Such was the scene. Hither came the King and his people on Tynwald Day. It fell on the 24th of June, the first of the seven days of the Icelandic gathering of the Althing. What occurred in Iceland occurred also in Man. The King with his Keys and his clergy gathered in the chapel. Thence they passed in procession to the law-rock. On the top round of the Tynwald the King sat on a chair and faced to the east. His sword was held before him, point upwards. His barons and beneficed men, his deemsters, knights, esquires, coroners, and yeomen, stood on the lower steps of the mount. On the grass plot beyond the people were gathered in crowds. Then the work of the day began. The coroners proclaimed a warning. No man should make disturbance at Tynwald on pain of death. Then the Acts of Tynwald were read or recited aloud by the deemsters; first in the language of the laws, and next in the language of the people. After other formalities the procession of the King returned to the chapel, where the laws were signed and attested, and so the annual Tynwald ended.
Now this primitive ceremonial, begun by King Orry early in the tenth century, is observed to this day. On Midsummer-day of this year of grace a ceremony similar in all its essentials will be observed by the present Governor, his Keys, clergy, deemsters, coroners, and people, on or near the same spot. It is the old Icelandic ordinance, but it has gone from Iceland. The year 1800 saw the last of it on the lava law-rock of Thingvellir. It is gone from every other Norse kingdom founded by the old sea-rovers among the Western Isles. Manxmen alone have held on to it. Shall we also let it go? Shall we laugh at it as a bit of mummery that is useless in an age of books and newspapers, and foolish and pompous in days of frock-coats and chimney-pot hats? I think not. We cannot afford to lose it. Remember, it is the last visible sign of our independence as a nation. It is our hand-grasp with the past. Our little nation is the only Norse nation now on earth that can shake hands with the days of the Sagas, and the Sea-Kings. Then let him who will laugh at our primitive ceremonial. It is the badge of our ancient liberty, and we need not envy the man who can look on it unmoved.
THE LOST SAGA
Of King Orry himself we learn very little. He was not only the first of our kings, but also the greatest. We may be sure of that; first, by what we know; and next, by what we do not know. He was a conqueror, and yet we do not learn that he ever attempted to curtail the liberties of his subjects. He found us free men, and did not try to make us slaves. On the contrary, he gave us a representative Constitution, which has lasted a thousand years. We might call him our Manx King Alfred, if the indirections of history did not rather tempt us to christen him our Manx King Lear. His Saga has never been written, or else it is lost. Would that we could recover it! Oh, that imagination had the authority of history to vitalise the old man and his times! I seem to see him as he lived. There are hints of his character in his laws, that are as stage directions, telling of the entrances and exits of his people, though the drama of their day is gone. For example, in that preliminary warning of the coroner at Tynwald, there is a clause which says that none shall “bawl or quarrel or lye or lounge or sit.” Do you not see what that implies? Again, there is another clause which forbids any man, “on paine of life and lyme,” to make disturbance or stir in the time of Tynwald, or any murmur or rising in the king’s presence. Can you not read between the lines of that edict? Once more, no inquest of a deemster, no judge or jury, was necessary to the death-sentence of a man who rose against the king or his governor on his seat on Tynwald. Nobody can miss the meaning of that. Once again, it was a common right of the people to present petitions at Tynwald, a common privilege of persons unjustly punished to appeal against judgment, and a common prerogative of outlaws to ask at the foot of the Tynwald Mount on Tynwald Day for the removal of their outlawry. All these old rights and regulations came from Iceland, and by the help of the Sagas it needs no special imagination to make the scenes of their action live again. I seem to see King Orry sitting on his chair on the Tynwald with his face towards the east. He has long given up sea-roving.
His long red hair is become grey or white. But the old lion has the muscles and fiery eye of the warrior still. His deemsters and barons are about him, and his people are on the sward below. They are free men; they mean to have their rights, both from him and from each other. Disputes run high, there are loud voices, mighty oaths, sometimes blows, fights, and terrific hurly-burlies. Then old Orry comes down with a great voice and a sword, and ploughs a way through the fighters and scatters them. No man dare lift his hand on the king. Peace is restored, and the king goes back to his seat.
Then up from the valley comes a woe-begone man in tatters, grim and gaunt and dirty, a famished and hunted wolf. He is an outlaw, has killed a man, is pursued in a blood-feud, and asks for relief of his outlawry. And so on and so on, a scene of rugged, lusty passions, hate and revenge, but also love and brotherhood; drinking, laughing, swearing, fighting, savage vices but also savage virtues, noble contempt of death, and magnificent self-sacrifice.
The chapter is lost, but we know what it must have been. King Orry was its hero. Our Manx Alfred, our Manx Arthur, our Manx Lear. Then room for him among our heroes! he must stand high.
THE MANX MACBETH
The line of Orry came to an end at the beginning of the eleventh century. Scotland was then under the sway of the tyrant Macbeth, and, oddly enough, a parallel tragedy to that of Duncan and his kinsman was being enacted in Man. A son of Harold the Black, of Iceland, Goddard Crovan, a mighty soldier, conquered the island and took the crown by treachery, coming first as a guest of the Manx king. Treachery breeds treachery, duplicity is a bad seed to sow for loyalty, and the Manx people were divided in their allegiance. About twenty years after Crovan’s conquest the people of the south of the island took up arms against the people of the north, and the story goes that, when victory wavered, the women of the north rushed out to the help of their husbands, and so won the fight. For that day’s work, the northern wives were given the right to half of all their husband’s goods immovable, while the wives of the south had only a third. The last of the line of Goddard Crovan died in 1265, and so ended the dynasty of the Norsemen in Man. They had been three hundred years there. They found us a people of the race and language of the people of Ireland, and they left us Manxmen. They were our only true Manx kings, and when they fell, our independence as a nation ceased.
THE MANX GLO’STER