The Legitimacy of Bastards: The Place of Illegitimate Children in Later Medieval England

An in-depth look at the lives of illegitimate children and their parents in England in the later Middle Ages.

For the nobility and gentry in later medieval England, land was a source of wealth and status. Their marriages were arranged with this in mind, and it is not surprising that so many of them had mistresses and illegitimate children. John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, married at the age of twenty to a ten-year-old granddaughter of Edward I, had at least eight bastards and a complicated...