1Early modern Europe was a largely oral society, which placed speech at the heart of its legal system. This appeared to disadvantage non-verbal people, particularly those who were prelingually deaf and used sign language to communicate, particularly when it came to making wills, going to court or even getting married. Doubts were raised over deaf people’s ability to give informed consent, with some contemporaries arguing that since deaf people could not hear, they did not know what they were agreeing to. Others saw prelingual deafness (described as being “deaf and dumb”) as a cognitive disability, arguing that deaf people were not capable of rational consent. These beliefs were echoed in early modern legal guides, and in the Europe-wide efforts to teach deaf children to speak vocally in the 17th and 18th centuries. As a result, successive historians have argued that prelingually deaf people had few legal rights (Oates, “Speaking in hands”). Yet, a closer reading of the archival sources shows that this was not the case in early modern England. The medieval Catholic Church had decreed that deaf signing was a legally valid alternative to vocal speech in the case of marriage: a sacrament with legal as well as spiritual implications. This facilitated deaf people’s engagement in the common law courts too, implying that deaf men and women were rational human beings whose language was that of the hands. And despite England becoming a Protestant country, canon law continued to support deaf marriage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, it was not always clear cut to contemporaries that deaf people were able to get married: prejudice lingered about the intellectual capacity of deaf men and women, while a limited understanding of deaf signs meant deaf people were sometimes ignored or misrepresented. Things unsaid could be highly contested when only a few people used deaf signs, and the power of the spoken word was a constant through the period. In this article, based on a keynote lecture at the Le Non dit conference of September 2025, I will explore four very different experiences of deaf brides or bridegrooms in 16th and 17th-century England to examine the significance of speech, signs and speechlessness in Restoration England.
2Historians have identified how the oral nature of legal proceedings could be problematic for prelingually deaf men and women. Despite the rise in written records in medieval England, much of the law still relied upon speech and hearing. Lawsuits were “heard” in court, and defendants “pleaded” their case; while, in the field of conveyance property was transferred by spoken words alongside written contracts. In marriage, speech mattered too, with the bride and groom consenting to marry each other in the presence of witnesses who saw and heard the agreement. This has led historians to suggest that prelingually deaf people – who neither heard nor spoke verbally – were automatically excluded from most legal proceedings. As Michael Clanchy, historian of medieval England claimed: “one consequence of the litigant having to speak for themselves was that the deaf and dumb seem to have had no legal rights” in the medieval period (272-279).
3And indeed, legal guides from the medieval and early period suggest this was the case. Summaries of medieval legal cases which were published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included examples of prelingually deaf men who, having been charged with murder, were allowed to go free because no one could decide whether they could be held liable, could be charged, or could work out how to conduct the trial. It seemed that speechlessness was a bar to engaging with the legal system. In 1583, for example, one legal writer, Richard Crompton, produced a guide for magistrates in which he advised that since prelingually deaf people were not able to plead, they could not be tried in court or punished (fos. 19r- 20r, 87v).
4Yet, it was not merely a matter of logistics. Some authors believed that speech was a mark of humanity and argued that the speechlessness of prelingually deaf people was evidence that they were cognitively impaired and needed to be treated like infants. This was another ancient tradition which was revived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when philosophers started to ask what defined a human, and what characteristics separated animals from humans. Speech – along with the ability to reason – was seen as being uniquely human: a sign of divine favour which explained why mankind had a specially privileged place in creation. At the end of the seventeenth century, for example, the naturalist and minister John Ray wrote, in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, that speech was “a quality so peculiar to Man, that no Beast could ever attain it” (cited in Serjeantson 425).
