This article challenges the view that canon law was insignificant in the development of tenth-century English administrative and judicial institutions through a new study of Oda of Canterbury's Constitutiones, an important but neglected episcopal capitulary. Particular attention is paid to Oda's sources, the text's place in the legislative programme of King Edmund and the influence of wider European approaches to episcopal justice. The article shows that Oda's statutes endorsed an emerging system of collaborative justice between secular and ecclesiastical elites, thus demonstrating that tenth-century English governance was informed by a wider range of normative legal traditions than usually thought.

Despite the paucity of written sources for fifth- and sixth-century Britain, there are many inscriptions containing brief texts in Latin or Irish. This paper reinterprets these inscribed stones, showing that, contrary to the universal current assumption that most represent the memorials of secular notables, a much stronger case can be made for understanding them as ecclesiastical monuments associated with the cult of saints. Read in this way, they offer new insights into the fifth- and sixth-century British Church and the evangelisation of the west and north of Britain during these centuries.

The popular notion of social collapse consequent on natural catastrophe is here elegantly disentangled in a study of the dark summer of AD 536. Leaving aside the question of its cause, the authors show there is good scientific evidence for a climatic downturn, contemporary with good archaeological evidence for widespread disruption of settlement and population displacement in the northern latitudes. They then navigate through the shifting shadows of myth, and emerge with a welcome prize: strong circumstantial reasons for recognising that this widespread horror, like so many others, did leave its imprint on Scandinavian poetry and sculpture.

Did towns return to early medieval Europe through political leadership or economic expansion? This paper turns the spotlight on a particular group of actors, the long-distance traders, and finds that they stimulated proto-towns of a special kind among the Vikings. While social and economic changes, and aristocratic advantage, were widespread, it was the largely self-directed actions of these intrepid merchants which created what the author calls ‘the nodal points.’ One can think of many other periods and parts of the world in which this type of non-political initiative may well have proved pivotal.