Scotland has had a close and complex relationship with the Isle of Man throughout history. The Norse Kingdom of Mann and the Isles was ceded to Scotland by the Treaty of Perth in 1266, and the Scottish Crown held sovereignty over the Island until the English took control in the fourteenth century. The Murray Dukes of Atholl, who held the Lordship from 1736, were a Scottish family.

The Manx succession lists mark the change plainly. After Magnus the Second comes Alexander King of Scots, and the antiquaries note that in 1266 the kingdom of the Isles was translated by reason of Alexander, who had got the Western Isles into his hands and brought the Isle of Man under his dominion as one of that number.

The contest that followed ran for eighty years. Edward I took the Island from the Scots in the 1290s and assumed it as his own in 1307. Robert Bruce landed at Ramsey and took Castle Rushen, holding it for six months against Duncan Macdougal, and granted the Island to his nephew Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray. William Montacute drove the Scots out again by force of arms. The Island was still being claimed from both directions in 1389, when the truce between France and England was signed for it both by Randolph as its sovereign in the Scottish interest and by Montacute as the King of Man whom England recognised. When Mary of the Manx royal line sought the Island she was told she must lay her claim before the King of Scots, and her grandson had to bring it before the King of England as lord paramount over the King of Scotland.

The Scottish connection reached into the church as well. The see of Sodor and Man was held in succession by Gilbert, a Scot, then Bernard, a Scot, then Thomas, a Scot, who sat fourteen years and died in September 1348.