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18.09.42, McDougall, Royal Bastards
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The most famous bastard in European history, William the Conqueror is best known for having overcome not only English opposition to foreign rule, but also the impediment of his illegitimate birth to claim the English throne for himself. Yet as Sara McDougall establishes, the modern world has not fully appreciated the nature of William's predicament. Specifically, William was probably not a bastard at all, at least not in the modern sense of the word. When his enemies coined the epithet "William the Bastard" they did so to insult his parentage, but not for their failure to marry (although they did not). Rather, his mother's humble origins (Herleva was thought to be the daughter of an undertaker) made William an inappropriate heir to any crown. The Norman's experience strikes at the heart of this book's message: contrary to traditional scholarly belief, the medieval world--and especially the medieval church--cared little about birth outside of wedlock until the thirteenth century. What historians have consistently misinterpreted as concern for legitimate birth was instead a dogged insistence that a legitimate marriage existed only when husband and wife were of equivalent status. This is particularly relevant when it comes to an heir's "throneworthiness." It was not sufficient for a king to be the son of a great man with a remarkable patriline; the matriline had to be every bit as impressive to qualify him for the throne.

Illegitimacy as a concept is tied inextricably to a cultural understanding of the conjugal union. Drawing on her extensive background in the history of marriage, McDougall shrewdly reminds her audience that until canonists' debates provoked a formal recognition of matrimony as a sacrament in 1215, there was no clear definition of what constituted a valid marriage. Prior to this, little distinguished a marriage (legitimate or otherwise) from concubinage. This finding is fundamental to a history of illegitimacy: if matrimony was such an ambiguous state, how could there have been any solid understanding of what it meant to be born outside the bonds of marriage? The logical follow-up question is: when early medieval writers spoke of illegitimacy, to what exactly were they referring?

A skilled linguist, McDougall turns first to the language of illegitimacy, beginning with Roman law. She singles out terms typically translated as illegitimate: naturalis, spurius, nothus. Putting them into context, she explains that the intent behind their usage was to raise doubts about the legitimacy of a union in which the mother was a prostitute, a slave, or an adulteress. That the medieval world inherited this concern about the mother's status and lineage can be seen with the eleventh-century invention of the term "bastard." Often thought to derive from bastum, meaning "packsaddle"--apparently, the origin of the phrase "born in the saddle" to designate a child born out of wedlock--it is in fact drawn from bas, meaning "base-born." This etymology accords also with that put forward by the great medieval encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, who defined illegitimacy "according to the status of the parents and particularly a difference in social status between the parents," signaling a distinct cultural distaste for mésalliance.

As Isidore confirms, illegitimacy as a label was employed chiefly to describe a marriage rather than a person. Indeed, the first reference to a person's illegitimacy surfaced only in the 1180s (48). The church was not eager to stigmatize children for the "sins of the father" (11). When clerical authors did condemn children as being illegitimate (that is, born of an inappropriate union), the purpose was to promote monogamy. Aspersions of illegitimate marriage became a moralizing discourse, used both to "whitewash the polygamy of great rulers" (53), and to "delegitimize" rival heirs to the throne by attacking publicly their mothers' lineage. For the historian, determining which "marriage" rulers deemed legitimate is best deciphered through an analysis of children's names: a legitimate wife bore sons with dynastic names, like Pippin or Charles (80). The clergy was not alone in wielding the discourse of legitimacy as a political weapon. Usurpers legitimized their rule through marriage to women of the former ruling family. This was true of the Capetians as well as the Normans in England. Once again, the practice underscores the centrality of the matriline: marrying into the royal family was enough to make a ruler admissible in the eyes of the people.

Refocusing the lens on the matriline helps us to understand better some of the more baffling "dynastic soap operas" (95) of the medieval period. The explanation for Henry I's decision to name his daughter Matilda as heir is often simplified by reference to the death of her legitimate brother, William, in the White Ship disaster of 1120. Without a male heir, Henry I turned to his daughter. That narrative is not entirely true, however. Henry I was an astonishingly fertile king, with so many "illegitimate" children that historians have had some difficulty trying to produce a definitive count (twenty-one would seem to be a conservative estimate). His oldest son was in fact Robert of Gloucester, and one might easily believe that regardless of whether his parents were married, he had a better claim to the throne as a man and as Henry's son than either Matilda or her cousin Stephen. Yet Henry chose Matilda because, as he reminded his subjects, she inherited a combined lineage that included both Norman kings on her father's side and Anglo-Saxon kings on her mother's. How better to persuade a conquered people to accept foreign rule? No matter who Robert's mother proved to be, he "had no such cachet" (127). What is perhaps more fascinating is Stephen's objection to Matilda as claimant: he reasoned that she was illegitimate: not because her parents were improperly married, but because her mother, Matilda of Scotland, had taken vows as a nun before she married Henry, adding yet another dimension to our discussion of medieval bastardy.

