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.