Corruption, Protection and Justice in Medieval Europe: A Thousand Year History. By Jonathan R.Lyon. Cambridge University Press, 2023. xx + 417pp. £29.99.

In recent years, there has been much speculation over the rise of 'accountability'. In theory (Joseph Strayer, Thomas Bisson, John Sabapathy, Frédérique Lachaud, Robert Berkhofer), this was a phenomenon of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, ensuring that the 'bad old ways' yielded place to a new emphasis upon the obligations of patrons to clients and of rulers to ruled. Such claims, Jonathan Lyon now suggests, are starry eyed: divorced from the realities of a world in which greed and kleptocracy remained ubiquitous. For realities, he argues, we would do better to look to the mafioso practices of modern autocrats than to any rose-tinted fictions swallowed by the gullible. 'Accountability' itself he dismisses as a thin gilt crust, beneath which far darker impulses seethed. This is a bold and in many ways persuasive thesis, expounded in Lyons' opening twenty pages. To justify it, he then offers us a thousand-year conspectus of the lay 'advocacy' of churches, from Einhard to Schiller's Wilhelm Tell. For the most part, he focuses upon German-speaking lands east of the Rhine. Anglophone readers, familiar with Susan Wood's 1955 study of English Monasteries and their Patrons (oddly unacknowledged by Lyon), may on the whole assume that such advocacy was benign, offering lay patrons spiritual services and a degree of dynastic kudos in return for their protection. With one notorious exception (Geoffrey fitz Peter's quarrel with the monks of Walden), the English image of the 'advocatus' has blurred relatively cosily into that of 'advowson' ('advocatio'), in both instances with patron and church bound together, for the most part, in mutually supportive harmony. This was not at all the case, Lyon argues, with the German lay patron or 'vogt': strongmen, exercising their authority with iron fist rather than velvet glove. Operating with particular vigour in areas of otherwise weak 'royal' or 'public' authority, by the tenth century, such advocacy had become an aristocratic privilege, treated with increasing wariness by its monastic clients. Some 'vogt' no doubt discharged their duties with scrupulous fairness. Others, however, 'did not understand advocacy as an office under the authority of the Church, but as a hereditary possession': indeed even as something conferred by God ('Gaucher gratia Dei advocatus oppidi Salinensis', p. 125). What before the year 1000 had been duties of defence or representation, especially in blood judgments or the prosecution of crime, were increasingly transformed into lucractive protection rackets involving exactions in cash or kind, lodgings, procurations and other such 'rights'. Hence the rash of forgeries by which the monks themselves sought to impose limits upon lordly extortion. Hence too the regular explosions of violence in which patrons and clients battled like hawks and doves (pp. 153–4), or in which monasteries became embroiled in their advocates' own private warfare. Just as in England, where sheriffs (or 'vicecomites') were regularly accused of corruption from which, on the whole, the earls (or 'comites') were deemed to stand aloof, so too in Germany, the office of 'subadvocatus' is reported as particularly prone to abuse. Once again, however, the contrast here is a pointed one, since in England earl and sheriff were ultimately delegates of royal authority, with the earl's public status acknowledged by ceremonial belting and the grant of the (royally revocable) third penny of pleas. Not so in Germany where such offices were practically autonomous and there was often no obvious or effective forum in which appeals against a 'vogt' or his deputies might be heard. Petitioning the emperor himself to serve as advocate, as was increasingly the case for Cistercian houses, was one potential escape route. Alternatively, a monastery might 'repurchase' its rights of advocacy from a lay patron and confer them instead upon the local bishop, albeit with the risk of thus falling from frying pan into fire. As Lyon notes, Lucius III's bull 'Ad abolendam' (1184), long squeezed dry for its role in the future papal prosecution of heresy, is in reality directed just as forcefully against the evils of lay advocacy. Enacted in the presence of the Emperor Frederick Babarossa, it decreed excommunication against all 'advocati', 'patroni', 'vicedomini' or 'custodes' who sought more than what was theirs by ancient or episcopally sanctioned right. Where, from the 1250s onwards, it has been argued, such rights became a fairly harmless status symbol, Lyon cites case after case in which advocacy, however altered or formalized, continued to confer both real power and financial profit. This is an important book, perhaps best read chapter by chapter as a collection of micro-studies, each beginning with a distinct incident or abuse of power. Lyon is critical of the artificial categories devised by German scholarship ('Schirmvogt', 'Beamtenvogt', 'Gerichtvogt', etc.), unknown to medieval taxonomy. There is a risk nonetheless that in seeking to emphasize the originality of his thesis, he sets up his own men of straw against whom to do battle. Is it really the case, for instance, that scholars assume a withering away of lordly greed or kleptocracy from the 1250s onwards? Or that in the ensuing centuries (of Gilles de Rai no less than of Vlad Dracul), they assume that lordship on Elbe or Danube was neutered by the germination of the Weberian state? In a book that begins in Francia, and that happily cites Abbo of Fleury or the Vézelay chronicle for developments before 1200, how, why and at what point does Lyon suppose that Germany diverged from western Frankish norms? In other words, are we not here at risk of returning to a view of the German past, bereft of the mechanisms of public justice or equity that most recent scholars, trailing in the wake of Otto Brunner and Karl Leyser, have been at such pains to reinstate? Pitching his tent in the shadow of Klingsor's Tower, Lyon risks ignoring the rather less gloomy story as sung at Nuremberg, or trumpeted (recte alpenhorned) on the Rütli meadow. In a study that begins with such bold albeit pessimistic emphasis upon 'corruption' at the expense of 'accountability', there is undoubtedly a disjunction between Lyon's broad opening vista and the far narrower peep-hole of advocacy through which he then directs our gaze. For all that, there are still not nearly enough good Anglophone books on medieval Germany. This is one such that deserves both readership and debate.