The Inheritance Loophole Nobody Talks About: Bastardy

Medieval inheritance laws were particularly harsh toward bastards, for whom a claim to their father’s villein land was forbidden by the laws of England. A court of one manor summarily rejected a claimant’s appeal, stating that he was bastard “to whom no villein-land can descend.”

But in practice, communities and courts were much more flexible in their enforcement of illegitimacy — when it came to land disputes, at least. A Yorkshire court ruled that a child conceived during a private marriage vow (but before the church-door agreement) was legitimate by virtue of local custom and could inherit the father’s land without question. Meanwhile, to avoid an unwelcome succession dispute, a number of manors simply allowed for “bastard” heirs to hold their father’s land for life if no other heir was available. Even a child born of adultery was legally the husband’s “by the law of England,” one contemporary judge declared cheerfully — “whoso bulleth my cow, the calf is mine.”

The same impulse underlay similar rules elsewhere: a lord’s interest in steady, paying tenants outweighed any desire to enforce strict moral standards, while the villagers needed the land to continue to be farmed and to change hands smoothly in the next generation. Wherever the rules on illegitimacy threatened the continuity of a working farm, they tended to bend.

For a story involving a secret or disputed parentage, this is reassuring — for the characters, if not necessarily for the plot. The “no inheritance for bastards” rule existed, but so did a long tradition of finding reasons why it shouldn’t apply.

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