Before we get started, isn’t bastard a nasty thing to call a person? 

It’s turned into an all-purpose insult, yes, but it’s still better than illegitimate child, which people use if they’re trying to be polite but which implies that some kids are legal and justified and some aren’t and maybe we should just ship ‘em into the outer darkness and be done with them. So yeah, I’ll go with bastard, in spite of its drawbacks.

 

How much can we actually know about them?

Less than I’d like. Probably less than you’d like. In an article about unmarried mothers in medieval England–called, surprisingly enough, “Unwed Mothers in Medieval England,” Becky R. Lee says,  “I have a confession to make. The claim of any historian to uncover the experiences of, and attitudes towards, any group from the past is at best hyperbole. When it is a group of women, and medieval women at that, the claim and the information is bound to be full of gaps.”

Ditto bastard children. 

Lee’s topic isn’t identical to mine, but it’s close enough: if you don’t have mothers, you don’t get children. I’ve drawn on her article heavily but managed to lose the site where it’s most easily available. Basically the link above proves it exists but– Um. Yeah. Sorry.

 

The medieval period

William the Conqueror–the big bad Norman who conquered England in 1066–wasthe  famously known as William the Bastard, and the chronicler Orderic Vitalis seems to have hinted (notice the two weasel words there, seems and hinted?) that William’s parents not having been married was less important than in his mother having the wrong pedigree. She was the child of either a tanner or an undertaker. How unseemly can you get?

In William’s time and place, a bastard child could inherit and could even rule. What mattered was being born to parents (preferably two, but William made do with one) who had power, money, titles, ancestry, and– Hey, you know how it is: the aristocrats have ancestry; the rest of us just hatched somehow. 

I started with William because it’s easiest to find information on the bastard children of kings and aristocrats. They left a record and historians and pseudohistorians have a fascination with them. But what about ordinary people? We can’t all be the bastards of kings and dukes.

In the early medieval period, the attitude toward ordinary bastards was linked to the way marriage worked: couples didn’t have to marry in the church or even just outside the door. Some did, but others married more casually: on the road, at the pub, at someone’s house, in bed. They also didn’t need witnesses, their families’ permission, or a priest. They didn’t have to throw a party or wear clothes they’d never use again. If the two people agreed to marry and exchanged a gift of some sort–often a ring–it was done, which is why marrying in bed was not only possible but convenient. 

This had a downside: it made it hard to prove you were married. Or weren’t married. So the line between married and not married wasn’t as clear as it is today.

The secular custom of trothplight (the first recorded use is from sometime around 1300) was more public: a couple exchanged vows before friends and family, after which they were considered married. 

When there was a public betrothal, it was acceptable for couples to live in the same house before the wedding. Ditto while the terms of a marriage were being hammered out. Presumably they had sex, although they didn’t let me know so I can’t say for sure. One writer describes marriage in this period as a process, not a one-time event. 

If the line between the married and the unmarried was hazy, so too was the line between bastard and not-bastard.

Don’t you just love it when I take something that used to be clear and murk it up a bit?

 

Inheritance

It’s not until the twelfth century that children born outside of any marriage were excluded from various kinds of inheritance. I would’ve assumed that shift was driven by the church, but according to one article (and again I’ve lost the link; sorry, I’m more than usually disorganized this week), it was initially driven by court battles over inheritance in which disinherited and very grumpy descendants who’d been born on the right side of the bed presented judges with bits of Church doctrine to back up their claim that the descendants born on the wrong side had no right to inherit. 

Still, the Church wasn’t irrelevant. Starting in the eleventh century, it began trying to take control of marriage and eliminate adultery and concubinage by limiting the rights of bastards. It now defined a legitimate child as one born to a couple who were free to marry and who’d married publicly and formally. 

Don’t take that to mean that everything changed at once, though. For one thing, Church and state had separate courts, and Church law and civil law weren’t necessarily in tune on this, so the two court systems might rule differently. Take a couple who had a child and then married. To the Church, that made the child no longer a bastard as long as the parents were free to marry when it was conceived. To the state, it changed nothing.

