According to A.W. Moore the Isle of Man underwent epochal change in 1866. Governor Loch's reforms marked ‘the termination of what might be called the medieval history of Man’. Technically, the last vestiges of ‘feudalism’ were extinguished when the British Crown acquired the Atholls’ manorial rights and privileges in 1829 (at a cost of £417,114), but the onset of ‘modernity’ has always been identified with Loch's reforming regime. Little interest has been shown in the preceding decades, either as a coda to feudalism or the prelude to reform. In remedying this neglect this chapter aims to explore the complex processes of stasis and change in early and mid-nineteenth-century Man, the historical perspective within which Loch's achievement should be assessed.

Mona, the Paradise of the Half-pay

By the early nineteenth century the Isle of Man had at last adjusted to the revestment of 1765, capitalising on its unique position, geographically at the centre of the British Isles but politically distinct from the United Kingdom, to offer cheap and convenient domicile for British subjects of ‘small incomes and pinched circumstances’. Previously the Island was notorious as sanctuary and asylum for smugglers, runaway debtors (who, until a change in Manx law in 1814, could not be sued on the Island for debts contracted elsewhere) and other unwanted and unsavoury ‘transports’, a ‘notable Cave of Adullam’ the Reverend Hugh Stowell Brown fulminated, for ‘men of broken fortune and questionable character’. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars a more favourable image had been established, thanks in part to a number of travel journals and guide books which sought to disabuse mistaken opinions ‘both as to the natural character of the Island, and the moral character of its inhabitants’. Henceforth the Island took advantage of its cheap commodities and fiscal privileges to promote itself as a safe and comfortable haven (without direct taxation, poor rates, serious crime or political turmoil) for the lesser beneficiaries, superannuated and otherwise, of Hanoverian governmental and financial growth – ‘one of the few places in Europe where moderate people, may be moderately happy at a moderate expense’. A convenient arrangement for the British and Manx alike, the system was to persist (despite steady erosion of differentials) until Loch's reforms, after which nostalgia developed for ‘ “the good old times” of no taxes and cheap living’.