MSt, PhD, FRHistS
Tom Johnson grew up in Ipswich before reading History at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, graduating with a double first in 2010. He moved to Magdalen College, Oxford for an MSt. in Medieval History, before completing his PhD under the supervision of John Arnold at Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2015 he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before moving the next year to a permanent lectureship at the University of York.
Tom is a social historian of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. He is the author of Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (Oxford, 2020), as well as numerous articles on medieval history and historical method. Among other subjects, he has written about the laws of shipwreck, what Marx can tell us about medieval ghost stories, and why people went to soothsayers to solve crimes. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
Tom’s work has been recognized with research fellowships at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton, the University of Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaures, the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. He has just finished the manuscript of his second book, a microhistory of a medieval fishing village, which will come out with Allen Lane.
Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England. Oxford University Press. 2024.
Johnson, T and de Larivière, CJ, “Ordinary Politics in Late Medieval Europe,” Past & Present (2024).
“Byland Revisited, or, Spectres of Inheritance,” Journal of Medieval History, 48(4) (2022), 439–456.
” Medieval Law and Materiality: Shipwrecks, Finders, and Property on the Suffolk Coast, ca. 1380–1410, The American Historical Review, 120(2) (2015), 407–432.