Another factor slowing the change was public opinion. Especially in a small community, people would have strong opinions about what was and was not a marriage and who was and was not in one, and those opinions would vary from place to place and time to time.

 

The economics of bastardy

Central to all of this was the cost of bringing up a child. At least among the poor, who were the vast majority of the population, it took two people to raise a child and it was a struggle even then. A single woman with a child would be desperate. In fact, a single woman would be desperate even without a child. Marriage integrated her into the economy, and many single (or somewhat single, given the haziness of the dividing line) women who had children went on to marry. 

Still, the birth of a bastard child would be a matter for either a manorial court, where the lord of the manor presided, or a Church court, and either court would demand to know who the father was. He’d have to contribute to the child’s support, and sometimes support the mother through her pregnancy and provide her with a dowry. If he couldn’t be found, his family might be called on. 

And if he wasn’t known, if he and his family had no support to give, if any number of other things went wrong? Then it came down to community support. It wouldn’t have been much but it was better than nothing. That support might come from the parish, a monastery, a guild, or a town, and at least one historian raises the possibility that the financial burden on an already poor community turned communities against the mothers, and/or their children.

Some babies were abandoned at the door of a church or hospital, but others were raised by their mothers–with, I’d speculate, the support of the women’s families–or more rarely their fathers. There are instances of fathers leaving bequests to their bastard children in their wills, especially (in case you were about to get all sentimental about that) when they had no living non-bastard children. 

 

Penance & Punishment

Having unauthorized sex was also a matter for the church and manorial courts–or it was if you got caught. A manorial court could levy a leyrwite, a fine for fornication, and these were more common and the fines were higher during hard times, when community resources were stretched thin and an extra child would be a burden. In some cases, the woman’s landholding was seized and she was expelled from the community. After the plague, though, when the population was depleted and an extra child would be welcome, no matter how it came into the world, fines were smaller and less common.

Predictably, more women than men were charged with fornication in manorial courts–men aren’t in the habit of getting pregnant and have a long history of saying, “Who, me?” when confronted with a pregnancy taking place in someone else’s body–and most of the women fined were poor. About a quarter of them later married. Others became trapped in a cycle of poverty, fines, repeated charges, and presumably sexual exploitation. Some of the charitable institutions that supported unwed mothers and their children excluded these women. They weren’t the deserving poor.

The Church went in not only for fines but also public penance–things like walking at the head of the Sunday procession or around the church in their underwear–and these sometimes landed on men but more commonly on women. One of the writers I read speculates that these rituals could’ve been a way for the punished to be accepted back into the community. Others see them simply as public humiliation. 

 

Names

You can’t play spot-the-bastard by looking at people’s names. Children whose fathers recognized them often took their father’s name; others took their mother’s. Fitz, as in Fitzwilliam, isn’t the mark of a bastard ancestor. It simply means son of, although many a royal bastard did become a Fitz, which is why it’s often assumed that it marks a bastard birth.

 

The late medieval period

By the time we get into the late fourteenth century, a bastard child could no longer inherit, but there were ways around that. Take Sir William Argentine, a bastard son whose father had entailed most of his estates, cutting out his non-bastard daughter and her two entirely respectable children. Along with the property went the right to serve as cup-bearer to Henry IV. Everybody involved went to court and William won.

If you’re not convinced yet that Fitz didn’t signify bastardy, William’s opponent in the lawsuit was his half-sister’s husband, whose last name was Fitzwaryn.

As for entailment, let’s skip the details: it allowed the person in possession of a property to control how it was distributed after his death–and I suspect we do mean his there. Women’s hold on property was rare and tenuous.

William went on to sit in parliament as a knight of the shire (they talked like that back then; trust me, I’m old enough to remember) and serve as sheriff for Norfolk and Suffolk. In other words, bastard birth or not, he was screamingly respectable.

