Tom Johnson

Hooray! My book, Law in Common, has just come out in paperback, and is now a mere £30 Some representative index entries: - Custom, acting against - Highways, pigs in - Law-courts, feasting at - Mariners, testimony of - Theft, of eels - Vagabonds tinyurl.com/4kp237yz

Thanks @tomsojka for a great conversation about Intimate Subjects for @NewBooksBritish @NewBooksNetwork podcast. Check it out here! newbooksnetwork.com/intimate-subje…

Great episode of @LRB with @tomlukejohnson discussing @jotis13's new book 'By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion, and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England' (@OxUniPress) lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-v…

‘In early modern England, numbers were something you could touch. On tally-sticks and abacuses, counting boards and jettons, arithmetic was a feat of hand-eye coordination.’ @tomlukejohnson on early modern numbers: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/…

@Ajprescott Thanks Andrew, it's very kind of you to say!

@tomlukejohnson It is a fascinating and thought-provoking article which contains many thought-provoking new perspectives. Many congratulations to both of you - it was well worth the struggle!!

This article took about 4 years to write together, and another 3 to revise / get through the publication process. I'm not sure what the lesson of this (writing is hard?) is but I'm really pleased to see it out If you would like a pdf and don't have access, drop me a DM

@KathyLo56824537 Yes -- sorry, didn't realize they had been closed!

‘In premodern England, number had a texture. Three barleycorns laid end to end made an inch. The “long” hundred was 120 for herring, but 112 for measures of tin. Four saltfish made a warp.’ Tom Johnson on the material nature of numbers: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/…

For the new issue of the LRB, I wrote about tally-sticks, plague bills, and how to use a counting board

@HREhistorian to be honest I had taken the Oxbridge-y stuff for granted here - I was more amazed at the growing up in a sanatorium and then going to live with his headmaster...!

@tomlukejohnson To be clear, I'm talking about the humanities here. The natural sciences were doubtless always more diverse (at least in terms of background and nationality - gender is a whole other story!) But the humanities only really escaped that parochialism in the '90s.

the biography of a mid-century medievalist never fails to amaze

@earlymodernjohn Congratulations! Looks great.

Abstract is at the link or read it here:

It's out! 'Migrant Voices in Multilingual London, 1560-1600' in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Read to find out how insults and information moved between the city's languages, and to think about how linguistic diversity shaped urban life. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Exciting news! We're advertising for a fully funded doctoral studentship at the University of Oxford and @UkNatArchives to work on Chaucer's thameside life and poetry. Supervised by me and Prof Marion Turner. Details below, please share widely! oocdtp.web.ox.ac.uk/ox-cda-turner-…

My book about how we can tell a new history of Britain through the city of Liverpool now has a cover. It's out next year but can be pre-ordered here: waterstones.com/book/liverpool…

This is a wonderful piece of scholarship and I learned so much from supervising it. Congratulations Sarah!

Still have time to submit your proposal to IMC Leeds next year. Our session is about medieval News and everything about it!!!!

all this and more in Paul Cavill, ‘Mortuary dues in early sixteenth-century England’, Continuity and Change, 36 (2021), 285-308.

reading about "mortuary": when medieval parishioners died they had to give their best or second-best animal to the rector also called "foredrove" because in some places the gifted ox, or horse, or sheep was used to lead the coffin into the church in the funeral procession (!)

This is one of the best books I've read recently: elegiac but spare, with a twist in the last line that stabs you right in the heart

And some secondary, related news: I won't be teaching in Oxford until next September, as this year I am taking up a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to work on my "reckoning" project. I'll look forward to sharing some of the research coming out of this soon

Some news: as of today, I am delighted to be starting a new position as Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Medieval History @OrielOxford I'll miss my wonderful colleagues at York but I'm excited to begin this new chapter (and to work in the Bodleian again!)