First off, I’m not sure where to put this question, as it doesn’t really have a definitive answer, nor is it a great debate.
What I want to know is: If the parents of an “illegitimate” child get married, then is the child still illegitimate?
Or, does getting married make an “illegitimate” child “legitimate”
From Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary:
You’ll see that definition b has “put in the state of a legitimate child before the law by legal means.” One such legal means is marriage (legal marriage, of course!). Another such is adoption.
It depends upon the law in your state. Under common law, if your mother was married (it generally didn’t matter to whom) before the actual birth, the child was considered the legitimate child of the mother and her husband.
My understanding is that at common law, the only question was whether mum was married at the time she gave birth. If she wasn’t, then the child was illegitimate, even if the parents got married after the birth.
I believe that in England, Parliament amended the common law to provide that subsequent marriage legitimated the child, for all but a few purposes (e.g. - it didn’t legitimate a child for the purposes of inheriting a title).
Lots of Canadian jurisdictions have abolished the entire concept of legitimacy, and no longer attach any legal significance to it. Don’t know if that’s the case elsewhere.
Speaking from experience here… (Airman and I weren’t married when I conceived)
If I’d still stayed married to my (now) ex-husband, the baby would have been legally my ex’s, even though he’d have been fathered by another man. In other words, my ex would have been, for all intents and purposes, the baby’s legal father.
However, most states no longer recognize the concept of legitimacy, and it certainly carries no real social stigma. If I’d given birth to the baby and Airman and I were not married, Airman would still be the baby’s legal father and still legally and financially responsible for him. If we’d married later, the act of marriage in and of itself “legitimizes” the baby, although some states do require a formal court proceeding. IANAL, and YMMV.
Robin
In order to cultivate the pope, William had a hand in whipping up the Albigensian crusades (which occurred in the south of France, in the Toulouse / Narbonne area).
Um … your question did refer to the early 13th century, right?