England is the largest constituent country of the United Kingdom and the suzerain power that exercised overlordship of the Isle of Man. The relationship between the English Crown and the Island shaped Manx history profoundly, from the medieval transfer of the Lordship to the English Stanleys in 1405, through the Revestment of 1765, to the continuing constitutional relationship as a Crown Dependency.

The terms of the holding were feudal and were recited for centuries. The Island was granted with the patronage of the bishopric and all its ecclesiastical benefices, as fully as any former lord or king of Man had held them, to be holden by homage and by the service of rendering to the King and his successors at their coronations two falcons.

The English claim was asserted step by step. King John took Reginald, King of Mann, under his protection in 1205 and took his homage for the Island and the out Isles. Edwin of Northumbria had wrested it from the Scots as early as 625. Edward I heard the Waldeboef claim as lord paramount over the King of Scotland, and the Manx chronologies say he took the Island under his protection in 1290 and assumed it as his own in 1307. Henry IV granted it to Sir John Stanley and his heirs after Scrope's attainder.

The Manx never accepted that the relation was simple. The Island's writers insist that when it passed to the kings of England no rights of Holy Mother Church went with it, and yet the Crown afterwards presumed to give or sell the patronage of the bishopric, and Henry VIII and Elizabeth seized the lands and revenues of Rushen Abbey. Sir James Gell as Attorney-General had to answer an opinion of the English Law Officers that the Insular Legislature could not legislate on a matter affecting Crown rights without an Act of the Imperial Parliament, and he answered it with the precedents.