Talk:avowry

RFV discussion: December 2022–February 2023
Only sense I can readily discern in books is the legal act of justifying distraining something. The OED entry on avowry has even more senses: "advocacy, protection or authority personified: a protector, a patron", with quotes from 1549, 1622, 1849, and "patronage or right of presentation to a benefice; advowson" with two quotes from Roger Coke's 1660 Power and Subjection which use the spellings advowry and avowry respectively; they also have two late 1500s citations of auowries in the sense of "a vowing, swearing, solemn declaration or oath" which they say is "due to confusion between the two verbs avow". (We currently only have one verb avow.) For advowry, they have one more sense, "advowson or patronage of a benefice", with a cite from 1593 (advouris). In some books that mention income from avowries / advowries, I can't tell whether they mean income from distraining or from holding the patronage of a benefice; if the latter, that sense may be citable. - -sche (discuss) 10:28, 31 December 2022 (UTC)


 * It's possible that some of it needs to be pushed back to Middle English, e.g. there's a clear use of it for general "protection" in the 14th-century "song of the Flemish Insurrection": "Ne for the avowerie of the Kyng of France / Tuenti score ant fyve haden their meschaunce by day ant eke by nyht". The OED's "function of an advowee" etc. sense, our sense 1, also only has one citation from 1330. I added the "patron saint" sense (the OED's "protection personified") with 3 citations. The OED doesn't mark that one as obsolete, but I think this is wrong since its one 19th-century citation puts it in quotation marks as a historical term of art. The advowson one should be citable. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 13:53, 31 December 2022 (UTC)


 * I made a Middle English entry at with the medieval senses, referenced but not cited atm. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 17:42, 31 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Well, after more digging around it seems there's another, historical sense (or the "patronage" sense is much more specifically applied). In context, the quotation from the English Historical Review isn't talking about either advowson or the act of justifying distraint, and in fact the article explicitly distinguishes its sense of "avowry" from advowson. It's about a specific system of medieval English colonial patronage (in Ireland, Wales and the Marches). Searching for "system of avowries" turned up some other historiographical material discussing it, so I've added it as a sense with 4 citations. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:10, 4 January 2023 (UTC)


 * "Avowal" is cited and tagged obsolete, "advowson" has been added and cited, both from sources on EEBO. I can't find evidence of the other two tagged senses in modern English. I'll leave it there. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 18:44, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

RFV-resolved as above; props to for some top-notch research here. This, that and the other (talk) 12:29, 4 February 2023 (UTC)