Women played a significant part in tenth‐century Rome, and the documentation makes them visible in a way rarely seen in early medieval sources. First examining the political agency of the foremost among them, women like Marozia and the Theophylact family senatrices, this paper also highlights the socio‐economic, legal and cultural role of many women of lower status. As donors, buyers and lessees, able to acquire property as well as to dispose of it within Roman law, their impact as part of a family group or in their own name becomes far more visible than either earlier or later.

This paper examines judges and judgement in Bavarian dispute charters from the first decades of the ninth century. It argues that justice in Carolingian Bavaria was an amateur affair, in which of primary importance was the ability to create a stable consensus around an outcome. Accordingly, distinctions between judges and other participants in judicial assemblies were blurred, and the capacities in which assembly‐goers participated often blended into each other. Even when royal agents intervened in the region, they did this mainly through, rather than against, the consensus dynamics of local judicial assemblies.

This article argues that there is no strong evidence for the continuity of the cult of St Alban at Verulamium from the fifth to the eighth century. The written evidence suggests rather that the martyr narrative and cult of Alban was created in Gaul and reimported to Britain through texts. The activity at late and post‐Roman Verulamium is contextualized by comparing it with archaeological evidence from contemporary British sites. The article explores how the contrasts and connections between Britain and the Continent determined the survival of devotion to Alban.

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