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Manx Names in the Early 16th Century

by Heather Rose Jones

©1998 by Heather Rose Jones. All rights reserved.

Last updated 30 Oct 1998

J.J. Kneen's The Personal Names of the Isle of Man (Oxford University Press, 1937) provides a useful collection of the small amount of information that is known about the names used on the Isle of Man in the pre-modern period. Probably the most extensive survey comes from a manorial roll collected in 1511-15, known as the "Liber Assedationis", which appears to be the sort of survey of landholders common in English records of the medieval period and later. While Kneen's method of presenting the data has certain flaws -- surnames and given names are presented in separate lists without showing examples of whole names, and frequency statistics are not given for surnames -- on the whole, it is useful for the purpose.

The names used in Man at this time reflect the multifaceted cultural background of the island. In addition to the original Gaelic-speaking inhabitants, there was a strong Norse infusion beginning in the 9th century, followed by an overlay of Anglo-Norman culture that predated any official English control of the island. By the early 16th century, Norse influence was mostly confined to a handful of fixed surnames. Gaelic influence is strongest among surnames -- indeed, the majority of surnames either use a Gaelic patronymic format or contain Gaelic-origin elements or both. The majority of given names, however, are of Anglo-Norman origin.

As is usual in documents of this sort, men far outnumber women. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 men's names appear, while only about 140 women's names do. One of the largest problems inherent in presenting the given names and surnames separately comes in trying to analyze gender differences in surnames, which I discuss further below.

Given Names

Kneen presents the given names in lists according to popularity (with general groupings for the men and specific numbers for the women). From this, I've calculated approximate percentages. Kneen has listed what I would consider to be variants of the same name as different entries and I have mostly kept to his format, even though it means treating "Katerina" and "Kateryn" as different names! Given that minor variants such as this are given in his data, we can be fairly confident in assuming that he has not normalized name spellings.

In general, the popularity patterns for men's given names are very similar to those in England proper at the same period. The 15 most popular names represent about 85% of the total, and "John" represents fully a fifth of all men's names, with "William" and "Thomas" also very high in the running (all similar to contemporary name statistics for England). The Gaelic and Norse heritages of the island remain to varying extents. About a sixth of the men bore names of linguistically Gaelic origin (representing about a quarter of the different names in use), while maybe around 3% bore names of Norse origin (only three different names represented). In the 15 most popular names, three are Gaelic and one Norse, while in the 17 names appearing only once, half are Gaelic and two Norse.

Women's names in the available sample are even more concentrated among the most popular (with the top 15 representing 88%) although the most popular name (Cristian) is slightly less popular (17%) than the most popular male name. Gaelic-origin names have similar popularity to that found in men, with slightly over a sixth of the women bearing them (and about a quarter of the 30 different names represented). No women bore names of identifiable Norse origin. A significant majority of the feminine Gaelic names (5 of 7) are "devotional names" of the format "Caly-<saint's name>", in parallel to the male formula "Gil-<saint's name>", although the latter make up only half of the different male Gaelic names used.

Given Names -- Frequency Lists

Given Names -- Alphabetical Lists

Surnames

The surnames are listed by parish, but actual counts for each are not given, only representative spellings. So it is impossible to tell which surnames were the most common in absolute terms, but some approximation may be made of how widespread they were.

There are 764 surname listings (in 17 parishes) representing 319 name groupings (where all patronymic-origin surnames using a particular form of the root name are grouped together, but surnames based on different variants of the root are not). Of these, about 80% are patronymic in origin, while the others are divided roughly equally between surnames of locative origin, those of occupational origin, and those derived from personal nicknames.

Of the patronymic-origin surnames, 75% are formed with prefixed "Mac", 16% consist only of the root name, 7% are formed with suffixed "son", and the remaining handful of names include a few prefixed with "O" and one with "Ap".

There is no particular correlation between the more common surnames and the more common given names, and there are many patronymic-origin surnames whose roots do not occur as given name at all. This is strong evidence that surnames were, for the most part, fixed and inherited rather than being true patronyms. However, since no information is available about either whole names or the relationships of the people named, we cannot know for certain that none of the patronymic surnames were true patronyms.