5These beliefs had implications for prelingually deaf people: some contemporaries believed that because deaf men and women were apparently speechless they were as irrational as animals and could not, therefore, engage with the legal system. As John Bulwer wrote in the mid-seventeenth century: deaf men “wanting speech, are reckoned little better than dumb animals” and as a result, as Bulwer noted, “in Civil law” a deaf person was “compared to an infant” (102, 109). Since, it was argued, deaf people were incapable of making a rational decision, they could not be held responsible for their actions. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Michael Dalton published a guide to magistrates, The Country Justice, which was to be a bestseller and was repeatedly reprinted well into the eighteenth century. He argued that if “a man born deaf and dumb killeth another, that is no felony, for he cannot know whether he did evil or no.” Instead, Dalton argued that “such acts happen by involuntary ignorance” (1618, 215 -216).
6As a result, historians have seen the early modern period as one of exclusion and marginalisation for deaf people. In her detailed assessment of deaf education in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Marilyn Daniels argued that “people who were deaf were considered incapable of speech, devoid of the ability to reason, and unable to communicate […] they were unable to inherit land, or own property, receive an education or acquire the salvation of the Church” (3). A few years later, Jonathan Rée summarised early modern views of deaf people as follows: “it was debatable whether the deaf could ever be validly received into Christian communion, since they could neither show that they understood and accepted the creed, nor confess their sins. Their inability to swear an oath also debarred them from the proceedings of civil courts, and from most feudal rights and duties” (95). Drawing on the claims of John Bulwer, esteemed scholar Elizabeth Bearden argued that “linguistic capacity was a benchmark for personhood” in early modern Europe (91-92), a claim I repeated in an article from 2022, asserting that “England was no exception” to this exclusion of deaf people (“Speaking in Hands” 55).
7I was wrong. As indeed was John Bulwer, and many other writers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who argued that vocal speech was essential for deaf men and women to assert their legal identity in early modern England. In fact, deaf signs had been accepted as a legally valid alternative to speech hundreds of years before John Bulwer wrote his book in 1648. The legal guides and contemporary discussions about civil law and inheritance were out of step with developments in the Church, which acknowledged that certain manual signs and gestures were as eloquent as vocal speech. It was a development that had wide-reaching ramifications for prelingually deaf men and women, allowing them to take part in Church sacraments, including the Eucharist and confession. Furthermore, by accepting that signing was equivalent to speech, the idea that deaf people were cognitively disabled was dismissed. As a result, deaf men and women should be theoretically able to make wills and transfer property, and even go to court. In all of these different settings, deaf signs were equivalent to vocal speech, allowing men and women to assert a legal identity without speaking audibly (Oates, Silent Histories). In this article, however, I am going to concentrate on just one area where the role of vocal speech, deaf signs, and consent were thrown into sharp relief: that of deaf marriage.
8Marriage was a sacrament; it was also a serious business agreement, with potentially far reaching economic and legal implications. It might not be surprising, therefore, that the issue of consent in marriage was addressed in the sweeping reforms of canon law overseen by Pope Innocent III. In 1198, Innocent III issued a papal ruling that prelingually deaf people could marry using signs rather than words, since “what they [the deaf person] cannot express by words, they are able to declare by means of signs.” Later, there was a clarification that this did not include those who were non-verbal for other reasons, like an episode of “frenzy” or other severe mental illness. In 1206, a further ruling made it explicit that allowing people to use signs to demonstrate “lawful consent” referred to the marriage of deaf men and women (Epistolae Decretales Summorum Pontificum 656-658). Although Henry VIII established a Church independent of Rome in the 1530s, much of canon law was lifted wholesale from the Catholic Church and adopted by the Church of England. This included the guidance on deaf marriage, which was recognised in the early seventeenth century as an established feature of the English Church. And yet, prejudice continued. As we have seen, popular legal guides suggested that deaf people were irrational and incapable, and this persistent belief meant that some deaf men and women found it much harder to get married in this period than others did.
