’s institution; the island dates its founding to 979 and kept its millennium in 1979.

Scots, English and the Stanleys

The Treaty of Perth of 1266 passed Man and the Isles from Norway to Scotland. The island changed hands between the Scottish and English kings for seventy years and settled under English overlordship in the fourteenth century, held by a succession of English lords. In 1405 Henry IV granted it to Sir John Stanley, whose descendants, Earls of Derby from 1485, held it as Lords of Mann for three centuries and styled themselves its kings until the sixteenth.

Illiam Dhone

During the English Civil War the seventh Earl of Derby held Man for the King. After his execution in 1651 his widow, Charlotte de la Trémoille, the Countess of Derby, held the island until William Christian, its Receiver-General, known in Manx as Illiam Dhone, brown-haired William, led a rising that surrendered it to Parliament’s forces on terms that protected the Manx. At the Restoration the Derbys had him tried for treason, and on 2 January 1663 he was shot at Hango Hill outside Castletown. The King’s Privy Council afterwards held the trial unlawful. He is the island’s martyr to some and its traitor to others, and the ballad of his death is still sung.

The Atholls and the Revestment

The Lordship passed through a Stanley heiress to the Dukes of Atholl in 1736. By then the island was the centre of a great smuggling trade: goods landed lawfully in Man at the island’s low duties were run into Britain and Ireland, and the British exchequer lost heavily by it. Parliament ended the trade by buying the Lordship. The Revestment Act 1765 transferred the Lordship and its revenues from the Duke of Atholl to the Crown for £70,000, and the Atholls sold their remaining rights in 1828. The Manx call the revestment yn chialg, the mischief: the island lost its trade and its revenues and for a century was governed for Britain’s convenience rather than its own.

The nineteenth century

The Isle of Man Steam Packet Company was founded in 1830 and has carried the island’s passengers ever since, the oldest continuously operating passenger shipping company in the world. The century brought cholera in 1832 and hunger in the 1840s, and with them emigration, much of it to the Realm and above all to Cleveland, in the Commonwealth of Ohio, where Manx families settled from the 1820s and founded Mona’s Relief Society in 1851. Cleveland’s Manx are the island’s largest community abroad.

Its industries were the sea and the mines. The herring fishery sent fleets from Peel and Port St Mary to the Irish Sea grounds, and the lead and zinc mines of Laxey and Foxdale were among the richest in the British Isles. The Great Laxey Wheel, Lady Isabella, built in 1854 to pump the Laxey mines, is the largest working waterwheel in the world. Both the fishery and the mines had collapsed by 1900.

Home rule, 1866

Until the 1860s the House of Keys chose its own members, the Lieutenant-Governor governed, and the island’s customs revenue went to London. The Lieutenant-Governor Henry Loch made the bargain that changed it. The Isle of Man Customs, Harbours and Public Purposes Act 1866 gave the island a share of its own customs revenue for its own purposes, and in return the Keys accepted election; the first elected House was returned in 1867. Tynwald and the island’s offices moved to Douglas in the following years. Castletown was never replaced as the capital in law, and remains so.

In 1881 unmarried women and widows who owned property voted for the Keys, the first women anywhere to vote in a national election; all adult women had the vote from 1919. The novelist Hall Caine, author of The Deemster and The Manxman and around 1900 the best-selling writer in the English-speaking world, sat in the Keys from 1901 to 1908.

The resort

From the 1870s the island became a resort for the industrial north of England. Douglas built a promenade two miles long, boarding houses by the hundred and the theatres and ballrooms to fill them. The horse trams began on the Douglas front in 1876; the steam railway reached Port Erin in 1874; the Manx Electric Railway opened in 1893 and the Snaefell Mountain Railway in 1895. At its height before the First Great War the island received more than half a million visitors a summer.

The Tourist Trophy races began in 1907, because Britain forbade racing on its public roads and Tynwald was willing to close the island’s. The Snaefell Mountain Course of about 60 kilometres has been used since 1911.

