a tomb said to be his. He was buried at the abbey he founded here, of which only a wall and the foundations below ground remain. At Davington, close to Faversham, there are remains, incorporated in a residence, of the cloisters and other parts of a Benedictine priory founded in 1153. Faversham has a free grammar school founded in 1527 and removed to its present site in 1877. Faversham Creek is navigable up to the town for vessels of 200 tons. The shipping trade is considerable, chiefly in coal, timber and agricultural produce. The oyster fisheries are important, and are managed by a very ancient gild, the Company of Free Dredgermen of the Hundred and Manor of Faversham. Brewing, brickmaking and the manufacture of cement are also carried on, and there are several large powder mills in the vicinity. The town is governed by a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors. Area, 686 acres.
There was a Romano-British village on the site of Faversham. The town (Fauresfeld, Faveresham) owed its early importance to its situation as a port on the Swale, to the fertile country surrounding it, and to the neighbourhood of Watling Street. In 811 it was called the king’s town, and a witenagemot was held here under Æthelstan. In 1086 it was assessed as royal demesne, and a market was held here at this date. An abbey was built by Stephen in 1147, in which he and Matilda were buried. They had endowed it with the manor and hundred of Faversham; this grant caused many disputes between the abbot and men of Faversham concerning the abbot’s jurisdiction. Faversham was probably a member of Dover from the earliest association of the Cinque Ports, certainly as early as Henry III., who in 1252 granted among other liberties of the Cinque Ports that the barons of Faversham should plead only in Shepway Court, but ten years later transferred certain pleas to the abbot’s court. In this reign also the abbot appointed the mayor, but from the reign of Edward I. he was elected by the freemen and then installed by the abbot. The corporation was prescriptive, and a hallmote held in 1293 was attended by a mayor and twelve jurats. All the liberties of the Cinque Ports were granted to the barons of Faversham by Edward I. in 1302, and confirmed by Edward III. in 1365, and by later monarchs. The governing charter till 1835 was that of Henry VIII., granted in 1545 and confirmed by Edward VI.
FAVORINUS (2nd century A.D.), Greek sophist and philosopher,
flourished during the reign of Hadrian. A Gaul by birth, he was
a native of Arelate (Arles), but at an early age began his lifelong
travels through Greece, Italy and the East. His extensive
knowledge, combined with great oratorical powers, raised him
to eminence both in Athens and in Rome. With Plutarch, who
dedicated to him his treatise Περὶ τοῦ πρώτου ψυχροῦ, with
Herodes Atticus, to whom he bequeathed his library at Rome,
with Demetrius the Cynic, Cornelius Fronto, Aulus Gellius,
and with Hadrian himself, he lived on intimate terms; his great
rival, whom he violently attacked in his later years, was Polemon
of Smyrna. It was Favorinus who, on being silenced by Hadrian
in an argument in which the sophist might easily have refuted
his adversary, subsequently explained that it was foolish to
criticize the logic of the master of thirty legions. When the
servile Athenians, feigning to share the emperor’s displeasure
with the sophist, pulled down a statue which they had erected
to him, Favorinus remarked that if only Socrates also had had a
statue at Athens, he might have been spared the hemlock. Of
the very numerous works of Favorinus, we possess only a few
fragments (unless the Κορινθιακὸς λόγος attributed to his
tutor Dio Chrysostom is by him), preserved by Aulus Gellius,
Diogenes Laërtius, Philostratus, and Suïdas, the second of
whom borrows from his Παντοδαπὴ ἱστορία (miscellaneous
history) and his Ἀπομνημονεύματα (memoirs). As a philosopher,
Favorinus belonged to the sceptical school; his most important
work in this connexion appears to have been Πυρρώνειοι τρόποι
(the Pyrrhonean Tropes) in ten books, in which he endeavours
to show that the methods of Pyrrho were useful to those who
intended to practise in the law courts.
See Philostratus, Vitae sophistarum, i. 8; Suïdas, s.v.; frags. in C. W. Müller, Frag. Hist. Graec. iii. 4; monographs by L. Legré (1900), T. Colardeau (1903).
