So, I've been playing Mass Effect on Pherenike—that's my powerful laptop I saved up for and bought about a year and a half ago, and which I love despite complications around its hinges that make it useless as a laptop rather than a desktop. Anyway, it's fun playing the trilogy on a computer meant to power games like BG3 (the once-tedious loading screens are a joke on this one) and with a more advanced NVIDIA situation that makes screenshots and videos easy. Google Earth is always taking pics!
“...Familial loyalties between fathers and sons that jeopardised the material well-being of the mother and her illegitimate child could create considerable conflict within a parish. …Fathers who failed to take order regarding their son’s indiscretions might also find themselves charged with incontinent living besides becoming financially liable for the consequences. In 1628, the churchwardens of Wisborough Green (Sussex) not only presented John Nightingall and Mary Lewer (his father’s servant) for incontinency following Lewer’s confessions that she was pregnant by John, but also Robert Nightingall, John’s father, ‘for a very bawd’.
This was because he had for several months ‘bin told, both [by] our vicar and also by divers others, what great familiarity was spoken of to be betwixt his said sonne John and Mary Lewer’ but had failed ‘either to cause them for to be marryed or els to put them asunder … which maketh many people uppon great presumptions for to suggest that the said Mary is an harlot common both with the father and also with his sonne’. As a consequence all three were ‘kept backe from the Lord’s table, for the great suspicion of their incontinency’.
Measures whereby grandparents were ordered to take responsibility for their children’s children reflected a wider framework of familial protection that could be extended to parents of ‘base-born’ children. While this sometimes incurred punitive consequences at the instigation of churchwardens and overseers seeking to limit charges to parish funds, grandparental involvement – and expenditure – was often voluntary and did not necessarily entail competing loyalties towards children and grandchildren.
While it was more often maternal grandparents of illegitimate children that featured in quarter session orders both being compelled and volunteering to take on the responsibility for their grandchildren’s maintenance, fathers of putative fathers can also be glimpsed substituting their own means on behalf of their sons. …A similar arrangement appears to have been brokered between the grandparents of the child Alice Martin was carrying in 1640, of which the labourer Thomas Spencer was the reputed father.
William Martin, Alice’s father, ‘did voluntarily undertake to keep her … until she could be delivered’, after which John Spencer, Thomas’s father, undertook to ‘keep the said child’ on account of his withholding consent from his son to marry Alice ‘unless he should be compelled by law’. As in this last case, fathers of putative fathers often stepped in to let their sons off the hook and such actions mirrored the kind of arrangements that could be put in place for the care of legitimate children who had been pre-deceased or deserted by their fathers.
These measures could therefore function as a form of licensed desertion or figurative death, and may well have deprived both the illegitimate children and their ‘reputed’ fathers of the opportunity to form lasting bonds. However, it is also possible that such arrangements (many of which would have been brokered out of court) actually served to facilitate paternal contact and prioritise it above maternal claims on either the putative father or their child.
Similar interpretative ambiguities regarding attitudes to putative fathers arise from measures put in place by JPs to secure the maintenance of illegitimate children. On the one hand, magisterial orders were principally motivated by the need to limit pressure on the charges borne by ratepayers, and they were therefore focused on extracting a financial commitment from putative fathers.
This had a punitive as well as pragmatic dimension, divorcing maintenance from those concepts of honesty and that were normatively associated with a man’s provision for his dependants. Orders sometimes stipulated that payments should be made after divine service at the communion table or in the church porch, in rituals of reparation which were public and which may have therefore carried associations of shame.
On the other hand, the preoccupation with maintenance was not always severed from expectations that fathers would play an active role in the upbringing of their offspring, although – significantly – such expectations appear to have diminished over the course of the seventeenth century. While this might be judged to have been beneficial to the men concerned, freeing them from the direct responsibilities of parenthood in ways that were increasingly unthinkable for the mothers of illegitimate children (particularly during infancy), it also more decisively severed the links between paternity and parenthood in cases when fathers were deemed incapable of maintenance, thereby channelling patriarchal dividends out of the hands of the poor.
Many putative fathers were not shielded by their families of origin from either the charges or even the practicalities of caring for illegitimate children. Securing a child’s maintenance without charge to ratepayers was the main preoccupation of JPs concerned with giving orders to ‘reputed’ fathers. However, it was not unheard of, particularly in the earlier part of the period, for JPs to expect more paternal involvement than the basic provision of regular maintenance payments and sufficient security to protect parish rates.