The two wars

The First Great War emptied the boarding houses. The visitor trade collapsed in 1914 and did not recover until the 1920s, the worst economic shock in the island’s modern history. About 1,200 Manx volunteers died in British regiments, from an island of about 50,000. The Steam Packet’s ships were requisitioned, and several were sunk by French submarines.

In the Second Great War the island was a training base. The Royal Air Force built airfields at Jurby and Andreas and a radar station on the northern hills, and the boarding houses filled with servicemen. The island was not bombed in earnest. The Steam Packet again gave its ships to the war and again lost several to French submarines in the Irish Sea and the western approaches, and its losses in the two wars are the island’s war memorial. There was no internment on Man in either war.

The finance centre and the reforms

The island took its own money in 1958, when the Isle of Man Act ended British Treasury control of its finances, and its own government in stages afterwards. From 1961 the Lieutenant-Governor no longer presided over the island’s executive. In 1980 the President of Tynwald took the chair of Tynwald Court from him, and in 1990 he left the Legislative Council. The office of Chief Minister was created in 1986, and the Council of Ministers replaced the old Executive Council in 1990.

The island used its fiscal freedom to make itself an offshore centre: low income tax, no taxes on capital, and from the 1970s a banking, insurance and trust industry that grew to the largest part of the economy. The resort declined in the same years, as the north of England went abroad for its holidays.

On 2 August 1973 the Summerland leisure centre on the Douglas front caught fire and fifty people died. The building had been clad in acrylic sheeting that burned like paper, some of its emergency doors were locked, and the fire brigade was called late. The inquiry found fault widely and nobody was prosecuted.

In 1967 Tynwald refused to pass Britain’s law against offshore pirate radio stations, to protect a station broadcasting from Ramsey Bay under island licence. Britain extended its own Act to the island by Order in Council over Tynwald’s refusal. It is the one modern use of Britain’s power to legislate for the island, and the Keys still cite it.

The island came last to two reforms. Its courts sentenced young offenders to birching until a complaint to the League’s court in 1978 held the punishment degrading, over Tynwald’s protest; Tynwald abolished it soon after. Homosexual acts between men remained a crime until 1992, the last place in the British Isles to decriminalise them, after years of pressure from Britain. Tynwald apologised formally to those who had been convicted in 2019.

The present

The island founded the Island Games in 1985 and held the first. The Isle of Man Film fund, from 1995 to 2011, made the island a film location and lost money. In 2006 the island abolished corporate tax for most companies and lowered the voting age to sixteen. In October 2008 the Manx branch of an Icelandic bank failed with the collapse of Iceland’s banks; about 8,000 depositors, most of them British, were repaid only in part and over years, and the island’s depositor scheme proved unequal to it. In 2016 the whole island was made a biosphere reserve by the League’s scientific organisation.

Tynwald passed an Assisted Dying Act in 2025, the first law of its kind in the British Isles. The Lieutenant-Governor reserved it for the King, and for several months British ministers argued over whether the King could take Manx advice on a law that would be refused in Britain. He did, and the Act received assent in 2026; the first assisted deaths under it took place in 2027 and the first legal challenge followed. The general election of 2026 returned a House of Keys that elected Juan Kinvig Chief Minister. In October 2028, after Britain’s Regency Act, Tynwald passed a short Regency Act of its own in a single sitting.

Geography

The island is about 52 kilometres long and 22 wide, with an area of about 572 square kilometres, in the middle of the northern Irish Sea. A central upland runs north-east to south-west, rising to Snaefell, 621 metres, from whose summit six kingdoms are said to be visible on a clear day: England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Mann and Heaven. The uplands are cut by wooded glens running down to the sea. The north is a flat plain ending in the sand dunes and heath of the Ayres. The Calf of Man, a small island off the south-west tip, is a bird observatory and nature reserve.

The climate is mild, wet and windy. The waters round the island hold basking sharks in summer, off the west coast, and the beds of the queen scallop, the queenie, on which the island’s fishermen depend. An offshore wind field is planned east of the island, the largest public project in its history.

The island is divided into six sheadings, an ancient division used now chiefly for ceremony, and seventeen parishes. Local government is in the hands of the town and village commissioners and the borough of Douglas.