FAVRAS, THOMAS DE MAHY, Marquis de (1744–1790),
French royalist, was born on the 26th of March 1744, at Blois.
He belonged to a poor family whose nobility dated from the
12th century. At seventeen he was a captain of dragoons,
and saw some service in the closing campaign of the Seven
Years’ War. In 1772 he became first lieutenant of the Swiss
guards of the count of Provence (afterwards Louis XVIII.).
Unable to meet the expenses of his rank, which was equivalent
to the grade of colonel in the army, he retired in 1775. He
married in 1776 Victoria Hedwig Caroline, princess of Anhalt-Bernburg-Schaumburg,
whose mother, deserted by her husband
Prince Carl Ludwig in 1749, had found refuge with her daughter
in the house of Marshal Soubise. After his marriage he went to
Vienna to press the restitution of his wife’s rights, and spent
some time in Warsaw. In 1787 he was authorized to raise a
patriotic legion to help the Dutch against the stadtholder
William IV. and his Prussian allies. Returning to Paris at the
outbreak of the Revolution, he became implicated in schemes
for the escape of Louis XVI. from Paris and the dominance of
the National Assembly. He was commissioned by the count
of Provence through one of his gentlemen, the comte de la
Châtre, to negotiate a loan of two million francs from the bankers
Schaumel and Sartorius. Favras took into his confidence
certain officers by whom he was betrayed; and, with his wife,
he was arrested on Christmas Eve 1789 and imprisoned in the
Abbaye. A fortnight later they were separated, Favras being
removed to the Châtelet. It was stated in a leaflet circulated
throughout Paris that Favras had organized a plot of which
the count of Provence was the moving spirit. A force of 30,000
was to be raised, La Fayette and Bailly, the mayor of Paris,
were to be assassinated, and Paris was to be starved into submission
by cutting off supplies. The count hastened publicly
to disavow Favras in a speech delivered before the commune of
Paris and in a letter to the National Assembly, although there is
no reasonable doubt of his complicity in the plot that did exist.
In the course of a trial of nearly two months’ duration the
witnesses disagreed, and even the editor of the Révolutions de
Paris (No. 30) admitted that the evidence was insufficient
but an armed attempt of the Royalists on the Châtelet on the
26th of January, which was defeated by La Fayette, roused the
suspicious temper of the Parisians to fury, and on the 18th of
February 1790, in spite of the courageous defence of his counsel,
Favras was condemned to be hanged. He refused to give any
information of the alleged plot, and the sentence was carried out
on the Place de Grève the next day, to the delight of the populace,
since it was the first instance when no distinction in the mode
of execution was allowed between noble and commoner. Favras
was generally regarded as a martyr to his refusal to implicate
the count of Provence, and Madame de Favras was pensioned
by Louis XVI. She left France, and her son Charles de Favras
served in the Austrian and the Russian armies. He received an
allowance from Louis XVIII. Her daughter Caroline married
Rüdiger, Freiherr von Stillfried Ratènic, in 1805.
The official dossier of Favras’s trial for high treason against the nation disappeared from the Châtelet, but its substance is preserved in the papers of a clerk.
Bibliography.—For particulars see A. Tuetey, Répertoire général des sources manuscrites de l’histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution Française (vol. i., 1890, pp. 175–177); M. Tourneux, Bibl. de l’histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution Française (vol. i. pp. 196–198, 1890). His brother, M. Mahy de Cormère, published a Mémoire justificatif in 1790 and a Justification in 1791. See also a memoir by Eduard, Freiherr v. Stillfried Ratènic (Vienna, 1881), and an article by Alexis de Valon in the Revue des deux mondes (15th June 1851).
FAVRE, JEAN ALPHONSE (1815–1890), Swiss geologist,
was born at Geneva on the 31st of March 1815. He was for
many years professor of geology in the academy at Geneva, and
afterwards president of the Federal Commission with charge
of the geological map of Switzerland. One of his earliest papers
was On the Anthracites of the Alps (1841), and later he gave
special attention to the geology of Savoy and of Mont Blanc,
and to the ancient glacial phenomena of those Alpine regions.
His elucidation of the geological structure demonstrated that