A few maintenance orders issued by JPs stipulated a division of labour between mothers and fathers of illegitimate children that entailed fathers taking over direct responsibility, usually after infancy or early childhood, at the very least for decision-making concerning the child’s future if not for its day-to-day care. JPs in Staffordshire in 1601 ordered that John Sabin should pay 10d weekly towards the maintenance of the child he fathered on Alice Godwin until its second birthday, after which he was to ‘take charge of the child’, receiving 1d weekly from Alice until the child was able to get its own living.
At the Wiltshire Sessions in 1615 it was similarly ordered that an illegitimate child should be nursed and brought up by his mother until he ‘shall accomplishe the full age of three years’, during which time the father was to pay 10d weekly towards his maintenance. After this point the father was to ‘keep and maintaine the childe untill he be fitt yeares to be bound as an apprentice in some Trade or mistrie’ during which time the mother was to contribute 4d weekly to the father’s costs.
In determining a period of payment, it was not unusual for maintenance orders to oblige putative fathers to undertake weekly contributions until they took over the child’s care or arranged a place in service or apprenticeship, and it is possible that fathers were expected to take direct responsibility for such placements in a division of labour that would have mirrored the duties of fathers towards their legitimate offspring.
In the early 1560s the Durham church courts presided over a settlement between the parents of a ‘bais begotton’ girl to the effect that her father William Brandling was to ‘have the rewll, order and government’ of the child while her mother agreed from henceforth to have ‘no medlynge with the said wench, to enties hir frome any servic order or apointment lawfullye by the said William the wench shall be assigned unto’. William, in the meantime, was to compensate the mother for her former charges associated with bringing up their child with a bundle of lint or flax annually for the following four years.
…Petitions lodged with JPs sometimes included expectations that putative fathers should take on direct and immediate responsibility for a child’s care, such as that lodged by Eleanor Raynolds in 1619 requesting that the father of her child, a butcher, be ordered ‘to breed up the said child or give her money wherewith to maintain it’. The fellmonger Augustine King was similarly issued with the choice between taking on ‘the whole keeping and nourishing’ of his bastard child or paying a weekly sum of 12d to the overseers of the poor ‘for its upkeep and education until it can be placed in service’.
That a request for a father to take on his illegitimate child was not merely an empty threat designed to extract maintenance payments is suggested by orders that presumed paternal responsibility, such as that issued by Warwickshire JPs in 1662 subsequent to Elizabeth Morrell’s affiliation of her child to William Search during her delivery. On the basis of the testimony of midwives present at the birth it was ordered that Search ‘shall from henceforth receive, provide for and maintain the said bastard male child’, free the parish of Milverton from any charge relating to his maintenance and pay James Morrell, in whose house the child had been born, his ‘reasonable charges’ for Elizabeth’s lying in.
In a few instances, sessions records provide fleeting references to putative fathers voluntarily taking on direct responsibility for their children’s welfare. In 1665 the Warwickshire bench ordered that the child of Anne Wilcox be removed from her care in the county gaol on the petition of its father who was ‘contented to maintain and provide for the said child’ and who was exhorted to ‘take care that the said child be carefully provided for’.
This may have been a temporary measure, as in the case of Richard Jones who had been entrusted with the care of the child he had fathered on Elizabeth Smyth while she remained in the house of correction, which arrangement ceased when she was freed as a consequence of inheriting ‘some reasonable estate whereby she … is of ability to maintain herself in good sort’. However, it is important that we do not discount the possibility in at least some cases of genuine affection on the part of fathers towards their illegitimate children.
Such emotions are unlikely to have surfaced in the routine orders issued for maintenance – not least since most cases came to the attention of the quarter sessions as a consequence of some kind of default – but they can very occasionally be discerned elsewhere. The sentiments of Richard Smyth, for example, servant to Elizabeth Watson, were recorded in 1617 after she was suspected of drinking a substance concocted to destroy the child she was carrying, fathered illegitimately by Richard.
He confessed to a number of witnesses that, having often lain with him, ‘my dame nede not a gone awaye frome me thus for I dide never deserve it at her hand’, declaring that ‘she is a beaste’ and that ‘she nede not agone aboute to a destryed it for I am as licke a man as enye of hir husbones ware for I woulde never a stored from hir for I would neaver a bene a shamed of it’. The ability of fathers to assume direct responsibility for their illegitimate offspring’s care depended on a range of factors besides willingness – which, it should not be denied, was often clearly lacking.
It is not perhaps coincidental that many of the orders discussed above involving direct paternal involvement of some kind related to men with specific occupational titles that suggest they may have been householders of sufficient substance rather than youths more dependent on the patronage and goodwill of parents or employers – although the distress of Richard Smyth at his mistress’s attempt to destroy their child suggests that not all men in this position automatically looked to flight, denial or protection as the most attractive options.