Drawing on the history of the Umayyads of Andalusia, McDougall demonstrates the risks of matrilineage to a reigning king, hinting at why the practice may have eventually fallen into abeyance. Despite marriage to women from prominent families, the Umayyad rulers deliberately pursued a succession strategy that excluded the children of those marriages. Instead, they designated as heirs sons born to slave mistresses in order to stave off the political ambitions of their wives' families. An heir born to two leading families made the king unnecessary and paved the way for seizure of the throne. Admittedly, the Umayyads were not the only European rulers with curious patterns of succession. To further muddy the waters, McDougall observes that an heir's throneworthiness before the thirteenth century was complicated also by the absence of primogeniture: "first born did not necessarily mean first in line at this early date" (109). Rather, fathers designated as heir the son they believed best incorporated the values and needs of kingship. Others adopted the Byzantine approach to succession, choosing as heir sons "born to the purple" (porphyrogeniture), that is, the first son born to a king after his coronation.

The story of illegitimacy has customarily cast a dark cloud on the Catholic church. Yet, as McDougall explains, popes did not take the lead in developing ideas about illegitimacy, particularly as a bar to inheritance or succession. Rather, they got involved only in response to requests from injured parties. Alexander III's development of putative marriage as a doctrine establishes just how anxious he was to secure explicit recognition of legitimacy for children who became casualties of their parents' marital strategies. If a child had been born to an illegitimate union, but one that had been entered into in good faith, the child remained legitimate even after the union had been dissolved. Throughout the Middle Ages, the church maintained a firm sense of a sacred/secular divide, abstaining from remarking on the rights of children to inherit secular lands or titles. The only example in which the pope crossed this line was when Pope Innocent III devised legitimation by papal rescript in order to secure the legitimacy of King Philip Augustus's children. Even in this instance, he was prompted to action by political intrigue: Philip hoped to goad Innocent into annulling his previous marriage to jilted wife Ingeborg. Having long fought to uphold the marriage, Innocent refused to be backed into a corner for the good of the French succession. Instead, he innovated by declaring the children legitimate by necessity (because Philip needed an heir). Innocent soon realized that he had created a "disturbing precedent, one that challenged the balance of power between papacy and secular authority" (231). Thus, the pope and his successors firmly maintained that the power to legitimate a king's subjects belonged to the king, not the pope.

With the hardening of the definition of valid marriage, we see the rise of illegitimacy in the modern sense of the word. The mid-thirteenth-century French epic poem Raoul de Cambrai witnessed the first instance in which the term bastard was applied to a child born to two noble parents, heralding the end of this transformation. And yet, even at this point, illegitimacy was not the iron bar to kingship, or even sainthood that historians have come to understand. Born to an illegal marriage, King Ferdinand III (d. 1252) was king of not one, but eventually three kingdoms--Castile, Léon and Galicia---and popularly acclaimed El Santo. His experience might be an illustration of "Iberian exceptionalism"; but it also raises doubts as to just how deeply entrenched was the idea that the right marriage privileged some and deprived others.

Somewhat unexpectedly, McDougall's eminently readable and thought-provoking book is also very feminist. McDougall reveals how the misogynistic assumptions of modern-day historians have gotten in the way of understanding medieval dynasties. Historians have preferred to see queens merely as vessels, while medieval kings and their subjects instead welcomed them as scions of great families and astute political partners whose own family connections were vital to successful rule. McDougall is not a lone wolf in this respect: her work aligns with recent studies in family history. Amy Livingstone and Anita Guerreau-Jalabert have both repeatedly pointed out that historians' "use of the term 'lineage' and their insistence that medieval people privileged the patriline" is a better reflection of modern than medieval practices. [1] This also reinforces Susan Mosher Stuard's observation that under Roman law, "Fathers did not pass their status to offspring; mothers did." [2] While Stuard was addressing the children of slaves, it is hard to understand a logic that upholds the matriline only when it can be applied punitively.

McDougall's book will be eagerly welcomed by admirers of David D'Avray's Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage, 860-1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In discussing the scandalous history of royal divorces, D'Avray raises many questions about heirs and illegitimacy that McDougall proceeds to answer. The only inconvenience to be flagged with McDougall's fine work is that there are numerous Latin and French phrases left untranslated. For most of its readers, this will not present any problems; for those of us hoping to assign passages to our undergraduate classes, this will present some obstacles. Nonetheless, this is a trivial concern that in no way detracts from the value of this useful and engrossing book.

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Notes:

1. Amy Livingstone, Out of Love for my Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000-1200 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 159; Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, "La parenté dans l'Europe médiévale et moderne: À propos d'une synthèse récente," L'Homme 29 (1989): 69-93.

2. Susan Mosher Stuard, "Single by Law and Custom," in Singlewomen in the European Past 1250-1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 114.