Bastardry gaol for a Female

[stanmapstone]

An exact search for Bastardry in the British Newspaper Archive, brings up only three results, and they are all misspellings of Bastardy. For example from the Wrexham Advertiser - Saturday 29 December 1855;

[Yonks Ago]

Thank you to all,
 Annette7's answer was what I was after, been googling all afternoon and was not getting any where.

The lady concerned in not in my family, [ and if she was.. not much one can do ] came across it in the Gaol registers but as the old saying goes
"After all, the wool of a black sheep is just as warm"

Yonks

[g eli]

I have noticed a couple of instances, the mother was sentenced to 3 months,the father got the same but it was hard labour. The reason seemed to be connected to the fact that mother and child became
a charge on the parish.
Liz

[Yonks Ago]

Hi Liz,

I understand what the procedure was regarding the man not looking after the lady, parish and ect, it was "why the lady was sent to gaol" being the reason on asking, now know regarding the 2 spellings of the word meaning 2 different things.
Yonks

[stanmapstone]

I know you  have marked this completed but if you go to http://vcp.e2bn.org/search/advancedsearch.php and search for females sentenced for Bastardy there are 41 prisoners matching that search. Including Name: Elizabeth Maddock Age: 19 Date of Offence: 8th November 1810 Offence: Bastardy.Sentence: 3 Months So in my opinion Bastardry is a misspelling of Bastardy unless I can be shown a definition of Bastardry as it was in England in the early 19th Century, and the not much later Australian definition.
Bastardy:
A former offence. If you had a child, without the means to support it, outside marriage, and it became chargeable to the state, you could be sent to goal. The idea was that people should be responsible enough to ensure they had the means to support any children born. This sentence could be applied to either a man or a woman if they could be proved to be the parents. http://vcp.e2bn.org/glossary/view_glossary_0_B.html
Stan

[Gardener]

And I totally agree with Stan.

I found one or two "hits" where the word was used in the sense of actually being a a bastard (illegitimate), and one online dictionary gave that as an obsolete meaning - but that is hardly a criminal offence worthy of hard labour.
Many of the hits were due to automatic and faulty transcriptions I think, and a few were in books and spelled with the extra "r". For example, from 1870 "and amongst others those of fornication and Bastardry..."

[stanmapstone]

Bastardy and Bastardry are 2 different things.
Bastardry is malicious, aggressive behaviour which is presumably what the woman concerned was charged with.
Annette

There is definitely no such criminal offence as Bastardry meaning malicious, aggressive behaviour, she was charged with Bastardy.

Stan

[stanmapstone]

“lewd women”, this did not mean that they were prostitutes, but rather that they were unmarried mothers, who had been imprisoned because they and their offspring had become a burden on the parish rates.

See https://gloscrimehistory.wordpress.com/tag/lewd-women/

Stan