In the case of married men charged with paternity the action taken would most likely have involved spousal negotiation, with some wives colluding in attempts to have another man named as the putative father of any children born of their husband’s adulterous liaisons and others willing to accommodate them within their own households. A petition by Anne, the wife of John Aldridge, submitted to the Warwickshire sessions in 1657 illustrates the circumstances in which it might have been in a wife’s interest to house another woman’s child, reputedly fathered by her husband.
Protesting against John’s long imprisonment for being the ‘supposed’ father of a child begotten on Bridget Darbey, Anne offered to take the child and ‘breed it up with her own children rather than her husband should lie in prison, she being confident of her husband’s honesty notwithstanding the harlot’s affirmation in the time of her travail’. It was clearly less damaging to the household’s material well-being to take on the burden of an additional child than to suffer the costs of John’s absence, even if this did not vindicate his reputation in the way Anne might have desired.
It should also be remembered that it was not unusual for households to absorb children from former relationships, however unharmoniously, and that fostering arrangements were also commonplace, providing a context in which the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate children could be blurred. Over the course of the seventeenth century there was, however, a subtle shift in the dynamics governing the negotiation of paternal responsibilities towards and involvement with illegitimate offspring as the intervention of parish authorities became more routine regarding arrangements for the care, education and (most pressingly) the maintenance of the poor children who were deemed a threat to parish rates.
This has already been charted with reference to the practice of placing pauper children as apprentices, which became increasingly commonplace from the early seventeenth century and which reflected the growing scepticism of parish authorities about the ability of poorer parents to socialise as much as provide for their children. Conversely, the power of parish officers to place children in foster care (on account of their poverty or parental deprivation) could also constitute a form of patronage to the receiving households through the provision of a welcome source of labour, income and claims to civic entitlement.
In Southampton, for example, widow Grundie promised to take in an orphaned child until he was old enough to be bound apprentice to her son, ‘[i]n Considerac’on whereof she was p[ro]missed that she should contynewe Alehowse keeping’ in addition to receiving the sum of 20s, while a porter, Thomas Pitties, took in a child ‘at his owne charges’ on condition that he, his wife and the boy had ‘a spare Roome in the lower Almeshowse’. The transfer of parental roles in such cases could be informed by distinctions between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor and often involved the subtle redistribution of scant resources between them.
Just as ‘marriage and family formation … was a privilege rather than a right’ in early modern England, with some parish officers actively preventing nuptials between couples of limited means, fitness for fatherhood was also judged in socio-economic terms, and this was of particular relevance in cases of illegitimacy in which parish overseers became involved. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the numbers of orders requiring fathers’ direct paternal involvement in or responsibility for their illegitimate offspring’s care diminished markedly.
Instead, it became routine to demand weekly maintenance payments from putative fathers in cases when officials were not satisfied that an illegitimate child would be provided for either by a one-off payment of a lump sum and/or a bond supported by sureties saving the parish harmless. Increasingly, as the mechanisms for administering poor relief became established at the level of the parish, these payments were channelled through the overseers of the poor. In Warwickshire, for example, maintenance payments from fathers were less often paid directly to their children’s carers but were increasingly administered and redistributed by parish officials over the course of the seventeenth century.
This occurred not only when the parish authorities took on responsibility for arranging a child’s care (perhaps after the return to work, death or desertion of its mother), but also even when the child remained in the mother’s hands. Besides a cluster of cases during the Interregnum in which the bench ordered maintenance to be paid directly to the child’s mother or foster carer, and two cases involving men of substantial means (one a gentleman and the other settling with a lump sum), overseers of the poor were increasingly specified as the recipients and distributors of payments.
…Diminished paternal involvement in such cases should not therefore be ascribed to the elevation of maternal above paternal bonds, since it was most likely the cost-effectiveness of maternal breast-feeding (compared with the expense of a wet nurse) that lay behind parochial pressure on mothers of chargeable illegitimates to keep their children. Divesting putative fathers of paternal responsibilities beyond maintenance stemmed from the assumptions of ‘civic fathers’ (so described and documented by Patricia Crawford) that poor men ‘lack[ed] the masculine virtues of independence and autonomy’ and were to be treated themselves ‘as children who required paternal supervision’.”
