Dr Tom Johnson

My research focuses on everyday life in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, with a particular interest in how people understood and interacted with law courts, documents, and more recently, economic institutions. Among other subjects, I have written about the laws of shipwreck, what Marx can tell us about medieval ghost stories, and why people went to soothsayers in order to solve crimes.

I also have a longstanding interest in historical methodology and how reflection on our methods of working can inform the production of historical knowledge (and just as important, an understanding of its limits); which is perhaps just a fancy way of saying that I have never really gotten over the strange and beguiling experience of touching, reading, and thinking about really old documents.

Research Interests

My first book, Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. It is a social history, exploring how ordinary people used and shaped legal institutions in the long fifteenth century (c.1380-1530). Based on a wide body of archival research, it investigates the many local seigneurial, customary, and ecclesiastical courts that have often been ignored or overlooked in legal histories of this period; it shows these were essential to the formation of distinctive vernacular legal cultures that emerged in towns, forests, and maritime communities. The book argues that alongside this pluralism, a common set of legal practices – through the physical environment, the production of social knowledge, vernacular language, and the use of documents – generated a broader legal culture ‘from below’.

I have two new projects, supported by a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and in the academic year 2024-5, a Mid-Career Fellowship with the British Academy. The first project is about "reckoning" -- an informal practice of accounting, by which people balanced out the credits and debts they generated in the course of their everyday transactions. Drawing on research into several dozen account books of the kind that were made and kept more often in the fifteenth century, I want to think about how reckoning and accounting more generally came to shape the way people thought about value, social relations, and the documents in which these were recorded. The research will be published as a series of three articles (my accounting triptych): on reckoning as a social practice, on the poetics of financial accounts, and on "economic inscription".

The second project is a trade book entitled The Fishermen's Church: Reckoning and Ruin in a Medieval Fishing Village, under contract with Allen Lane. It is a microhistory of Walberswick, a fishing village on the Suffolk coast, in the fifteenth century. In the later Middle Ages, this coastline was devastated by the North Sea: floods, storms, and siltation destroyed towns, harbours, and livelihoods. Yet in the midst of this upheaval, the fishermen of Walberswick set out plans to build a magnificent new church – a nave that could hold a thousand souls – a project that would take over a century to complete. The book explores what it means to live, work, and even build something new in the face of environmental collapse, and what kind of history can be salvaged from the ruins.