Over thirty English women can be identified who lived for some time between 1360 and 1420 in Rome. Since they could not do most things men did, act as travelling merchants nor of course become clergy, most English women who lived for any length of time in Rome were either wives or widows. There were very few unmarried daughters and few religious. Their experience must have been very different from their sisters in England. Some were probably pilgrims, perhaps pilgrims who stayed. Again the experience must have been different for a woman.

Whereas notaries' protocols usually contain a number of marriage contracts, I found none for English couples in Rome, and only one for an English man, John Cross, (Croce) of Colonna in 1391, several times camerarius of S Thomas's beginning in 1401, whose dower arrangements when he was marrying Angillela, daughter of Francesca, widow of Paulus Macarii, are preserved, though some of the other marriages must have taken place in Rome also. Marriage in Italy differed from England and indeed from city to city in the peninsula, though the exchange of ‘words of present consent’, essential for a canonical marriage, was always carefully recorded. In the Roman protocols the actual marriage (subarratio) was before a notary and remembered in a document by which he recorded that the young couple before him were asked in turn if they wished the other to be their wife or husband, replying volo.