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Concept
Legitimacy (family law)
Summary
Legitimacy, in traditional Western common law, is the status of a child born to parents who are legally married to each other, and of a child conceived before the parents obtain a legal divorce. Conversely, illegitimacy, also known as bastardy, has been the status of a child born outside marriage, such a child being known as a bastard, a love child, a natural child, or illegitimate. In Scots law, the terms natural son and natural daughter carry the same implications.
The importance of legitimacy has decreased substantially in Western developed countries since the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the declining influence of Christian churches (especially Catholic and Anglican/Lutheran) in family and social life.
Births outside marriage now represent majorities in multiple countries of Western Europe and the Americas, as well as in many former European colonies. In many Western-influenced cultures, stigma based on parents' marital status, and use of the word bastard, are now widely considered dated.
England's Statute of Merton (1235) stated, regarding illegitimacy: "He is a bastard that is born before the marriage of his parents." This definition also applied to situations when a child's parents could not marry, as when one or both were already married or when the relationship was incestuous.
The Poor Law of 1576 formed the basis of English bastardy law. Its purpose was to punish a bastard child's mother and putative father, and to relieve the parish from the cost of supporting mother and child. "By an act of 1576 (18 Elizabeth C. 3), it was ordered that bastards should be supported by their putative fathers, though bastardy orders in the quarter sessions date from before this date. If the genitor could be found, then he was put under very great pressure to accept responsibility and to maintain the child."
Under English law, a bastard could not inherit real property and could not be legitimized by the subsequent marriage of father to mother.
Official source
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