Douglas, on the east coast, is the largest town, with about a third of the population, and the seat of Tynwald, the government and the courts. Castletown, in the south, is the capital: the seat of the Lords of Mann at Castle Rushen, one of the best-preserved medieval castles in the British Isles, and of the Old House of Keys. Ramsey is the town of the north, Peel the fishing port of the west with Peel Castle on St Patrick’s Isle and the ruined cathedral of St German, and Port Erin and Port St Mary the resorts of the south-west.

Government and politics

The Lordship of Mann

The King holds the island as Lord of Mann. The Lordship is not one of the King’s fourteen capacities and not a Crown in right of the island: the island’s instruments speak of the Lord of Mann and never of a Manx Crown, and the style is a style of the British Crown. In law the Lordship does everything a Crown does. It owns the island’s foreshore and ungranted land, prosecutes in the courts through the Attorney-General, contracts and is sued, and the courts treat it as a Crown for every purpose without calling it one. Jersey and Guernsey each hold a Crown in right of their own; Man holds a lordship that is a Crown in all but name.

The King acts in Manx matters on the advice of the island’s ministers. There is no British committee between Tynwald and the Lord of Mann, as there is between the States of the Channel Islands and the King, and the island is not on the list of exceptions to the rule that the King acts on local advice.

The Lieutenant-Governor

The Lieutenant-Governor is appointed by the King on the Chief Minister’s advice, after a panel of island officers has recommended a name, for about five years. He lives at Government House at Onchan, outside Douglas. His office is ceremonial except in two things: he gives assent to most Acts of Tynwald himself, and he swears in the members of the House of Keys.

The present Lieutenant-Governor is Sir Richard Callister, a former Deemster, the first Manx-born holder of the office.

Assent

An Act of Tynwald becomes law when it receives assent and is then promulgated on Tynwald Hill. Most Acts receive assent from the Lieutenant-Governor, on the Chief Minister’s advice. A small class of Acts, those touching the Lordship, the prerogatives of the Crown or Britain’s obligations abroad, are reserved for the King, who assents to them on Manx advice as well. The reserved class has been used rarely; the Assisted Dying Act was its most contested use.

Tynwald

Tynwald has three parts. The House of Keys has twenty-four members, elected in twelve two-member constituencies every five years by voters from the age of sixteen; its members are styled MHK and it elects its own Speaker. The Legislative Council has eleven members: eight elected by the House of Keys, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, the Attorney-General, who does not vote, and the President of Tynwald. The two branches sit separately to pass most legislation, and together as Tynwald Court, under the President, once a month, for finance, policy and the business of the island as a whole.

Tynwald and the government sit in the Legislative Buildings at Douglas, where they have sat since the island’s offices moved there in the decades after 1866. The capital has stayed at Castletown.

The present President of Tynwald is Dr Ann Kewley, a former member for Douglas and the first woman to hold the office for a full term.

The Chief Minister and the Council of Ministers

The Chief Minister is elected by Tynwald after each general election and appoints a Council of Ministers from its members. The present Chief Minister is Juan Kinvig MHK, member for Rushen, a former advocate and Treasury minister, elected after the general election of 2026.

Parties

Most members of Tynwald are independents. Manx Labour and Liberal Vannin hold a handful of seats between them, and no party has ever approached a majority. Governments are coalitions of individuals assembled by the Chief Minister.

Tynwald Day

Tynwald meets each year on 5 July, Old Midsummer Day, in the open air at St John’s, in the middle of the island. The members walk in procession from the Royal Chapel of St John to Tynwald Hill, an artificial mound of four tiers, along a path strewn with rushes, the rent once said to be paid to Manannan. The Sword of State, which the island claims is a thousand years old, is carried before the presiding officer. The Coroner of Glenfaba “fences” the court, forbidding any disturbance of it, in Manx and English. The Deemsters then read the titles and summaries of the laws enacted in the past year, in Manx and English, and they are promulgated by that reading.

