The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Vavasors

(also valvasors), minor feudal lords in medieval France and Italy.

In France the term “vavasors” was applied to vassals of knights who had given them fiefs (often very small ones). Most vavasors had the right of lowest jurisdiction on the fief. In the 11th century the term “vavasor” became established in Italy. The Italian vavasors received benefices from great feudal lords, against whom they later started a struggle to convert the benefices into fiefs. In 1037 Emperor Conrad II confirmed the hereditary rights of the vavasors. In the 11th century the vavasors began moving to the towns and were drawn into trade and usury; they became closely associated with the upper stratum of the townspeople and began to merge with them in the 13th century. However, most of the vavasors (the grandees) became the main enemy of the townspeople.

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References in periodicals archive

So delighted is he by her company that when the vavasor comes to call him to supper he interprets the intrusion as a hostile act: "that night the vavasor made war upon me / by coming to fetch me / when it was the time and hour to sup" (247-49) ("mes tant me fist, la nuit, de guerre / li vavasors, qu'il me vint querre, / qant de soper fu tans et ore" [247-49]).

Disoriented, he returns to the vavasor's castle, where both the vavasor and his daughter are glad to see him.

Male same-sex desire in the romances of de Troyes

Prong (Rachel Ray), Bernard Dale and Adolphus Crosbie (Small House at Allington), Miss Mackenzie's three suitors, Captain Bellfield, and George Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her?, Mr.

Frank must marry money: men, women, and property in Trollope's novels

Unlike Lady Laura whose resistance to those restrictions is motivated by a desire to participate in politics, and unlike Alice Vavasor who fights against the marriage market and its sexual contract to escape domestic violence, Lizzie manipulates her social and economic functions, to use Mr Dove's earlier phrase, for a `simple dirty question of money'.

Trollope's Material Girl

Trollope, like Thackeray, relies on language that is chiefly metaphoric for his narrator's account of the decisively sexualized moment in John Grey's courtship of Alice Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her?:

Narrating the unnarratable: gender and metonymy in the Victorian novel

Recent and forthcoming scholarly studies of Baptist leaders such as Benjamin Reach, William Kiffin, Hercules Collins, Vavasor Powell, and Henry Jessey signal a resurging interest in seventeenth-century English Baptist life and thought.

Thomas Grantham (1633-1692) and General Baptist Theology

It reminds me of those two great Cymros John Penry and Vavasor Powell who suffered persecution and execution (legal murder) for their struggle to prevent an English law which was intent on taking away their heritage.

Letter: Martyrs died for this

He claimed to be descended from the 17th century Welsh puritan Vavasor Powell.

Letter: A claim too far