Young

Young is not a trade name and it is not a patronymic. It belongs to the third great class of European surname, the descriptive byname: a word hung on a man to tell him apart from somebody standing next to him. The root is Old English geong, 'young'. Where a father and a son shared a Christian name, or where two men in one small place did, the parish, the rent roll and the baron court all needed to know which was meant. One became the young one, and in time simply Young.

In Scotland the byname carried more weight than that. There it runs synonymous with Younger, the word used to describe the heir to a feudal title, so the man marked out as the younger was often the man who would inherit. The same idea appears across Europe in whatever language was to hand: Fychan in Welsh, which comes into English as Vaughan; Óg in Irish and Òg in Scottish Gaelic; Jung in German, Jeune in French. Five vernaculars, one habit of speech, because two neighbours everywhere turned up sharing a forename.

Descriptive names were also unreliable, and knowing that is part of understanding this one. The Oxford English Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland sets Young's class alongside Brown, Short and Thin, names describing the original bearer, and its project leader Richard Coates noted that Short may in fact be an ironic nickname for a tall man. A Young stopped being young almost at once. What survived was not the description but the label.

The earliest records of the name in Scotland put Malmor and Ade Young at Dumbarton in 1271. In 1342 John Young of Dingwall witnessed a charter granted by the Earl of Ross to Reginald, son of the Lord of the Isles: a Young at the top of Highland politics, where the witness list was the legal spine of a land grant. In 1439 Alexander Young was chaplain to the House of the Holy Trinity in Aberdeen, the first firm attachment of the name to the north-east, where it is densest still.

Those entries straddle the moment the byname froze. By the 14th century most English and most Scottish people used surnames, and by 1400 most English families and those of Lowland Scotland had adopted them as hereditary; Wales followed only after unification under Henry VIII in 1536. The Young of 1271 may well have been literally the younger of two men at Dumbarton. The Young of 1439 was simply a Young, and his children would be Youngs whatever their age.

The name was doing the same work elsewhere. Gruffydd Young (1370-1435) was a churchman and close supporter of Owain Glyndwr through the Welsh rebellion, a Young bearing the anglicised form in the country where its cousin Fychan was hardening into Vaughan.

In 1569 Peter Young was recommended by the Regent Moray as assistant preceptor to James VI of Scotland, then three years old. The infant king was the whole of the Stewart succession, and the men chosen to form his mind held a quiet, permanent influence over the reign that followed. Young kept the position and the favour, and was knighted at Whitehall in 1605, two years after his pupil took the English throne as well.

His household rose with him. Sir Peter's first wife was Elizabeth Gibb, a gentlewoman in the household of Anne of Denmark, and several of their large family took up royal patronage. One son, another Peter, formed part of the embassy sent in 1628 to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. The descendants married into numerous prominent families, and a Scots name that began as a way of telling two men apart was now moving through courts and embassies. Patrick Young (1584-1652) made his name in the same generation as a Scottish scholar and librarian: the Young who gets on by his book rather than his sword.

Sir Peter Young was succeeded by his eldest son, Sir James Young, who held extensive grants of land in Ireland. That single inheritance is why the surname is common today across Antrim, Tyrone, Down and Londonderry. If your line reaches back into the north of Ireland rather than into Scotland, this is very probably the door it came through.

The Scottish estates changed hands twice in the century that followed. In 1670 the family sold their original estate at Easter Seton and purchased the lands of Auldbar in Angus. Auldbar went in turn in 1743, bought by William Chalmers of Hazlehead, himself related to the Youngs by marriage, so even the sale kept the property inside the wider kindred.

The Auldbar line kept its stamp long after the land was gone. Peter Young (d. 1988), a descendant of the Youngs of Auldbar, became a distinguished military historian, was awarded the Military Cross three times, and commanded the Ninth Arab Legion, an elite unit of the kingdom of Jordan. In 1968 he founded the Sealed Knot Society, dedicated to the English Civil War and the Scottish Wars of the Covenant.

Rue Castle, near Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders, is the site of a castle once held by the Youngs. The English torched it in 1513 and torched it again in 1545: twice inside thirty-two years, the plain measure of what it meant to hold ground in the Borders.

