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

St Columba and the convention at Druimm Cete: peace and politics at seventh‐century Iona

Attendance at the ‘convention of kings’ at Druimm Cete in north‐east Ireland is one of the most famous episodes in the career of St Columba or Colum Cille, who died in 597. Discussion of the significance of this shadowy summit, largely informed by unreliable late evidence, has hitherto focused upon what (may have) transpired there between kings based in Ireland and Scotland. The result has been the neglect of the hagiographical dimension of the presentation of Druimm Cete in our principal source, Adomnán's Vita Sancti Columbae, composed c.700. Analysis of this material shows that Adomnán's information about the convention came from his principal source, composed some sixty years earlier. It reveals moreover that Druimm Cete assumed prominence within the Columban dossier in the 640s for what it represented, rather than because of what actually happened there. Once the hagiographical agenda of Vita Sancti Columbae and its principal source is restored to its rightful place in evaluating the text, it emerges that several of its best‐known stories – including the story of Columba's ordination of a Scottish king – are much more problematic as witnesses to sixth‐century history than is conventionally supposed. As scholars begin to lose their grip upon the historical Columba, however, they grow better able to grasp seventh‐century political history in north‐east Ireland and Gaelic Scotland.