Definition
Mulierty is the legal status of being born in lawful wedlock — that is, of being legitimate issue. The term derives from the Latin mulier (wife or lawful wife) and describes the condition of a child whose birth gives rise to full inheritance rights as a recognized heir. It stands as the direct opposite of bastardy, which denotes illegitimate birth. In old English law, mulierty was not merely a descriptive label but a legally operative status determining property succession, particularly in disputes over descent and heirship.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The condition of being a mulier; state of being born in lawful wedlock.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Condition of being a mulier; position of one born in lawful wedlock.
The common and legal definitions are functionally identical here, but the common-language versions strip away the operative legal weight. In legal contexts, mulierty was not simply a personal status — it was a determinative fact in property disputes, capable of being pleaded, proven, and adjudicated. The dictionary gloss tells you what it is; the law told you what it did.
Common Confusion
Mulierty is sometimes conflated with legitimacy in the general sense, but the two are not synonymous in all historical contexts. Legitimacy could be conferred after birth through subsequent marriage of the parents (legitimation) in civil and canon law traditions. Mulierty, by contrast, was narrowly tied to birth during lawful marriage — being born e muliere (of a wife), not ex concubina (of a concubine). A child might be legitimated under church or civil law yet not technically mulier puisné in the strict common law sense. The distinction mattered acutely in English inheritance disputes where the common law refused to recognize subsequent marriage as curing illegitimacy at birth, a position that diverged sharply from canon law.
Why It Matters in Research
Mulierty appears almost exclusively in historical English common law sources and is essentially obsolete in modern legal usage. Researchers encountering the term will find it concentrated in materials on inheritance, descent, and the law of bastardy from the medieval period through the eighteenth century.
Several research traps deserve attention. First, mulierty frequently appears in tandem with the companion term mulier puisné — a specific doctrine describing the legitimate younger son who could displace a bastard elder brother from inheritance once the parents subsequently married. These are related but distinct concepts, and sources do not always distinguish them cleanly. Second, the Latin phrase e muliere (of a wife) appears in Coke and other early authorities as the definitional anchor; readers unfamiliar with the Latin may miss the technical precision the term is carrying. Third, the term sits at the intersection of common law, canon law, and civil law traditions that resolved legitimacy differently, meaning that a single source's treatment of mulierty may reflect one tradition without acknowledging the others.
For corpus researchers, mulierty is a reliable signal that a document is engaged with inheritance disputes, questions of descent, or the law of bastardy. It rarely appears in isolation — look for accompanying treatment of bastard eigne (the elder bastard), mulier puisné, descent and heirship rules, and the role of the church courts in legitimacy determinations.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are in close agreement. Black's (both editions), Burrill, and Rapalje & Lawrence all define mulierty as the state or condition of lawful issue and identify it as the opposite of bastardy. All cite Coke on Littleton at or near folio 352 as the authoritative source. Burrill adds the French root (mulerie), providing a useful linguistic anchor. Rapalje & Lawrence offers the most functionally specific gloss — "lawful issue, because begotten e muliere (of a wife), and not ex concubiná" — which better captures why the term carried legal weight rather than simply naming a status.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the doctrinal machinery surrounding mulierty: how it was pleaded, how courts resolved conflicts between the common law's rigid birth-in-wedlock rule and canon law's more flexible legitimation-by-subsequent-marriage approach, or the specific inheritance scenarios (bastard eigne versus mulier puisné) in which the status became decisive. Researchers relying on dictionary entries alone will have the label but not the legal context.
Jurisdictional Note
Mulierty is a doctrine of English common law and is not a term of art in modern American, Scottish, or civil law jurisdictions. American law absorbed legitimacy principles from English common law but largely abandoned the specific vocabulary of mulierty and bastard eigne as inheritance law was reformed by statute through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.