- Alexandra Shepard, “Brokering Fatherhood: Illegitimacy and Paternal Rights and Responsibilities in Early Modern England.” in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England
I was able to snag another amazing commission by @rosenkow! Thank you so much for bringing my Cinnamon Bun Alexandra Destiny Hope Shepard to life! You are phenomenal! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Name: Alexandra Destiny Hope Shepard
DOB: April 15, 2188. Nine Months Post-Reaper War
POB: Normandy SR-2
Specialization: Vanguard, N7
Psych: Spacer, Paragon
Sexuality: Bisexual
Love Interest: (OC) Jason Argyle
Facts About Alexandra:
She was born on April 15, 2188 to Commander John Shepard and Lieutenant-Commander Ashley Williams on the Normandy SR2.
Growing up, her time was divided between residing on the Normandy and the Citadel. Commander Shepard had retaking command of the Normandy upon recovering from his extensive injury during the last push of London. There, she was homeschooled along with her little brother, Kaidan -named after Kaidan Alenko-.
At age 13, Alexandra's biotics manifestated. She was then registered at Grissom Academy where she under took tutelage from Jack and Miranda.
She joined the biotiball team and eventually became team captain for she demonstrated strong leadership skills.
She graduated from Grissom Academy a year early, age 17. Having lived most of her life between the Normandy, the Citadel, and Grissom Academy, she grew to have a strong fascination with engines and signed up to study engineering. Once she turned 18, she signed up to join the Alliance, following in her parents footsteps, and still managed to finish her studies in engineering and graduating with honors. However, she did decide to specialize in the vanguard class for her powerful biotics are very useful in fight, and she will admit to loving to display them ❤.
Do any of you guys who were following me back in 2012 or so remember Alex? Because I was and am DAMN PROUD of my terrible, terrible mess of a Shepard. I miss her.
(I have no idea where my ME3 screenshots vanished to. Whoops)
I’m trawling through all my old unfinished fic with her while I wait for ME:A to install, and man - I’m putting the NSFW summaries under the cut, because I started these two fics that never got off the ground and uh
uh
here’s the porn I could have written you, kids
so Alex romanced Thane, and I headcanoned that she was never terribly emotionally invested in the relationship (because Alex was never stable in the first place and then got super fucked up by the whole “coming back from the dead” experience and wasn’t emotionally invested in anything); it was a dysfunctional wreck.
Fic 1 would have started with her attempting to knowingly slam the poisoned drink from the bartender in Afterlife, getting in a huge “holy shit you need professional help” fight with Thane about it, stalking off, running into Zaeed, and tl;dr blowing Zaeed in an Omega alley somewhere
Fic 2 would have been (a probably very high) Alex in her cabin getting EDI to set up an audio/video link to Zaeed for very filthy reasons, and would have wound up with her putting on her clothes and going down to Life Support where Thane was meditating, sneaking one of his silenced pistols, taking it back to her cabin and taking out the clip/disassembling it enough to make it safe, and then having Zaeed watch while she fucked herself with the gun
Diverting back to Mass Effect for a moment, this is probably my single favorite moment for the "ruthless victor of Torfan" Shepard, especially combined with the Mindoir survivor backstory:
[Image ID: four screenshots of a conversation between a scarred female Commander Shepard and the murderous batarian Balak, subtitled with their dialogue—
Shepard: How does killing innocent people make up for that?
Balak: I could ask you the same thing? How many innocent batarians died at Torfan?
1— my small "please choose my Mass Effect romance for my scary ruthless yet severely principled Shepard" poll has concluded and the people chose Miranda (narrowly beating out Garrus; they were both well ahead of all other options).
2— with no serious competitors, book Boromir's repeatedly mentioned beauty and Literal Elf Legolas eulogizing him as "Boromir the Fair" was y'all's favorite House of Húrin fact! Boromir's sparkly beauty won 27.1% of 269 votes, while the nearest competitor was "the Ruling Stewardship passed through the bloodline of a woman twice" at 14.5%.
For context: my Shepard is harsh, relentless, and quietly haunted, but with noble goals and a grim willingness to sacrifice her own interests as easily as anyone else's in pursuit of them. She survived the batarians' slave raid/massacre at Mindoir and ruthlessly wiped out a major batarian base at Torfan years later, killing any slave raiders who tried to surrender. Currently she's a mix of sternly resolute Paragon options and unforgiving Renegade ones.
..............I am deciding on a romance for this person.
Who should my scary Shepard romance?
Liara
Miranda (I have a mod that makes her romanceable)
Jack (ditto)
Garrus Vakarian
Thane Krios
Samara
Voting ended onJan 24, 2025
(Excluded Kaidan because he is slated for death on Virmire, Ashley because she's the most heterosexual woman in space, Traynor and modded Tali because this Shep is far too spiritually old for them, Jacob because he annoys me, Kelly because she super annoys me, and Diana Allers for uncanny valley reasons.)
