Advocatus

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An advocatus was an attorney at law in the Middle Ages. It was used in Continental Europe as the title of the lay lord charged with the protection and representation in secular matters of an abbey. The office is traceable as early as the beginning of the 5th century in the Roman Empire, the churches being allowed to choose defensores from the body of advocates to represent them in the courts. In the Frankish Kingdom, under the Merovingians, these lay representatives of the churches appear as agentes, defensores and advocati; and under the Carolingians it was made obligatory on bishops, abbots and abbesses to appoint such officials in every county where they held property. The office was not hereditary, the advocatus being chosen, either by the abbot alone, or by the abbot and bishop concurrently with the count. The same causes that led to the development of the feudal system also affected the advocatus. In times of confusion churches and abbeys needed not so much a legal representative as an armed protector, while as feudal immunities were conceded to the ecclesiastical foundations, these required a representative to defend their rights and to fulfill their secular obligations to the state, such as leading the ecclesiastical levies to war. A new class of advocatus thus arose, whose office, commonly rewarded by a grant of land, crystallized into a fief, which, like other fiefs, had by the beginning of the 12th century become hereditary.

In France, the advocati (avoués) were of two classes. The first class was the great barons, who held the advocateship of an abbey or abbeys rather as an office than a fief, though they were indemnified for the protection they afforded by a domain and preach revenues granted by the abbey: thus the "duke of avoué". Normandy was advocatus of nearly all the abbeys in the duchy. The second class was the petty seigneurs, who held their avoueries as hereditary fiefs and often as their sole means of subsistence. The avoid of an abbey, of this class, corresponded to the vidame of a bishop. Their function was generally to represent the abbot in his capacity as feudal lord; to act as his representative in the courts of his superior lord; to exercise secular justice in the abbot's name in the abbatial court; to lead the retainers of the abbey to battle under the banner of the patron saint.

In England, the word advocatus was never used to denote a hereditary representative of an abbot; but in some of the larger abbeys there were hereditary stewards whose functions and privileges were not dissimilar to those of the continental advocati. The word advocatus, however, was in constant use in England to denote the patron of an ecclesiastical benefice, whose sole right of any importance was a hereditary one of presenting a parson to the bishop for institution. In this way the hereditary right of presentation to a benefice came to be called in English an "advowson" (advocatio).

The advocatus played a more important part in the feudal polity of the Empire and of the Low Countries than in France, where his functions, confined to the protection of the interests of religious houses, were superseded from the 13th century onwards by the growth of the central power and the increasing efficiency of the royal administration. They had, indeed, long ceased to be effective for their original purpose; and from the time when their office became a fief they had taken advantage of their position to pillage and suppress those whom it was their function to defend. The medieval records, not in France only, are full of complaints by abbots of their usurpations, exactions and acts of violence.

In Germany, the title of advocatus (Vogt) was given not only to the advocati of churches and abbeys, but to the officials appointed, from early in the Middle Ages, by the German emperor to administer their immediate domains, in Vogt contradistinction to the counts, who had become hereditary princes of the Empire. The territory so administered was known as Vogtland (terra advocatorum), a name still sometimes employed to designate the strip of country which embraces the principalities of Reuss and adjacent portions of Saxony, Prussia and Bavaria. These imperial advocati tended in their turn to become hereditary. Sometimes the emperor himself assumed the title of Vogt of some particular part of his immediate domain. In the Netherlands as well as in Germany advocati were often appointed in the cities, by the overlord or by the emperor, sometimes to take the place of the bailiff, sometimes alongside this official.

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