Tom Johnson

How​ will we know when the world is ending? According to ‘The Pricke of Conscience’, an English poem c.1340, the apocalypse will proceed with a fortnight of terrifying signs. On the first day the sea will rise to the height of a mountain, then on the second day drain away to a trickle. There will be a hideous roaring from the ‘mast wonderful fisshes of the se’, blood...

Children​ have always liked to stash things in hidey-holes. The Carmelite church in Coventry was built with resonance passages, a series of hollows under the wooden floorboards of the chancel. In the 15th century, the church was home to a choir, which meant herding together a dozen young boys and making them stand still for long periods of time; in the 1550s, the building came to be used as a...

In​ 1641, the Golden Grape, a three-masted five-hundred-ton Dutch merchant fluyt, set off from Cádiz to Le Havre with an official cargo of 1253 barrels of raisins, four hundred jars of olive oil and a little wine. Its unofficial cargo, laden at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, was a great quantity of silk taffeta and a bag of five hundred gold pistoles, defying the ban on bullion...

Half​ of London was dead, and it was time to spend. Between the plague of 1348 and a second wave in 1361, wages rose steeply, and workers couldn’t wait to enjoy the good things in life. ‘There is scarcely a villein today who is satisfied with his lot,’ a sermon writer complained. Oxherds and ploughmen were eating well. Artisans were going about dressed as gentlemen,...

In​ 1391, 2.3 million sheets of paper arrived at the port of London: a page for every person in England. Most of it was probably low-quality brown paper used as a packing material to protect foodstuffs and ceramics as they juddered along cartways into the city. A small amount, some 3500 sheets, was the ornamental paper used for decorations at feasts and known as papiri depicti (Chaucer...