Any person may present a petition for redress of grievance at the foot of the hill, and Tynwald must consider it; a few are presented every year, on subjects from roads to the TT. Tynwald Day is the island’s national day. A fair is held in the field round the hill.

The Lord of Mann presides when he is present, and otherwise the Lieutenant-Governor does. Ernest V presided three times in his reign: in 1979, for the millennium of Tynwald, in 1999, for its twentieth anniversary, and in 2016, for the island’s biosphere year. He has visited the island less often than he visits Jersey.

The toast

The Manx toast is to “the King, Lord of Mann”, standing. The Channel Islanders drink to the Duke, and the Manx do not; the title of Duke belongs to the Channel Islands alone.

The regency

The British Regency Act of 2 October 2028 made Queen Christina Regent in Britain and covers the island, since the Lordship is held by the British King. Jersey and Guernsey did nothing but note the fact. Tynwald passed a short Regency Act of its own in October 2028, in a single sitting, providing in Manx law that the Regent acts for the Lord of Mann, on Manx advice, for as long as the British regency lasts. Members argued that it was unnecessary, and the Chief Minister’s answer was that an island which had once had its laws made for it by Order in Council would rather say things itself.

Britain’s power to legislate

Britain’s Parliament has power to legislate for the island and does not use it without Tynwald’s consent, by a convention that has been broken once in modern times, in 1967, over pirate radio. Britain is responsible for the island’s defence and external relations, and its Ministry of Justice is the department that deals with it. The island is not represented in Britain’s Parliament and sends no member to Britain’s Council of the Nations.

Law

Manx law is the island’s own: a customary law of Norse and English origin, Acts of Tynwald, and those British Acts extended to the island with its consent.

The High Court sits at Douglas under the Deemsters: the First Deemster, who is also Clerk of the Rolls, the Second Deemster, and a Deemster. The name is Norse, from the men who once deemed the law from memory. On appointment a Deemster swears to execute the laws “as indifferently as the herring’s backbone doth lie in the midst of the fish”. Appeals go to the Staff of Government Division, and the final appeal lies to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

Serious crimes are tried by a jury, on the English pattern. The island has no Jurats of the Channel Islands’ kind, in which a lay panel sits with the judge to find the facts.

The Attorney-General is the Lordship’s law officer, prosecutes in its name and sits without a vote in the Legislative Council.

External relations and defence

Britain and the island

Britain conducts the island’s foreign relations and defends it. Britain has entrusted the island with signing its own tax and regulatory agreements, and it signs them in its own name. The island pays Britain a yearly contribution for defence and representation abroad.

The tie with Britain that the Channel Islands lack is the Common Purse Agreement: a customs and excise union under which the island levies value added tax and the excise duties at Britain’s rates, and the revenue of the two is pooled and shared. The agreement makes the island part of Britain’s customs territory and makes the rate of value added tax, which yields about a third of the island’s revenue, a decision taken in London.

The Concert

The island is inside the European Concert through Britain’s treaty, as the Channel Islands are. When the Concert’s financial standards came into force in 2027 the island took a middle course: it opted in on tax transparency and opted out on the registers of beneficial ownership. Jersey and Guernsey opted out wholly. Straßburg names the island with them all the same.

Ireland

Ireland is the island’s nearest neighbour to the west and its oldest connection. Ferries and flights run to Dublin and Belfast; Irish fishing boats work Manx waters under a fisheries arrangement; and Ireland’s realm and the island’s lordship are held by the same King. The two share the Gaelic languages, and the Manx revival drew on Irish teaching.

The Celtic nations

The island is one of the six nations of the pan-Celtic movement, with Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Kernow and Brittany. It sends delegations to the Festival Interceltique at Lorient and to the Pan-Celtic festival, and its language revival borrowed its methods from the Irish and Scottish Gaelic schools.

The Realm

The island’s links with the Realm are its diaspora in Cleveland, which keeps Tynwald Day with a small ceremony that a Manx minister attends every few years, the American riders and spectators who come to the TT in their thousands, and the money. The standing committee of the American House of Commons that complains about American assets held in Jersey and Guernsey names the Isle of Man with them, over American money in Manx trusts and in the online gambling firms licensed on the island.

