ABSTRACT
The history of the word ‘bastard’ reveals that its origin comes from an association with the modern equivalent of the travelling salesmen. ‘Bastum’ in Latin meant packsaddle that the travelling salesman carried with him, so ‘basturdus’ came to mean a child left behind by the travelling man, or more figuratively, a ‘baggage-child.’ In a BBC Radio 4 broadcast in 2018 called Nobody’s Child, two MPs, Caroline Flint and Jess Phillips, who were both illegitimate, ended the programme by saying that they felt that the stigma of ‘bastardy’ had not gone even though the law has changed. Until the sixteenth century the adoption of children had been an unregulated or de facto affair. The unregulated process of adopting an illegitimate child occurred in all classes of society and it was possible to make an illegitimate child legitimate, though there were legal and social constraints on inheritance because of the ‘blood line.’.
