He was educated at Birmingham University (BA, PhD, PGCE) and King's College London (MA).
His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Nicholas Brooks and completed in 1992, investigated the late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman aristocracy in East Anglia.
After working as a temporary lecturer in medieval history at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford (1992–4), he was employed by the Institute of Historical Research (1995–2002).
His connections through family and friends with South/East Asia led to his work on the comparative history of Europe and South/East Asia in the early middle ages, partly completed while an academic visitor at the Department of Economic History, LSE and the Department of Economics, Lingnan University (2003–4).
He was a research associate in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London (2003–6) working on the AHRC Durham Liber Vitae project, and in 2006 he was appointed as director of the British Academy Hearth Tax Project (Centre for Hearth Tax Research) in the Department of Humanities at Roehampton University.