Governance, locality and legal culture: the rise and fall of the Carolingian advocates of Saint‐Martin of Tours

This article examines the office of advocate at abbey Saint-Martin Tours. It studies what was regionally distinctive about its emergence there in late ninth century and suggests a reason for office’s demise early tenth century. In doing so, it draws out important discursive shifts which were part parcel both setting-up fading-away Carolingian ‘reform’, suggesting that changes seen advocatial ones mentality first administrative change only secondarily.