The Little Manx Nation - 1891

by Sir Hall Caine

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 women of the island went forth to punish her, and, to escape from them, she took the form of a wren and flew away. That is how it comes about that the poor little wren is hunted and killed 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, armed with sticks and carrying torches. They beat the hedges until they light on a wren’s nest, and, having started the wren and slaughtered it, they suspend the tiny mite to the middle of a long pole, which is borne by two lads from 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 of the May. The Mheillia is the harvest-home. It is a picturesque ceremonial, observed differently in different parts. Women 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 made 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 Mheillia!” “Ballamona’s Mheillia’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 women at the harvesting. Sheep’s heads for a change on Manx herrings, English 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 think I can just remember to have heard the shouts of the Mheillia 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 custom of hunting the wren is widely spread throughout Ireland; and if I were to tell you of Manx wedding customs, Manx burial customs, Manx birth customs, May day, Lammas, Good Friday, New Year, and Christmas customs, you would recognise in the Manxman the same irresponsible tendency to appropriate whatever flotsam drifts to 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 William 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.

It is easy to laugh at these old superstitions, so childish do they seem, so foolish, 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 warm 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 nearly all. The wind bloweth where it listeth. We are as far off as ever. Our superstitions remain, only we call them Science, and try not to be afraid of them. But we are as little children after all, and the best of us 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 conscience, 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 offer you certain of the best of our Manx yarns from fear that they may be venerable English, Irish, and Scotch familiars. I will content myself with a few that bear undoubted Manx lineaments. As an instance of Manx hospitality, 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 himself our North-country Spurgeon, with his wife, his sister, and his mother, were belated one evening up Baldwin Glen, and stopped at a farm-house to inquire their way. But the farmer would not hear of their going a step further. “Aw, nonsense!” he said. “What’s the use of talkin’, man? You’ll 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 all be in heaven before morning, Archdeacon!” “Oh, God forbid, captain,” cried the Archdeacon.

I have said what true work for religion Nonconformity must have done in those evil days when the clergy of the Athols were more busy with backgammon than with theology. But the religion of the old type of Manx Methodist was often an amusing mixture of puritanism and its opposite, a sort of grim, white-faced sanctity, that was never altogether free of the suspicion of a big boisterous laugh behind it. The Methodist local preachers have been the real guardians and repositories of one side of the Manx genius, a curious, hybrid thing, deadly earnest, often howlingly ludicrous, simple, generally sincere, here and there audaciously hypocritical. Among 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 from market on Saturday night, dead drunk, across the bottom of his cart drawn by his faithful horse, and I saw him in the pulpit next morning, and heard his sermon 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 tchut’d a good deal, and at last, quite impatient of getting no solid religious food, cried aloud, “Give us mate, man, give us mate!” Whereupon the preacher leaned over the pulpit cushion, and said, “Hould on, man, till I’ve done with the carving.”