BASTARDY, is a defect of birth objected to one born out of wedlock. Eustathius will have bastards among the Greeks to have been in equal favour with legitimate children, as low as the Trojan war; but the course of antiquity seems against him. Potter and others show, that there never was a time when bastardy was not in disgrace.
In the time of William the Conqueror, however, bastardy seems not to have implied any reproach, if we may judge from the circumstance of that monarch himself not scrupling to assume the appellation of bastard. His epistle to Alan count of Bretagne begins, Ego Willielmus cognomento bastardus.