Contemporary society has discovered—or in some cases been forced to discover—the worth of women. Historians have provided valuable insights into the social, cultural, and legal status of women in an effort to highlight the roots of attitudes that have excluded women from positions of power in the western world. Much of this research has focused upon new ways of viewing history, and the fine series of monographs Women in Culture and Society being published by the University of Chicago Press provides a prime example of the new awareness of the distaff side of history. Yet, little attention has been paid to some of the most basic assumptions of past generations of medieval historians about women and society. The claim that male chauvinist attitudes are founded in the primative Germanic concept of a warrior fraternity from which women were physiologically excluded from membership was already hoary when Fritz Kern published his classic account of medieval law and society in 1914. The comitatus band of Tacitus has been seen as a central component of the leitmotiv that produced chivalry. The chivalric love ethic has, of course, received great attention from women's historians, but the chivalric orders into which such views were distilled have been largely ignored.

The traditional view of the chivalric orders as fossilized parodies of the values they espoused so eloquently advocated by Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages still holds the field. Only in the last year have the chivalric orders been rehabilitated as genuine expressions of the human values of their age. The position of women within the tradition of the chivalric orders is worth a look for the intrinsic interest of the subject and for the insights that the investigation provides into the shifts in attitudes toward females over the centuries. The chivalric orders, and the Arthurian legends that inspired them, placed a high value on women, much higher than the earlier chansons de geste. While it is true that this tradition tended to place the lady upon a pedestal from which her daughters have fought to climb down, the greatest and longest lasting of these late-medieval chivalric fraternities, the Order of the Garter, also gave women a role in its celebrations.

The campaign for better public health was a major social issue in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. As in the case of Poor Law and factory reform, Edwin Chadwick stands as the person who directed public interest toward the need for sanitary reform. He did this through his association with the Poor Law Commission in the late 1830s, then through his seminal and widely read 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population. Chadwick's report captured the minds of many in the British upper middle class. The Health of Towns Association, founded in 1844, helped to diffuse information on the “physical and moral evils that result from the present defective sewerage, drainage, supply of water, air, and light. …” Although the sanitary reformers had made some minor gains by 1847, they had failed to produce a satisfactory bill that would allow government some role in coordinating sanitary improvement. At this point, neither Chadwick, nor any other leading proponent of sanitary legislation wanted to put full authority in the hands of the central government, but they did desire a more efficient combination of local and national control.

The sanitary reformers, and particularly Chadwick, achieved a measure of success in 1848 when the Public Health Bill received parliamentary approval. It was hoped the Act would bring about a useful consolidation of responsibility for drainage, sewerage, water supply, and road maintenance. Instead, the legislation spurred a furious debate over how much national government interference was acceptable. It did little to improve public health because the argument over government interference for a time took attention away from critical issues of sanitation reform. Although never completely overcome, the argument over principles faded in the 1850s in the face of an urgent need for reform.

On 22 June 1631 the government of Charles I issued Letters Patent proclaiming Captain Sir Charles Vavasor of Skellingthorpe, Lines., a baronet. The grant of honors to Sir Charles Vavasor was among the most distinctive made in England during the seventeenth century. By its special terms, Sir Charles became the first baronet (of approximately 285) to receive rights of precedence—in spite of parliamentary statutes opposing such rights. A clause of precedency declared the title retroactive to 29 June 1611, and that, in turn, made Sir Charles's father, Sir Thomas Vavasor, who had died in 1620, a baronet post mortem. The baronetcy of Sir Charles Vavasor is also unusual as one of the few which did not depend upon the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham, as the only one created during the whole of 1631, and as the last one created before the eve of Civil War.

The competition for honors among the gentry is an important element in the social history of early seventeenth century England, and a factor in the complex origins of the Civil War. The full dimensions of that competition can be illuminated by studying the motives of individual families, and the processes by which they achieved their titles. The Skellingthorpe Vavasor make an especially interesting study because of the unusual distinctions which attend their title.

Heretofore, however, paucity of evidence made it nearly impossible to reconstruct the quest for honors of the Skellingthorpe Vavasor. The evidence did show that before he died in 1620, Sir Thomas Vavasor sought the title of baronet without success, and that eleven years later, Sir Thomas's son, Charles, finally received a baronetcy with precedency. The intervening years, 1620-1631, had to be filled with conjectures about Charles Vavasor's motives, timing, and patronage, and also with some conjectures about why the government granted him honors of dubious legality.