Amateur justice in Carolingian Bavaria

Abstract

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.