Definition
A legitimate son; a son born in lawful wedlock. The term belongs to medieval canon and common law and was used to distinguish a child born after the marriage of his parents from one born before — the latter being a bastard who might later be legitimated, and the former being mulieratus, legitimate by birth.
The term gains its practical significance in contrast to bastardus, and the distinction between the two was critical in disputes over inheritance. Under English common law, a child born before marriage could not be legitimated by the subsequent marriage of his parents (the rule contra to canon law), while a mulieratus — a child born after marriage — was legitimate from birth and entitled to inherit.
Common Confusion
MULIERATUS vs. LEGITIMATUS vs. BASTARD LEGITIMATED: These three categories are easily conflated in historical sources. A mulieratus is legitimate because he was born in lawful wedlock — no external act of legitimation is required. A bastard legitimated (sometimes called a bastard mulier or spurious child subsequently legitimated) is one born before his parents married, who in canon law and in some civil-law jurisdictions could be legitimated by the subsequent marriage. English common law generally refused to recognize legitimation by subsequent marriage, creating a hard distinction between mulieratus and any form of post-legitimation. Researchers reading ecclesiastical or civil-law sources must be careful not to assume the English common-law rule applies.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern legal sources — treatises, year books, and ecclesiastical court records — and is essentially absent from modern legal writing. Researchers encountering mulieratus in historical materials are almost certainly dealing with an inheritance or legitimacy dispute, often one touching the conflict between canon law (which legitimated children by subsequent marriage) and English common law (which did not).
The term is a marker for a specific doctrinal battleground. When you see mulieratus alongside bastardus in a text, look for the surrounding discussion of the *per subsequens matrimonium* rule — the canon law doctrine that later marriage legitimated prior-born children. English common law's rejection of that doctrine is one of the most-discussed points of divergence between ecclesiastical and temporal courts in the medieval period, and mulieratus is the vocabulary through which that conflict was expressed.
Corpus connections: Sources referencing mulieratus will frequently lead to Bracton, Glanvil, and Littleton on legitimacy and descent, as well as to ecclesiastical court proceedings where the per subsequens matrimonium rule was actively applied. Cross-reference any occurrence with surrounding discussion of dower, inheritance of real property, and the rules of primogeniture, as the legitimate/illegitimate distinction was economically consequential precisely in those contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence — define mulieratus identically and minimally: "a legitimate son," with Black's citing Glanvil as the authority. The uniformity signals that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, the term had already passed into pure historical reference; no living dispute required a richer definition.
What the historical dictionaries omit is the operational context that gives the term meaning: its role as the counterpart to bastardus in inheritance disputes, and the specific doctrinal conflict it embodied between canon law and English common law. Rapalje & Lawrence in particular offer nothing beyond the bare gloss. Researchers relying solely on these entries risk missing the term's function entirely.
The Glanvil citation in Black's is the thread worth pulling. Ranulf de Glanvill's *Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Angliae* (c. 1187–1189) is among the earliest systematic treatments of English common law and addresses legitimacy and inheritance in terms that directly produce vocabulary like mulieratus. Bracton's later elaboration built on Glanvil's foundation and remains the richer source for understanding how the term operated in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs to English medieval common law and has no meaningful application in modern common-law jurisdictions. In civil-law and canon-law systems, the concept of legitimacy by subsequent marriage was recognized and the opposing category (bastard legitimated) existed alongside mulieratus, making the civil-law treatment of the underlying doctrine substantially different from English practice.