Defence

Britain defends the island. The island has had no military of its own since the Manx Fencibles were disbanded in 1811, apart from a small volunteer company in the British reserve, revived in the 1990s, which parades on Tynwald Day. Manx men and women serve in Britain’s forces.

Economy

The island’s output is about A£7 billion a year, about A£83,000 a head, among the highest in the British Isles.

Finance is the largest part: banking, insurance, funds and trusts, about a third of output. The island charges no corporate tax on most companies, 10 per cent on banks, and income tax at 10 and 21 per cent, with a cap on what any one person pays; there is no tax on capital gains or inheritance.

Online gambling, licensed and regulated on the island since the early 2000s, and the software firms that serve it, are the island’s largest new industry and its most argued about. A shipping register, a small space industry of satellite and launch companies, and a film sector left over from the film fund make up the rest of the modern economy.

Tourism is much smaller than in the resort years. The TT fortnight in June brings about 40,000 visitors and fills every bed on the island; heritage visitors come for the castles, the railways and the Laxey Wheel.

Farming and fishing survive in small measure: lamb and beef, a creamery, the queenie scallop fishery, and the kippers of Peel.

Public finance

The island holds reserves of about A£2.5 billion, built up in the good years, and has almost no public debt. About a third of its revenue comes from the Common Purse, about a third from income tax and national insurance, and the rest from duties and fees. The reserves carried the island through 2008 and the pandemic, and their use is the island’s most cautious argument.

Transport and media

The Steam Packet runs ferries from Douglas to Heysham and Liverpool all year and to Belfast and Dublin in summer. Ronaldsway airport, near Castletown, has flights to London, Manchester, Dublin and Belfast. On the island the Douglas horse trams still run along the promenade, the Manx Electric Railway runs north to Ramsey, the Snaefell Mountain Railway climbs to the summit, and the steam railway runs south to Port Erin.

Manx Radio, founded in 1964, the first licensed commercial station in the British Isles, is the island’s public broadcaster. The island has its own weekly newspapers.

Demographics and society

Population

The island has about 84,000 people. About half were born on it. Most of the rest came from England, with smaller communities of Irish, Scots, Filipino nurses, Latvians and Bretons, who came in the years of the pan-Celtic revival and stayed. The distinction between those born on the island and the come-overs is old and argued over; the islanders’ word for themselves in the argument is stop-heres.

Language

Manx, Gaelg, is a Gaelic language close to Scottish and Irish Gaelic. It declined through the nineteenth century, and its last native speaker, Ned Maddrell, died in 1974. The revival worked from recordings of the last speakers and from enthusiasts’ classes, then from a cultural compact with Britain of the same kind as Jersey’s with the Norman authorities, which funds the language board, the Manx-medium primary school, the Bunscoill Ghaelgagh, opened in 2001, and broadcasting. About 2,000 people speak it, a few hundred children have been educated in it, and every child on the island is taught some. A Manx Language Act of 2017 made Manx official with English.

Religion

The island is the Diocese of Sodor and Man of the Church of England, in the Province of York, which claims to be the oldest diocese in the British Isles; the name joins the island to the Hebrides of the old Norse kingdom. Its bishop sits in the Legislative Council. Methodism was strong in the island’s chapels and still is, and the Roman Catholic Church serves the Irish and the newer communities.

Health and education

Health care is Manx Care’s, the island’s own service, with Noble’s Hospital at Douglas; specialist care is provided in Liverpool under a reciprocal agreement with Britain. Schools follow the British model. University College Isle of Man awards degrees through a British university.

Culture and daily life

The TT

The Tourist Trophy races are run on the Snaefell Mountain Course, about 60 kilometres of the island’s public roads closed for racing, for two weeks each June. The fastest riders average more than 200 kilometres an hour over a lap. About 270 riders have been killed on the course since 1907, and spectators and marshals with them. The riders boycotted the races in the 1970s as too dangerous, and the TT lost its place in the world championship in 1976; it has run as a road race of its own since. Joey Dunlop of Ballymoney, in Ulster, won twenty-six TTs and is remembered as the King of the Mountain. Tynwald has defended the races every time they have been challenged.

