A subtle product of the community's interaction with its landscape and environment, folklore provides an unparalleled insight into how the Manx people perceived the world around them and how it affected their attitudes, behaviour and beliefs. It is an important layer of community analysis which ‘histories’ such as this often ignore in preference to the more tangible records of law, politics and formal religion. Folklore and traditional folk beliefs are not just about witches and fairies, irrational superstitions, or about protection against bad luck or natural catastrophes. Rather they are the material evidence of a complex and highly structured belief system which has evolved through time to make sense of and assist life in a pre-scientific pre-literate culture and society. The currency of this folklore within areas of society is simultaneously communal and also essentially a private selection of duties, allegiances, confidence and uncertainty. The process of transmission and continuance is similarly public and yet also at times secret, and occasionally mischievous.

Folklore and folk beliefs also provided a form of ‘etiquette and manners’ for a community whose everyday life experience was far removed from that small sector of society that made ‘the rules’. In this respect they were a cohesive social ‘glue’ which provided the community with a group of commonly held and observed social responses which could transcend and often conflict with the laws of church and state. In many ways Manx folklore beliefs provided a parallel system of daily control and compliance which was more closely related to daily domestic and working life than those which were created by more formal laws. The operation of this alternative system frequently led to censure and the ostracising or punishment of an individual. The Manx ecclesiastical court records of ‘presentments’ contain several references to cases of women being tried on the grounds of ill-wishing their neighbours and casting the ‘evil eye’.

The Collectors

Manx folklore contains elements which can be viewed as a mixture of unique or atypical Manx specific beliefs and customs, and Manx variations of more universal customs. The folklore-collectors varied in their concerns and interests. Some seemed content with recording evidence of Manx folklore and making little attempt to place the material discovered within a wider Celtic, British or European context.