A first-generation academic from a working-class background, I am a social historian of England in the period c.1500-1750, with a particular interest in the relationship between historical change and the everyday lives of ordinary men and women. My main research interests include:

• the history of drinking
• the history of work (especially the gender division of labour and work-based identities)
• the histories of time-telling and time-use
• the history of literacies
• the history of the South West
• approaches to the study of 'popular culture' and 'history from below'

My first book, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England, was published in 2014. For more information on my other publications see the 'Research Outputs' section of these pages.

Between 2015 and 2018 I worked with Professor Jane Whittle on a Leverhulme Trust funded project on 'Women's Work in Rural England, 1500-1700', which investigated women's and men's work activities using incidental evidence from witness statements given before the courts. This resulted in a co-authored article on 'The Gender Division of Labour in Early Modern England' in Economic History Review, and solo-authored articles on 'Time and Work in Rural England, 1500-1700' and 'Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550-1700', both in Past and Present. From 2019 to 2024 I am working with Jane on an ERC funded follow-up project on 'Forms of Labour: Gender, Freedom and Experience of Work in the Preindustrial Economy', which will result in a co-authored book (also with Hannah Robb and Taylor Aucoin) on The Experience of Work in Early Modern England with Cambridge University Press.

Across 2022 and 2023 I was a core scholar on a SSHRC Canada funded project on 'Writing Class: Public Engagement and Politics in the New Class History'.

For the academic year 2023 to 2024 I have a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to work on a book on Everyday Life in the Seventeenth-Century English Village, which focuses on my hometown of Portishead in Somerset.

I am a contributor to the collaborative early modern history blog the many-headed monster; I tweet in a professional capacity as @mark_hailwood; and I am a founding director of the international and interdisciplinary Drinking Studies Network.