Sport

The island founded the Island Games and sends its own team to the Commonwealth Games. Its most famous sportsman is the cyclist Mark Cavendish, of Douglas. Cammag, the Manx stick game related to hurling and shinty, has been revived, and the Parish Walk, about 137 kilometres through all seventeen parishes in a day, is held each June.

Customs and food

Hop-tu-Naa, on 31 October, the old Celtic new year, is kept with carved turnips and a children’s song older than Halloween on the island. Most Manx greet the fairies when they cross the Fairy Bridge on the Douglas road, half in jest. The national dish is chips, cheese and gravy, and the island’s breakfast is a Peel kipper.

The tailless Manx cat and the four-horned Loaghtan sheep are the island’s own breeds, and both are on its coins.

Heritage

Manx National Heritage runs the castles, the Laxey Wheel, the island’s archives and the Manx Museum at Douglas. Castle Rushen at Castletown and Peel Castle are its principal monuments.

What is argued about

Finance and gambling. Whether the offshore and online gambling industries are a living the island cannot do without or a reputation it cannot afford.

The Legislative Council. Whether the upper chamber, chosen by the lower, should be elected or abolished, a reform debated for a century and never made.

Housing and incomers. The cost of housing, a bill to limit second homes and buy-to-let, and whether the island’s work-permit rules are protection or unfriendliness.

The TT. Whether the races should go on, a question asked every year in which someone dies.

The wind field. Whether the offshore wind field, now before Tynwald for consent, should be built, with the fishermen and the Steam Packet against it.

Failings

The Register states the following plainly.

The last to reform. The island birched children until 1978 and was made to stop by a court; it kept homosexuality a crime until 1992 and was made to change by Britain. Tynwald defended both to the end, and apologised for the second only in 2019.

Finance and 2008. The island built its wealth on secrecy and on taxing companies at nothing, and in 2008 the depositors of a bank it had licensed, most of them from outside the island, were left short by a compensation scheme the island had advertised as protection.

Summerland. Fifty people died in 1973 in a building that should never have been approved, behind doors that should not have been locked, and nobody was prosecuted.

The Legislative Council. In the twenty-first century half the island’s parliament is an upper chamber nobody votes for, chosen by the lower house from among its friends and its defeated.

Assessment

The oldest continuous parliament in the world governs one of the youngest states in the British Isles. Tynwald has met for a thousand years, but the island elected it only from 1867, controlled its own money only from 1958, and had a Chief Minister only from 1986. It has used that control quickly and well, by its own measure: it is among the richest places per head in the British Isles, it has no debt, and it has brought back a language that had no native speaker left.

It has also used it, at times, to stand still. The island’s wealth came from offering what larger places would not, and its law changed when others made it change. Tynwald is at its best on the hill each July, when the laws are read in two languages to anyone who comes and anyone may hand up a grievance, and at its least impressive in the century of debate about its own upper house. The island has made itself rich and self-governing in a lifetime; whether it has made itself reformed is a question it answers more slowly.

Symbols

The flag is the three legs of Mann, the triskelion of three armoured legs joined at the thigh, in white and gold on red. The motto, Quocunque Jeceris Stabit, means “whichever way you throw it, it will stand”. The national anthem is Arrane Ashoonagh Vannin (1907), and the traditional song Ellan Vannin is sung as often. The national day is Tynwald Day, 5 July. The Manx cat and the Loaghtan sheep appear on the coins.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Bailiwick of Jersey: the largest of the Crown dependencies
• Bailiwick of Guernsey: with Alderney and Sark
• United Kingdom of Great Britain: the realm under whose Crown the Lordship is held
• Kingdom of Ireland: the island’s neighbour across the Irish Sea
• The Crown in Right: the King’s Crowns and the lower Crowns
• Commonwealth of Ohio: Cleveland and the Manx diaspora
• European Concert: the union the island is inside through Britain

Categories

Nations · Great Britain and its territories · Crown Dependencies · Isle of Man