By John Findlater

There is a tendency to have preconceptions (if such a word is allowable here) about illegitimacy. Peter Laslett in his book ‘The World We Have Lost‘¹ cites the error of Gregory King, the seventeenth century writer and statistician. he believed, like everyone else, that London was a dreadful place, where decent standards were defied. We are certain that he was wrong here in one respect, as to illegitimacy … up to 1910 London had one of the lowest levels. Are we therefore to expect the Warton rural story to be all “wanton wenches and wayward wives, peasants and illicit sex”²?

In the Warton Parish Registers of Baptisms only 46³ entries, for the whole century, were identified as concerned with illegitimate births. Reference to three more illegitimate persons is to be found in the Burial Registers. No further information, such as their ages, is available about these three. I have not found them in the Registers of Baptism.

In 12 of the 46 instances the baptismal record is of a son or daughter of a named woman when, in normal circumstances, it was the father’s name which was recorded. For example, on October 10th, 1652 “Maria fillia Allis Hardie de Carnford [Carnforth]” is recorded. The presumption is that such children are illegitimate, but it is not absolutely certain. On June 13th, 1669 there is a record of “Richard s. of Mary d. of Tho: Relph of W [Warton]” which makes the presumption even more likely. Somehow the short entry on February 12th, 1656, “Thos: s of Ann Wilson a stranger” makes one anxious to know what happened to this little mite.

But a rather different deduction might be made about the entry on April 13th, 1650 for “Jone fillius widdow Watson de Yealand Redman“. The most likely explanation here is that the boy was a posthumous son. In the Register of Burials is to be found “Richard Watson of Yeal.Storrs” on February 16th, 1650, that is to say three months earlier. It seems likely that this was the father.

There are two baptismal entries in 1647 which are puzzling:

6 June Agnes fillia Athera Barrow de Silverdall
20 June Elline fillia Athera Barrow de Silverdall
Were they twin girls, daughters of the same person (presumed to be female), whose baptisms were two weeks apart? Perhaps for some reason Elline was not well enough to be baptised at the same time as her sister. They may not have been twins, but sisters with a considerable age difference between them.

For the remaining thirty children there can be no doubt of their status as illegitimate. Twelve are labelled “spurius” or “spuria”, five as “nothus”, seven as “base begot” and five as “bastard” or “basterd”. There is a vehemence starting from the page on
March 17th, 1644. “Isabella filia Eliz: Kenie de Lindeth spurius cum Thom: Crofte de Poulton base begot“: spurius and base begot and the guilty man named. Then on July 25th, 1652 we find the same woman appearing again, this time in connection with twin boys – “Will: & John base begot childeren of Elizabeth Kenie” – but no man named.

There is another woman whose name appears twice:-

1645 29 March Tho: the sonn of Jenet Hadwen de Silverdall base begot.
1647 17 December Tho: fillius Jenet Hadwen de Silverdall

The first entry specifies base begot, the second does not, but the presumption is there. Both babies are called Thomas. Interestingly, an entry in the Marriage Register for February 15th, 1657 states that Will Atkinson of Beetham was married to Jenet Hadwen of Silverdale. Had Ms Hadwen found a man to take her on with her base begotten children? Was he the father of them?

Then there is the case of Anna Johnson whose, child Robert was baptised on February 22nd, 1601; could this be the Ann Johnson who married Lancelot Stable on October 13th, 1601? Perhaps they had just jumped the gun with Robert. Could the Anthony Mason, who had fathered a bastard on Agneta Crozier (baptised on July 23rd, 1601), be the same man who married Margaret Burrow of Warton on January 16th, 1601. I have not found Agneta Crozier in the Marriage Register.

There are examples where the illegitimate child is assigned to the father, with no mention of the mother.

1601 3 October Jennet filia Thomas Widder de Over Kellet spurius
1612 17 October Ann the basterd daughter of Willia[m] Watson of Leighton
1622 18 November Thomas the basterd sonne of William Beaneby, a stranger

An important source of information on the subject is a book published in 1980 “Bastardy and its Comparative History” edited by Peter Laslett and with contributions from many writers. All the quotations and figures given below are taken from this book, unless otherwise stated. (I made the mistake of looking at chapters on other countries. Happily I could confine my interest to England. That was fortunate because, for a Scot, it was disconcerting to find Scotland a bit of a black spot.)

The findings for the seventeenth century – based on formidable family reconstitution studies involving many parishes – looked so definite. It seemed pretty well agreed that the reproductive rate and the rate of illegitimacy and pre-nuptial pregnancy followed the same course; a rise from 1570 to about 1620, with only a slight increase up to 1700.