One aspect of the patronym system, however, had not entirely been converted to English-style fixed surnames, and that is the treatment of women's surnames. While Kneen's main lists of surnames according to parish give only masculine forms of patronyms (i.e., ones using "mac"), his more detailed alphabetical listings provide a surprising number of feminine variants where "Ine" (equivalent to Irish "inghean") appears. We have no idea whether women also bore surnames using "Mac" or whether they always used "Ine" forms, or whether the use of "Ine" indicated a true patronym rather than simply a feminine form of a fixed surname (although this seems unlikely for the same reasons given above).

58 surnames have "Ine"-feminines listed. 50 of these simply substitute "Ine" for "Mac". For five "Ine" forms, no equivalent "Mac" form is cited, however for three of these, the roots are the sort you would expect to find in patronyms. In three cases, the masculine name involves "O". In two of these, "Ine" is added before the "O" (including one where "Mac" is also used this way) and in the third "Ine" is substituted for "O". In general, names for which "Ine" forms are available correspond to the more popular names, suggesting that the option is freely available for any patronymic-style surname.

Two of the "Ine" names, however, are rather startling: "Ine Goldesmyth" and "Ine Skylycorne", the first based on an English occupational name and the second on a name of locative origin. The first could be considered in the same class as Gaelic patronyms based on borrowed occupational terms, e.g., "MacPhearson" (from "parson"), however the second is without precedent that I am aware of. If we are not simply dealing with a scribal error or misinterpretation (which cannot be ruled out, given the small sample involved), this may suggest that "Ine" had been generalized as a feminine surname-prefix for names of all types, not simply patronyms (since neither of these elements ever appears prefixed by "Mac") or that the women are being identified as "daughter of <surname>" rather than it being considered appropriate to use the surname proper.

Another clue to the fossilized nature of the patronym-derived surnames is the number of feminine forms where the root has been reanalyzed in the "Mac" form. For example, the masculine patronym "Mac Comas" derives from the given name "Thomas" -- the "C" at the beginning of the root has migrated from the final sound of "Mac", after lenition caused the initial "T" to become essentially silent. If the patronym were still understood as "Mac + Thomas" (with "Mac Comas" simply being a written variant), we would expect the feminine form to be constructed from "Ine + Thomas" with appropriate grammatical rules applying. However, the corresponding feminine form is "Ine Comas", showing that the understanding of the name's origin has been lost. Twenty of the "Ine" patronyms use roots that show this sort of reanalysis. As before, this is strong evidence that these surnames are fixed and are not functioning as true patronyms. Kneen gives examples of feminine surnames using "Ine" as late as the early 19th century.

Surname Lists

As noted above, in the frequency lists the patronymic-origin names are grouped by root, e.g., Faile, Mac Fayle, O Fayle, and Ine Fayle are grouped together, but Thomasson and Thomson are not. The frequency number is based on the number of different forms of the name (e.g., William, Mac William, and Williamson count as three forms) and the number of different districts they appear in. Frequency numbers do not include feminine forms of patronyms. While this is not as useful as absolute numbers, it's better than nothing.

The frequency lists give surnames of patronymic, locative, occupational, and other origin separately. I want to emphasize that few, if any, of them would be functioning in this capacity at this time. I have not attempted to provide origins or "meanings" for any of the surnames, as this would have increased the amount of work involved in the article beyond what I am able to devote to it at this time.

In addition to the frequency lists, there is an alphabetical list of all the names that appear, with "Mac", "O", and "Ine" omitted from the alphabeticization.

Frequency Lists

Patronymic-Origin Surnames

Surnames of Locative Origin

Surnames of Occupational Origin

Surnames of Other or Unknown Origin

Alphabetic Index of All Surnames

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©1998 by Heather Rose Jones, hrjones@socrates.berkeley.edu. Please get proper permission before redistributing!

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