Historic ecclesiastical jurisdiction centred on the Isle of Man and descended from the medieval bishopric associated with Mann and the western islands.

The surviving Manx material preserves a long and complicated history for the see. Medieval sources refer to bishops of Sodor, while later Manx records use the combined title Sodor and Man.

Bishop Simon is one of the best-documented early figures. The Manx Society bibliography noted the survival of synodal statutes and constitutions attributed to him in 1229. These were printed from medieval records and later reissued in the Society’s editions of Manx historical material.

The medieval diocese operated within the political world of Mann and the Isles. Its bishops appear in the Chronicle of Mann and related documents, while the monks of Furness Abbey were involved at different periods in episcopal elections. One Manx Society note records an election made by the monks of St Mary of Furness, to whom the right of election was said to belong.

The political separation of Mann from the Hebrides eventually produced a corresponding ecclesiastical division. Nineteenth-century Manx writers placed this process around the later fourteenth century, after Mann and the western islands had come under different political rulers.

In the sixteenth century the diocese was formally attached to the Province of York. The Manx Society bibliography specifically identified the Act of 33 Henry VIII, cap. 31, as the measure by which the Diocese of Sodor and Man was annexed to York.

The diocese continued as a distinct Manx ecclesiastical institution thereafter, with its own Bishop, Archdeacon, Vicars-General and church courts. These officers also played a part in the Island’s wider constitutional structure, with senior ecclesiastical office-holders historically sitting in the Governor’s Council.