Definition
Bastardia is a Latin-derived term from old English law referring to a plea or formal legal objection asserting that a person is illegitimate — that is, born outside of lawful marriage and therefore without the legal status and inheritance rights accorded to legitimate children. The term functioned procedurally: a party raising bastardia was challenging another's claim to property, inheritance, or other legally cognizable rights on the ground that the claimant lacked legitimate birth.
Common Confusion
Bastardia (the plea or procedural objection) is distinct from bastardus (the status of being illegitimate) and from bastardy (the English-language term for the condition of illegitimacy as a legal and social status). These terms are closely related and are sometimes used interchangeably in secondary literature, but in primary legal sources they carry distinct technical meanings. Conflating them can produce misreadings when tracing how a court resolved a dispute: the raising of bastardia initiated a process; it did not itself determine status.
Why It Matters in Research
Bastardia is an archaic procedural term that will appear almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources. Researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus — particularly in records touching on inheritance disputes, land tenure, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction — should be alert to several navigational considerations.
First, jurisdiction over bastardy determinations in medieval England was divided between the common law courts and the ecclesiastical courts. The question of whether a person was a bastard was, as a matter of proof, generally referred to the bishop and the church courts, while the common law courts retained jurisdiction over the downstream property consequences. This division means that bastardia as a plea appears at the intersection of two distinct bodies of law, and researchers may need to consult sources addressing both.
Second, Bracton and Fleta — the foundational treatises cited in Burrill — are the primary textual authorities for bastardia as a formal legal category. Bracton's treatment (around fol. 405 and 416) addresses legitimacy in the context of land claims and the writ system. Fleta, a late thirteenth-century institutional treatise largely derived from Bracton, covers the same ground in its sixth book. Researchers relying on either source should use a reliable modern edition with scholarly apparatus, as both texts present significant interpretive challenges.
Third, bastardia should not be read as equivalent to the broader modern law of illegitimacy. The term is procedural and pleading-specific. It names the objection, not the status itself. The underlying concept — illegitimacy, or bastardus — is the substantive category. Bastardia is what a litigant raised when invoking that status to defeat a legal claim.
Fourth, because the term is Latin and predominantly appears in legal Latin sources, corpus searches should account for variant spellings and abbreviations common to manuscript and early print traditions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry in the available shelf sources, and its treatment is characteristically concise: bastardia is defined as "the plea or objection of illegitimacy," with direct citations to Bracton (fol. 405, 416, c. 19) and Fleta (lib. 6, c. 39). This is accurate as far as it goes, but it leaves several things unsaid.
Burrill does not address the ecclesiastical dimension of bastardy proceedings, which is essential context for understanding when and how the plea would actually operate in practice. He also does not distinguish bastardia as a procedural plea from bastardus as a status designation, a distinction that matters for reading historical sources precisely. No other historical dictionaries in the current Law Mind corpus carry an entry for bastardia, which reflects both its technical character and its obsolescence outside specialist medieval legal history. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a signpost to Bracton and Fleta rather than as a self-sufficient account.
Jurisdictional Note
Bastardia is a term of old English law with no meaningful modern jurisdictional application. Its procedural framework — including the referral of legitimacy questions to ecclesiastical courts — was specific to the medieval English common law system and has no direct counterpart in contemporary Anglo-American practice.