Auldbar Castle, near Brechin in Angus, was held by the Clan Lyon before it passed to the Youngs, and afterwards to the Chalmers of Balnacraig. Harburn Castle, near West Calder in West Lothian, was built by the Youngs in 1804, late enough to be a country house in castle dress rather than a fortress; it runs today as a hotel.

Those sites map the family's centre of gravity, and the modern distribution follows it. Young sits densest in the north-east (Aberdeenshire and Banff) and across the Borders, reaching through Buchan and Mar, Moray, Angus, Midlothian, Edinburgh, Lanarkshire and Stirling.

Clan Young is an armigerous clan: it has no chief currently recognised by the Court of the Lord Lyon, which regulates Scottish heraldry and arms. That is a legal status, not a verdict on the name's history. A clan or family becomes a legally recognised noble incorporation only once it has a recognised chief, and a name group without one has no equivalent standing in Scots law however long its record runs.

It is worth killing off the idea that Young, as a Lowland name, is a lesser thing than a Highland clan. Sir Crispin Agnew of Lochnaw, Albany Herald Extraordinary at the Court of the Lord Lyon, has shown that the Highland-clan versus Lowland-family split is a 19th-century convention rather than a historical or legal one. An Act of the Scottish Parliament of 1587 speaks of the 'cheiffis and chiftanes of all clannis, alsweill on the hielandis as on the bordouris', then lists Lowland names (Maxwells, Johnstones, Carruthers, Turnbulls) as clans without blinking.

Treat the sept list with more care. Those lists date from the 19th century, when clan societies and tartan manufacturers linked as many surnames as possible to particular clans regardless of any historical connection: Miller was made a sept of MacFarlane, Taylor of Cameron, Mason of Sinclair. The solid ground under Young is the record itself: Dumbarton in 1271, Aberdeen in 1439, the king's schoolroom in 1569.

The most extraordinary bearer of the name was Thomas Young of Milverton, a Quaker prodigy who read fluent Greek at six and had fourteen languages by fourteen. In 1801 he established the wave nature of light with the double-slit experiment. He then made the first decipherment of Egyptian demotic, and devised the measure of a material's stiffness that engineers still call Young's modulus.

Sir James Young Simpson (1811-1870) belongs to the Lowland Young line by his middle name, which preserved the maternal surname in the common Scots way. The Bathgate-born physician discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform in 1847 and became the founding figure of modern anaesthesia and obstetrics. Before him, surgery and childbirth were endured awake.

The scholarly streak did not stop there. Sydney Young (1857-1937) held a British chair in chemistry, and British mathematics carries four Youngs inside two generations: William Henry Young (1863-1942), Grace Chisholm Young (1868-1944), Alfred Young (1873-1940) and Laurence Chisholm Young (1905-2000).

Brigham Young (1801-1877) descended from a 17th-century English-Young emigrant line ultimately of Lowland Scots origin, which makes him the most consequential early carrier of the name across the Atlantic. As second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints he led his people west and founded Salt Lake City in 1847, the moment fixed in memory as 'this is the place'. His brother Phineas Young (1799-1879) was an early convert, and his son Brigham Young Jr. (1836-1903) followed him as a missionary and church leader.

Britain kept its own writing Youngs: Edward Young (1683-1765), poet; Andrew Young (1885-1971), Borders-born Anglican clergyman and author of some of the finest English-language nature poetry of the inter-war period; Francis Brett Young (1884-1954), novelist, poet, playwright and composer at once; and Freddie Young (1902-1998), a great British cinematographer.

The name travelled everywhere the Scots and English did. Cy Young (1867-1955) is in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame; Neil Young (b. 1945) is a Canadian musician of Scots-Young descent; Malcolm Young (1953-2017), Scottish-born, and his brother Angus Young (b. 1955) drove AC/DC out of Australia. Seven and a half centuries after two men at Dumbarton needed telling apart, the word that told them apart is the 19th most common surname in Scotland, the 49th in England and Wales and the 34th in the United States.