 

A quick dash through a few more centuries

Once we get into the sixteenth century, we find laws like the Acte for Setting of the Poore on Work, and for the Avoiding of Ydleness (they spelled like that too), which in theory punished both parents but–well, you know how it is, what with fathers being unlikely to get pregnant and all. And since walking around the church in your underwear had gone out of fashion, it allowed the mother’s name to be announced  publicly instead. 

Shaming a woman for having had sex hadn’t gone out of fashion. 

After 1609, a mother could be sent to a house of correction for a year unless she gave security–in other words, money–for her bastard child.  Public opinion turned on women with bastard children if they became dependent on the parish, which was now more likely because when Henry VIII chased the Catholic Church into exile, it took with it its network of charitable support, however thin and patchwork it had been.

You notice a pattern here? Punishment fell on women who didn’t have the money to support their children. Well-connected bastards would be okay if their mothers’ families accepted them, or if their fathers’ did. Charles II’s bastards did very well, thanks. They were given titles and good marriages were organized for them. A bastard child brought up in a wealthy family might not be on equal footing with the other children but she or he wouldn’t be out on the street.

Or a wealthy man might pay some other man to marry a woman he’d made pregnant. If she wasn’t of his class, who was she to turn her nose up at a milliner or a tailor?

Poor women, though? As a measure of the desperation they faced, infanticide became common enough that in 1624 an Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children was introduced . A woman could face execution if she concealed the dead body of a child she’d given birth to. 

With all that said, bastard children were less common than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Skip to 1732 (that takes us into the Georgian era) and under the Bastard Child Act any man charged with being the father of a bastard child would be imprisoned until he agreed to pay the parish if he failed to shoulder the cost of raising the child. That was entered in the parish record and was called a bastardy bond. 

How would they know who the father was? It was the woman’s responsibility to name him. My best guess is that the threat of getting no support at all ensured that most would. 

In the eighteenth century, half of all conceptions happened outside of marriage, although only one in five births were recorded that way. That argues for a lot of hurried marriages. Under common law, those children wouldn’t have been able to inherit but I’d bet on a surprising number of premature children being born. And again, that workaround, entailment, was still available to let a father settle property on a child–as long as he had enough money to pay a lawyer, which narrows the field considerably.

Somewhere along in here we find people using euphemisms like base-born children, natural children, or by-blows for the bastard children of respectable men. 

 

Nineteenth  century

The 1833 Poor Law Commission Report on Bastardy argued that the existing poor laws were encouraging women to have bastard children. Parish relief was too easy and too expensive. (The arguments never seem to change, do they?) Parishes were being saddled with children they had to maintain. And if economics weren’t enough to win the argument, religion and morality went into high gear. Immorality and poverty became more or less the same thing. 

What was needed? Why, punishment. No one, male or female, who was able-bodied should get financial support–they either worked or went to the workhouse, which at its best was deliberately harsh.  

The 1834 Poor Laws did all that and also absolved fathers of any responsibility for bastard children.  

The mothers were solely responsible. Since babies don’t take well to being tucked in a drawer somewhere so that their mothers can work a twelve-hour day–well, if they couldn’t manage job and child, into the workhouse with them. What did they expect when they got themselves pregnant? 

You now find talk about the “vicious mother” and the “great offence against the sacrament of marriage.” The Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords denounced “the lazy, worthless, and ignominious class who pursue their self-gratification at the expense of the earnings of the industrious part of the community.” 

In case the picture isn’t grim enough, abortion became illegal in 1861. 

Enter baby farming: people would place ads offering to find a home for babies in return for some payment from their mothers. Some of the children died of malnutrition, neglect, or abuse, which in an age of high infant mortality hardly draw attention. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, legislation began to regulate both adoption and foster care. 

In 1926, after-the-fact legitimization was allowed. Sorry–I wasn’t going to use that word. De-bastardization? Call it what you like, it became legally possible. In 1969, a bastard child was allowed to inherit if her or his parents died without a will.