continued to remain as traditional and survival oriented, as it had been for the previous five hundred years. Most of the doctrine related to illicit sexuality and affinity was still part of the practise of law at the beginning of the nineteenth century as were the rules of illegitimacy. Change was to come, with and through social changes, not primarily by the introduction of new legal ideas and policies. I refer to Sweden once again as the illustrative example. The first attempts to improve the position of illegitimate children were made by clergymen in parliament in thes. The state Church was in charge of the poor relief that after had become a matter of great concern as the constantly growing number of poor people threatened to ruin the financial resources of the local parishes. The clergy proposed extending inheritance rights to illegitimate children to include maternal and paternal inheritance in order to ease the financial crisis caused by the excessive poor relief costs. Nothing came of this proposal. The medieval legal doctrine on legitimacy was rigid enough to stop the reform proposals. By , however, the poor classes had grown so terribly in size that a commission was set up to investigate the extent of poverty, to give reasonable explanations for this development, and to provide remedies to improve the situation. The shocking reports of the commission, published in , stated that the dramatic increase in poverty was closely related to the growing number of illegitimate children, who in were almost seven per cent of the new-born population, most of them predestined to become dependent on the 133 The turn of the tide
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