Manx History; childhood in the eighteenth century; a WI talk.

[curiouswombat]

On Saturday I went to a fascinating talk organised by the WI. The subject was Childhood on the Isle of Man in the Eighteenth Century. I am writing some of it down here so that I remember it

Comments

[taz_39]

Wow, this was very interesting to read! Thank you for sharing.

Really, the farm animals lived WITH the family?? How strange that seems to me!

Certainly if they had chickens, cows, and goats, they ate eggs and milk at least in addition to the salt fish and oat cakes.

Anyway, how cool and especially that someone documented all this :)

[curiouswombat]

The cottages were all very like this one;

[sallymn]

Love that picture, and all of the history is fascinating, we get so little of the lives of the mass of people in history that this sort of thing is invaluable :)

[curiouswombat]

There are still some of those stone cottages around - but these days they have usually been extended and, many of them, reroofed. Some are still thatched though.

Like you, I find the history of the ordinary people fascinating. I was really interested in how they had worked out how effective Bishop Barrow's schools were.

[one_raido]

I want another Manx kitty.

[curiouswombat]

We reckon every cat born on the island is manx...

Actually, proper Manx kittens and also rumpies and stumpies are just part of the local feline populace, but quite a few of the local cats have perfect tails.

[kazzy_cee]

How fascinating. I didn't know that the Manx language was not a written language. I suppose with a relatively small population it wasn't necessary to write. Did they have tally sticks or similar for counting and record keeping of livestock etc?

[curiouswombat]

I think there was no real need, in such a small population, to write down the every day language. Churchmen wrote in Latin, and records for the officials of the King of Mann and the Isles would have been in Norse, or maybe Scots or, again, Latin.

Counting did not seem to be a problem - the written numbers were pretty universal and I would guess some form of ogham was still in use to record such things too.

All the Gaelic languages seem to have been written down in roman letters, rather than ogham, at different dates - and the different ways of trying to form the sounds that are not used in Latin or English make the written versions look less alike than they sound.

Bishop Barrow, when he began to write down Manx, skipped a lot of those attempts and just used the nearest sound in English a lot of the time - so written Manx looks simpler but is less accurate, if you see what I mean. For example bheag in Scottish is veg in Manx; both the same word meaning small.

[elwenlj]

Lol. Children have always been children, it seems. Although I applaud the education system, it is sad that it followed the pattern used by colonisers the world over, by replacing the local language. It is fortunate that Manx has remained.

[curiouswombat]

Giving Bishop Barrow his due, it must have been very difficult to teach catechism, or read out the Bible, in the language of the people when there were no official written versions.

Of course if he had started with his work to write Manx down before he began the schools, things might well have been very different. But as a protestant bishop, his driving force was to ensure people could read the Bible and the Prayer Book for themselves and he didn't want to leave generations unable to do so when they could be taught in English.

It was really only in the Victorian period that speaking Manx became very discouraged, banned in schools and the parish churches.

[heleninwales]

The Welsh language was a written language, fortunately with early manuscripts dating back to at least the 1200s.

The preservation of Welsh as a living language owes a lot to William Morgan who translated the whole Bible which was published in 1588. During Queen Elizabeth I's reign it was decreed that church services were to be in English and not Latin. Of course the population in Wales, for the most part, didn't speak English, hence the translation of the whole Bible at such an early date.

[curiouswombat]

My knowledge of the history of the written records here is a bit hazy - but I think it likely that still being part of the original Norse Kingdom of Mann and the Isles until the 13th century probably had some influence on things. I'm not sure when they transitioned from Ogham to roman lettering

[heleninwales]

It's very likely that the clergy will have made their own notes in their own way, rather than relying purely on memory. It's a shame that Bishops Barrow and Wilson didn't get their own roads. They certainly made a big contribution to education and the Manx language.