Then the apparent simplicity of it all began to erode. There were many problems which could have been affecting the reliability of the conclusions. To begin with, it was admitted that there was great ambiguity in legal definition of bastardy. There was “general bastardy” if the parents did not marry after the birth of the child, and “special bastardy” if they did. Special bastardy, unlike general bastardy, could not be tried in the ecclesiastical courts for it was not recognised as bastardy by the church. Recourse had to be had to common law courts. By secular code – statute of 7 James cap 4 (1610) – it was laid down that

Every lewd woman which shall have any bastard which may be chargeable to the parish, the justices of the peace shall commit such woman to the House of Correction, to be punished and set to work, during the term of one whole year.

Clearly the civil authorities felt illegitimacy might be a dangerous liability to them.

Added to that, and apart from the general problems detracting from the reliability of Parish Registers, there was a change in attitude in mid-century. In 1644, with the Presbyterian party in the ascendant, a Directory of Church-Government was issued by the Westminster Assembly of Divines. It “deprived baptism of sacramental status [with a] shift to registration rather than baptism … mere registration was not so highly regarded and may have been neglected“. Recording of bastardy was not universal, and clandestine marriages were common in the late seventeenth century. So there was considerable irregularity of recording.

Illegitimacy and pre-nuptial pregnancy are to be understood in the light of general courtship and marriage patterns which vary from period to period. All sorts of factors come into play

” … the activities of a core of repetitive delinquents, adultery, prostitution, the exploitation of servant by master, cases related to delays in the solemnisation of contractual marriages, to less stable relationships … and obscure liaisons of transient couples … ”

Little is known, for sure, about the incidence of abortion and infanticide; infanticide was punishable by death by an act of 1624. Uncertainty also reigns over whether the apparent nadir of bastardy in the seventeenth century was real or not. In the early part of the century Puritans denounced, even more fiercely than the established church, institutions and practices they believed encouraged sexual lapses, such as “dancing, drinking, May games, alehouses and brothels”. In 1650 there was an Act against adultery, with incest carrying a sentence of death and the penalty for fornication 3 months in the county gaol for the first offence, death for subsequent acts. Whether the increasingly harsh official attitude to sexual laxness had any effect on illegitimacy is another matter. The apparent sharp drop in the ratio between legitimate and illegitimate births during the Commonwealth may have been largely a statistical artefact, due to neglect of registration, confusion as to who was lawfully married, clandestine baptisms and all the results of the social upheaval of the times.

Illegitimacy occurred across the social scale, but more among the poor. A study of the recorded judicial examinations of the parents of bastards in Lancashire, failed to show any mother of higher rank than a yeoman’s daughter. 24% of the mothers were servants. The fathers were from every social level, though predominantly husbandmen, artisans and craftsmen. 14% were masters of the girls, 8% were fellow servants. 65% of the couples lived in the same township and 23% in the same household.

There has been some interest in what is called a bastardy prone sub-society, with repeated bastard bearers related to each other by kinship or direct personal contacts. The concept of such a sub- culture is not universally accepted. In the Lancashire survey quoted above some of the mothers were rated as promiscuous, but of the 18% who had more than one bastard, it was mostly by the same father. In the case of single bastard conceptions servant women were vulnerable; there was a good deal of exploitation of servants by masters (or their sons), though perhaps not as much as popularly imagined. Apart from two women cited with more than one bastard there is no evidence of a bastardy prone “subculture” in Warton parish.

It is unlikely one can go further than saying that illegitimacy in Warton was low; Forty nine illegitimacies out of a total of 2,743 recorded baptisms, or 1.78% of baptisms over the century. This is lower than in Hawkshead, where it was 2.47%. The pattern of illegitimate baptisms in Warton parish does not mirror the supposed national pattern with a nadir in the 1650s, but the numbers are too small for anything to be concluded from this. All in all it might have been as well to have accepted Dr Marshall’s wise judgement at the outset. “Illegitimacy was not a significant factor in regional history before 1750. This does not mean that premarital conceptions were not common … “⁴

References

1. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, (3rd ed), 1983, p.571 ↩︎
2. Peter Laslett (ed) Bastardy and Its Comparative History, 1980, p.xiii ↩︎
3. Where twins were baptised together they have been counted as one entry, for example on July 23rd 1682 “Robert & James SS Alis More of YS [Yealand Storrs] ↩︎
4. J.D.Marshall “Out of Wedlock: Perception of a Cumbrian Social Problem in the Victorian Context”, Northern History, Vol. XXXI, 1995, p.203. ↩︎

Published in Mourholme Magazines Issue 28 1996