II. The Advocate's Office and Royal Justice in East Francia and the German Kingdom, c. 800–c. 1125.

The office of the advocate has received enormous scholarly attention since the later nineteenth century. In his recent monograph on this subject, Corruption, Protection and Justice in Medieval Europe: A Thousand Year History, Jonathan Lyon has sought to provide a fundamentally new approach by emphasizing the ways in which the office of the advocate can be used to understand conflicts among numerous holders of power, both secular and ecclesiastical, over the control of property and the judicial authority over people. In doing so, however, Lyon has drawn overly broad conclusions and overlooked important elements of both con-tinuity and change in the relationship between the royal government and advocates in the German speaking lands, particularly in the early medieval period. The burden of the current study is to illuminate the ongoing efforts, and frequent success, of the rulers of the Carolingian, Ottonian, and Salian dynasties to exercise control over advocates as they carried out the fundamentally public duty of providing justice to the king's subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]