An advocatus, or advocate, was generally a medieval term meaning "lawyer". The term was also used in continental Europe as the title of the lay lord charged with the protection and representation in secular matters of an abbey, known more fully as an advocatus ecclesiae.
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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, known as avoués, were of two types. The first included the great barons, who held the advocateship (avouerie) 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 included the petty lords who held their advocateships as hereditary fiefs and often as their sole means of subsistence. An abbey's avoid, of this class, corresponded to a bishop's vidame. Their function was generally to represent the abbot in his capacity as feudal lord, act as his representative in the courts of his superior, exercise secular justice in the abbot's name in the abbatial court, and lead the retainers of the abbey to battle under the banner of the patron saint. 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 central power and the increasing efficiency of royal administration. They had, in effect, long ceased to be effective in their original purpose, and after the advowson became a fief, they took advantage of their position to pillage and suppress those they were supposed to defend. Medieval records are full of complaints from abbots about usurpations, exactions, and acts of violence committed by the advocati.
In the Netherlands (as well as in Germany) advocati were often appointed in the cities, by the overlord or by the emperor, to take the place of the bailiff (Dutch schout, German Schultheiss) or to stand alongside this official in matters of Law.
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. Instead, the word advocatus, or more commonly avowee, 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 (Lat. advocatio).
In Germany, the title of Vogt (advocatus or "advocate") was given not only to the advocati of churches and abbeys but also, from early in the Middle Ages, to officials appointed by the Holy Roman Emperor to administer lands directly under his dominion, as opposed to the comital domains, owned by counts who had become hereditary princes of the Empire. The office or territory of a Vogt was a Vogtei. Land administered by a Vogt could also be known as a Vogtland (terra advocatorum), a name still used to refer to a region, the Vogtland, that adjoins the principalities of Reuss and adjacent portions of Saxony, Prussia and Bavaria. An imperial advocateship tended to become hereditary. Sometimes the emperor himself assumed the title of Vogt in application to particular parts of his eminent domain.
Charles West, "The Significance of the Carolingian Advocate", Early Medieval Europe 17 (2009), pp. 186-206
Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Advocatus ecclesiae", (1913), retrieved on 22 May 2009: s:Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Advocatus Ecclesiæ