Definition
Legitimitas is a Latin term drawn from medieval English legal usage, signifying the condition of being born lawfully in wedlock — that is, legitimacy as a legal status — as opposed to bastardia (bastardy), which denoted birth outside of lawful marriage. The term names the status itself, not the act or procedure by which it was established or challenged. In classical and medieval legal Latin, legitimitas carried the root meaning of conformity to lex (law), and its application to birth status reflected the centrality of lawful parentage to inheritance rights, feudal succession, and personal legal capacity.
Common Confusion
Legitimitas should not be conflated with legitimatio, which denotes the process or act of legitimation — the legal mechanism by which a person born outside of wedlock was subsequently granted the status of legitimate issue, whether by subsequent marriage of the parents, royal patent, or act of parliament. Legitimitas is the condition; legitimatio is the conferral of that condition upon one who lacked it. Historical sources occasionally use these terms loosely, and a researcher encountering either in a Latin document should check which sense is operative.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-modern English legal records — plea rolls, ecclesiastical court records, inquisitions post mortem, and feudal documents — will encounter legitimitas as a technical term of art, not merely a descriptive Latin phrase. Several practical points bear noting.
First, jurisdiction divided the issue. Temporal courts determined the consequences of legitimacy or its absence (inheritance, tenure, wardship), but the question of whether a person was in fact legitimate was routinely referred to the ecclesiastical courts for determination. This divided competence means that a dispute over legitimitas may generate records in two separate court systems, and the temporal record alone will not tell the full story.
Second, the English common law rule on legitimacy was famously strict: a child born outside of marriage was a filius nullius regardless of subsequent marriage of the parents, whereas canon law recognized legitimation by subsequent marriage. This divergence — visible in the Statute of Merton (1236) controversy — means that the term legitimitas may carry a slightly different operative meaning depending on whether a document originates in a temporal or ecclesiastical context.
Third, for corpus researchers, legitimitas will appear primarily in law Latin sources rather than in vernacular legal texts. It is unlikely to appear in Year Books in this form, but it will appear in treatises, formularies, and the kind of Fleta-era scholastic legal writing that engages with Roman and canon law categories. Researchers using early printed law dictionaries should note that the term drops from practical usage as law Latin falls out of regular use in English courts, and later dictionaries may not carry it at all.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry: legitimitas denotes legitimacy — the condition of lawful birth — as against bastardia, citing Fleta, book 5, chapter 5, section 7. Fleta, the late thirteenth-century English legal treatise, is a reliable primary source for this usage, and Burrill's citation is sound.
What Burrill's entry does not address is the doctrinal tension between the common law and canon law conceptions of what legitimitas required, nor the procedural mechanism by which the status was litigated. The entry treats the term definitionally rather than doctrinally. Researchers should not rely on Burrill alone to understand the substantive law governing legitimacy in the period when the term was in active use; Bracton and Fleta themselves, along with secondary scholarship on ecclesiastical jurisdiction in medieval England, are necessary supplements.
No other source dictionaries in the current corpus carry this term. The absence of legitimitas from later English law dictionaries reflects the gradual displacement of law Latin from English legal writing following the various acts against Latin in court proceedings, not any obsolescence of the underlying concept, which survived in English law under the vernacular term "legitimacy."