By Illegitimate Means: How Birth Decides Dynasties
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Legitimacy in medieval and early modern England was never private. Birthright could reorder kingdoms and spark wars. Historian Cheryl White traces how disputed heirs shaped dynasties-from William the Conqueror, mocked as "the Bastard" yet able to seize a throne, to the crises after Edward III and the tenuous claim of Henry VII. White reveals how the fate of a kingdom could turn on one enduring question: Who was born to rule?