Norse conqueror of the Isle of Man and founder of the dynasty which held it for nearly two centuries.

The Chronicle of Man makes him the son of Harald the Black of Iceland. He was at Stamford Bridge in September 1066, where Harald Harfager fell, and escaped from the defeat to Mann, where Godred son of Sytric then reigned and received him honourably. In the same year William the Bastard conquered England. Godred son of Sytric died and his son Fingal succeeded him.

The conquest took three attempts. Crovan gathered a fleet, came to Mann, joined battle with the inhabitants and was beaten. He recruited his army and navy, came again, and was beaten a second time. On the third attempt he landed by night and placed three hundred men in concealment, who rose at the rear of the Manx line once the fighting was joined and broke it. The battle is placed at Sky Hill near Ramsey, and Fingal was dispossessed.

The date is not settled in the sources. Manx Society editors give 1077, and the Antiquitates Hibernicae has him dead by 1076, which cannot both be right. The editor of the Monumenta notes that the chronology of the manuscript is defective at this point, that its own reckoning would push the conquest to 1081, and that the Norse sagas give 1077, which he thought the likelier date. His name is glossed in the same volumes as Crovan, Cronan or Chrouban, all meaning white-handed.

What he did with the land mattered longer than how he took it. He divided the Island among the natives and among those of his followers who chose to stay, on terms that none should claim their holdings as hereditary property but should hold simply as tenants at will to the King. This is the origin later Manx writers gave to the tenure of the straw, and the nineteenth-century editor of the Manx statutes drew the comparison directly: like William the Conqueror, Crovan established feudal tenures in Man, leaving the old proprietors in legal possession but granting them their charters from himself. The same editor observed that what the monks of Rushen imagined Crovan to have done was what the seventh Earl of Derby deliberately attempted in 1645.

He died in Islay and was succeeded by his son Lagman. Another account has him expelled from his kingdom in 1093 by Magnus Barefoot of Norway and dying in Islay in 1096, leaving three sons, Lagman, Harold and Olave. Twelve or thirteen kings of his race followed, and their line ended with Magnus, who died at Castle Rushen. A seal of Godred survived in the Office of the Duchy of Lancaster, perfect in Camden's time, with his effigy on horseback on the reverse and on the obverse a ship with furled sails and the legend Rex Manniae et Insularum.