Definition
A Latin and Law Latin term used in medieval and early English legal texts to denote a bastard — a person born outside of lawful marriage and therefore excluded, at common law, from the legal rights and privileges attached to legitimate birth. The term appears in pleading, in records of ecclesiastical proceedings, and in treatises on status and inheritance where the question of legitimacy bore directly on the capacity to inherit real property, hold certain offices, or claim the rights of a free subject.
In its legal operation, bastardus described a status, not merely a condition of birth. That status carried concrete legal consequences: at common law, a bastard was said to be filius nullius — the child of no one — and thus stood outside the ordinary structure of descent and distribution. The bastard could not inherit from a parent, could not be an heir in a feudal sense, and in early law had limited standing in certain proceedings that required proof of free and legitimate birth.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Bastard" in modern English is used both as a term for a person born to unmarried parents and as a general-purpose pejorative or term of rough address, with the original legal meaning largely displaced in everyday speech.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's defines "bastard" as "a natural child; a child begotten and born out of wedlock; an illegitimate child," and notes secondary meanings relating to things spurious or inferior in kind.
The gap between common and legal usage is significant in a research context. When bastardus appears in a legal record or treatise, it is not merely a descriptor of parentage — it is a term of legal status with procedural and substantive consequences. The common modern meaning carries little of that weight. A researcher encountering bastardus in a medieval roll or an equity pleading must read it as a status classification with specific effects on capacity, inheritance, and proof, not simply as a notation about the circumstances of birth.
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Common Confusion
Bastardus is sometimes loosely equated with filius nullius as if they were interchangeable labels for the same condition. They are related but distinct: filius nullius is a legal conclusion describing the effect of bastardy in the law of descent (the bastard has, in law, no father), while bastardus describes the status itself. Similarly, researchers should not conflate the common-law treatment of bastardus with later statutory reforms. Legislation progressively softened the consequences of illegitimacy, and equating the term's historical meaning with its later or modern legal context will produce anachronistic readings.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is a term encountered almost exclusively in historical sources. Researchers working in medieval English law, early modern equity, ecclesiastical court records, or treatise literature will find bastardus appearing in Latin pleadings, writs, and Bracton-era texts. Several navigational points deserve attention.
First, jurisdiction over the question of bastardy was divided between the common law courts and the ecclesiastical courts in medieval and early modern England. The common law courts determined the legal consequences of bastardy for property and inheritance; the ecclesiastical courts had jurisdiction to determine the fact of legitimacy or illegitimacy itself. A legal record touching bastardus may therefore sit in either archive, and the researcher must be alert to which body was being called upon and for what purpose.
Second, the term's appearance in treatises like Fleta — specifically cited by Burrill — is important for dating and context. Fleta is a late thirteenth-century treatise, and bastardus as used there reflects the fully developed common-law doctrine of that period. Usage in earlier sources may carry somewhat different connotations or procedural settings.
Third, the consequences attached to bastardus changed substantially over time. Statutes of distribution, legitimation doctrines, and eventually wholesale legislative reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressively dismantled the filius nullius framework. When tracking a term across the corpus chronologically, the researcher must account for these shifts or risk reading later leniency back into earlier sources.
Fourth, in equity and ecclesiastical sources, the precise framing of bastardus versus spurius or naturalis filius may indicate different procedural postures or different grounds for the illegitimacy finding. These distinctions matter for understanding what a given record is actually establishing.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is spare but accurate. It identifies bastardus as Law Latin for bastard in old English law and cites two passages in Fleta — book 3, chapter 10, and book 6, chapter 39 — which remain the appropriate primary-source anchors for the term in its medieval English legal context.
Burrill does not develop the substantive legal doctrine, and no other historical dictionary entry is available in the present source set. Researchers seeking fuller doctrinal treatment should consult Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae and Fleta directly, both of which address bastardy as a status with detailed attention to proof, pleading, and effect on inheritance. Later treatise writers including Blackstone address the common law of bastardyunder the heading of "persons" and provide the bridge between the medieval Latin sources and the early modern English framework.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is the ecclesiastical dimension and the gradual statutory erosion of the doctrine. Neither aspect can be reconstructed from the dictionary entry alone.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term bastardus and the common-law doctrine it reflects are distinctly English in origin, tied to the feudal structure of land tenure and descent. Scottish law, canon law, and civil law systems treated illegitimacy differently, particularly regarding legitimation by subsequent marriage — a remedy the common law of England notoriously refused to recognize. Researchers working in comparative or ecclesiastical sources should not assume that bastardus carries the same legal weight across jurisdictions.
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