Lex Spuriorum Or the Law related to Bastardy. Collected from the Common, Civil, and Ecclesiastical Laws

London, Printed by the Assigns of Richard and Edward Atkins..., 1703. FIRST EDITION. 8vo, 165 x 102 mms., pp. [xvi], 227 [228 blank], recent full calf, new end-papers; text browned ESTC S122159 (ten copies world-wide); Sweet & Maxwell I p. 498.3 According to the Oxford DNBN, John Brydall/Bridall (?1635 - 1705) "matriculated as a commoner in Queen's College, Oxford, on 15 July 1652, graduating BA on 28 June 1655. Four months earlier, on 22 February, he had enrolled as an inner barrister at Lincoln's Inn, being listed in the admission register there as the 'heir app[arent]' of his father (Lincoln's Inn, 270). He was called to the bar in 1662. Thirty years later Anthony Wood noted that Brydall, who was 'afterwards a common lawyer … hath published several things of his profession' (Wood, Ath. Oxon., 2.786)..... Generally, the works ascribed to him reflect a very wide range of jurisprudential expertise, covering such topics as the laws and customs of London, the rights and privileges of the nobility and gentry, conveyancing, bastardy, and lunacy. They also indicate a strongly conservative and pro-monarchical frame of mind." See also Wolfgang Schmidgen, 'Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel," ELH, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 133-166: "John Brydall's Lex Spuriorum (1703), the first legal treatise devoted exclusively to the problem of illegitimacy, collects and summarizes terms and arguments that have been instrumental in legal definitions of illegitimacy. The ambiguities in Brydall's text begin with a characterization of the bastard as imultaneously "filius populi"-the child of the people-and "nullius filius"-the child of no one. Belonging to everyone and no one, the bastard gains an additional layer of ambiguity by its description as "Terrae-Filius," the child of the earth: "a astard is Filius Terrae, Filius Populi, and quasi nullius filius." To complicate things further, Brydall points out that the bastard as filius terrae has to be imagined as "rising out of the ground like the Wind," and the bastard thus unites the opposing forces of wind and earth, the necessarily common, intangible, elusive, with the tangible and possessible. These richly contradictory terms suggest an unnatural birth, but in law, as Brydall reminds us, the bastard is considered to be a "natural" child because he is born outside the institution of marriage and thus outside the established frameworks of culture and custom. What is remarkable about these strange terms is that Brydall shows no concern whatsoever about their inconsistency. There is not a single moment in his treatise when Brydall laments or even remarks on these proliferating categories. In fact, he is happy to use the terms "Filius Terrae, Filius Populi, and quasi nullius filius" jointly to characterize the bastard. Such unconcern, it seems to me, signals more than an acceptance of the arcana of English common law. It suggests that the law actively contributes to the cultural production of the bastard as a multifarious, polyvalent creature that eludes defini- tion by oscillating between categories.'