Vestigia insulae manniae antiquiora, or, A dissertation on the armorial bearings of the Isle of Man : the regalities and prerogatives of its ancient kings, and the original usages, customs, privileges, laws, and constitutional government of the Manx people / by H.R. Oswald.

  • Oswald, H. R.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestigia insulae manniae antiquiora, or, A dissertation on the armorial bearings of the Isle of Man : the regalities and prerogatives of its ancient kings, and the original usages, customs, privileges, laws, and constitutional government of the Manx people / by H.R. Oswald. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    some accounts it is averred tliat it was visited by hostile invaders who found it desolate. Doubtless it is true that the natives were sometimes so hard pressed by danger that they abandoned their homes for a time^ but as the Celtic race of Manx has never changed its character or its language, it is evident they returned or were succeeded by identical races. The Venerable Bede, who wrote in the middle of the eighth century, informs us that Man contained three hundred families, and during the invasion of the country of the Dalraed Scots by the ancient Romans, the Manx people materially assisted the inhabitants of Galloway and Strathclyde in the defence of their country. It is interesting for us to trace the origin of our inheritance of the Tingvalla,—the original national assembly of the Celtic and Gothic tribes of Europe*—and especially interesting to find that although, in modern times, the legislative and judicial courts of the freest nations of the ancient Celts have disappeared before arbitrary power, and the Valhalla in Iceland and Scandinavia, and the Witenagemotts of Britain, have changed their form and aspect in modern England, that the primitive forms of Celtic legislation and their language still remains identical among a race of modern Celts in the Isle of Man, in the middle of Great Britain, at the present moment. And it is curious and important to the ethnology of the British Isles, that the change of dynasties which ensued from the conquest of England by M illiam of Nor- mandy, and of the Isle of Man by Godred Crovan, was effected at the same epoch, and that the accession of the Scots to the regalities of the whole of Scotland, by their amalgamation with the Piets in the reign of Donald Bane and Malcolm Caen More, only preceded those events a few years. Truly the eleventh