Christian

The Manx form is Mac Crysten, alongside Mac Giolla Chríost, "son of the servant of Christ". Behind both sits the Latin Christianus, a follower of Christ, from christus, "anointed", a word coined to translate the Hebrew messiah. Christian is counted among the native Manx surnames rather than an import: it is an anglicisation of Mac Christen, and it had settled into a fixed hereditary form on the Isle of Man by the medieval period, at a time when most English families and those of Lowland Scotland were only just adopting hereditary surnames at all.

The island then reworked its own names. In the early sixteenth century the Mac prefix was almost universal on Man; by the seventeenth it had all but vanished. Mac was spoken unstressed, so its final consonant slid forward and became the opening sound of the name behind it. That is why so many Manx surnames begin with C, K or Q. Cubbon, Kelly and Quayle are all fossils of a prefix that fell off in the mouth and left its last letter behind.

Mac Crysten took a different road. Rather than collapsing into a C or a K it was written up into an English-looking word, Christian, and in that form it went into English records. The Giolla forms of the same root went a third way again: Mac and the element Giolla, "servant of", contracted together into Myley, so that MacGillchrist became Mylechreest or Mylchreest. One root, three surnames, and only one of them legible to an English clerk on sight.

The Christians held Milntown, near Ramsey, and from that seat they supplied Deemsters, the judges of Man, and Receivers, across generation after generation. It is an unusual profile for a leading family. Their standing rested on office rather than on title: the men who read the law to the island, and the men who held the office of Receiver beside them, came repeatedly from the same house.

That made the surname administrative before it was famous. A Deemster's name went onto judgements, and judgements were written down and kept. By the time the seventeenth century pulled the family into open politics, Christian was already a word the island associated with authority exercised on its own ground and in its own courts.

William Christian (1608–1663) is remembered in Manx as Illiam Dhone, "brown-haired William". That the island kept his name in its own language rather than in English says most of what needs saying about how he was held. He led the Isle of Man through the years of the English Civil War, the stretch when the island's government had to answer for the island while the war ran on around it.

His life ended at Hango Hill in 1663, and the verdict Man passed afterwards was not the verdict of the court. Manx tradition holds him a patriot, and it is the Manx name, not the English one, that stayed attached to him. Of the two Christians the wider world has heard of, he is the one the island itself claims.

Thomas Christian (1754–1828) worked as a Manx poet and translator. He did it in the same century in which the island's formal paperwork, its parish registers and its probate records, was being kept in English. Translation was the harder half of that job: carrying a text into Manx meant settling what Manx could be made to carry, at a point when the official page belonged to English.

His near contemporary Hugh Cloberry Christian (1747–1798) rose to rear-admiral in the Royal Navy. The two careers mark the two directions the surname travelled out of the eighteenth century, one turned inward to hold a language, the other outward into British service and a rank.

Fletcher Christian (1764–1793) came of the same island family. He led the mutiny on HMS Bounty and settled afterwards on Pitcairn Island. He died in 1793. The mutiny itself is told elsewhere and belongs to the ship. What belongs to the surname is what happened next, which is that a Manx patronymic took root on a speck of land and never left it.

Long after him, the name was still doing that island's work. Ivan Christian (1919–1991) served as a Pitcairn Island politician. Tom Christian (1935–2013) was Pitcairn's radio operator, the link between that settlement and everyone beyond it. A surname formed on one small island had become the working surname of another.

Ewan Christian (1814–1895) practised as a British architect. Henry B. Christian (1883–1953) painted in America. Neither is a Manx story on its face, and that is the point: a small island's surname had reached the professional classes of much larger countries and was making a living there under its own name.

Garth Christian (1921–1967) was an English nature writer, editor, teacher and conservationist, the four roles running together in the same working life. Neil Christian (1943–2010) sang; Terry Christian (born 1962) presented on British television and radio, so the name carried into broadcasting as well.

Before the middle of the seventeenth century, Manx women carried a surname of their own shape. The prefix Ine, a Gaelic contraction meaning "daughter" and cognate with the Irish Ní and Nic and the Scottish Gaelic Nic, from iníon, gave a woman her own form of the family name. It generally fell out of use from the mid-seventeenth century, though J. J. Kneen recorded instances of feminine surnames in Ine surviving as late as the early nineteenth.

What replaced it was Latin and legal. Through the eighteenth century, formal documents written in English, parish registers and probate records among them, used "alias" to carry a married woman's or a widow's maiden name: "Mr. Robert Kelly of the Rock in the parish of Marown and his wife Isabel Kelly als Clucas". That abbreviation is the sound of a clerk fitting Manx family knowledge into an English form, the same pressure that had already turned Mac Crysten into Christian.

The counting came later still. Manx surnames have been ranked by their occurrences in the 1881 census and again in the 1986 island telephone directory, and a third measure asks which surnames appear on the Isle of Man at a higher rate than anywhere else in Great Britain. Those tables are how a name is shown to be Manx rather than merely present on Man.

Leonard Arthur Christian (1889–1955) flew as a Canadian ace in the First World War. Mary Ellen Christian (1848–1941) was an Australian contralto and a teacher of singing. Harold Christian (1871–1950) farmed as a South African and Rhodesian. Roy Christian (born 1943) played rugby league in New Zealand, and Sharon Christian (1950–2015) worked as a Canadian artist.

None of those are Manx careers, and that is exactly the shape a small-island surname takes once it is loose in the settler world: one name out of one place, at work in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa. Man counts it among its own, and Milntown is the house that put it on the record.