9The first of these cases concerned Thomas Speller, a prelingually deaf man, who was born at the start of the seventeenth century in Hatfield Broadoak in Essex in Southern England. Hatfield Broadoak was like many small towns in Tudor and Stuart England, and the Speller family were like many relatively wealthy families in the period: their boys needed to learn trades, and the parents saved carefully for their daughter’s dowries. Two features, however, make the Spellers stand out, the first of which is that four of their seven children were born deaf. The second is that Henry Speller – father of all those children – was friendly with a local gentleman, Sir Francis Barrington. And so when Henry realised he was dying, he asked Sir Francis Barrington to administer trusts that Henry had set up for his deaf children. The children got annual payments which would cover education and training, and then when they married these payments would stop and instead each son or daughter would receive a large lump. As the eldest, Thomas Speller was due to receive the largest sum of about 200 pounds on his marriage (Essex Record Office, D/P 54/25/5; D/DU 472/8; D/ABW 36/259).
10Thomas decided to become a blacksmith. This was a relatively common profession for prelingually deaf boys, since it was a trade that could be learned primarily by sight. Furthermore, forges were incredibly noisy places and so many blacksmiths lost their hearing as they grew older, making it an ideal place for a deaf sign language user. Thomas left Hatfield Broadoak and moved to a nearby village to be an apprentice to the local blacksmith there, which is when he met Sara Earl, the blacksmith’s daughter, and fell in love. The pair decided to get married and in 1618, they planned a wedding in Thomas’s hometown of Hatfield Broadoak. Speller’s family, however, were far from pleased with this development – perhaps anxious about losing the annual stipend. Thomas’s mother Winifred opposed the marriage and tried to stop it taking place. She claimed that Thomas could not know what he was doing because he was deaf and claimed that both Sara Earle and her father were taking advantage of Thomas. Winifred argued that Thomas had been “stolen” from his mother and his friends (Oates, “Signs of the Times” 64-66).
11The local vicar, who had known Thomas for years, did not agree. Nor did Francis Barrington – he too thought that Thomas was perfectly capable of deciding to get married. Yet, Winifred’s concerns could not be ignored. Those lingering prejudices about the capacity of deaf men and women meant that this case was escalated to the Bishop of London. What if Thomas was being taken advantage of? What if he was not capable of making a rational decision, or taking the wedding vows?
12The marriage of Thomas Speller and Sara Earle throws contemporary beliefs about words and signs, capacity and deafness into sharp relief. In the end, the pair travelled to London to meet with the Bishop of London’s chancellor, who questioned them both about their potential marriage. In the end he was satisfied that they did want to marry each other and were capable of doing so. Significantly, the chancellor’s secretary noted that while Sara expressed her desire to get married “in words,” Thomas Speller did so “in signs.” Reassured, the chancellor issued the pair with a marriage license to take back to Hatfield Broadoak (LMA DCL/C/0441 fo 95r-v; DLD /A/D/002/MS10091/006).
13Unfortunately, feelings ran so high in Hatfield Broadoak, with Winifred determined to stop the wedding, that the pair had to return to the chancellor to get another license, this time allowing them to get married outside the parish. Francis Barrington stepped in, helping them to find a church in London where they could marry. And so eventually, in December 1618, Thomas and Sara married each other in the London church of St Botolph’s, Aldgate. The parish clerk recorded that during the ceremony Speller showed “his willingness to have the said marriage rites solemnised” by bringing the Book of Common Prayer, his license and his bride to the minister and made “the best signs he could to show he was willing to be married” (LMA P69/Bot/A/019/ MS 09234/008).
14An earlier deaf marriage in Elizabethan Leicester may offer an insight into what those signs were. This time the deaf man was called Thomas Tilsey, and – like Thomas Speller – he was a blacksmith. The woman he wanted to marry, Ursula Russell, was hearing while Thomas Tilsey was a sign language user. In 1576, the pair decided to get married, but the question of Thomas’s deafness was a concern to the local vicar, Edward Turner, who worried whether Tilsey was intellectually capable of getting married and how he would make his vows. As the local parish clerk wrote, since Thomas Tilsey was “naturally deaf and also dumb […] that form of marriage used usually among those which can hear and speak could not, for his part, be observed” (St Martin’s Parish Register 24; MS 1D63/1, 108).
15Soon the Bishop and the Mayor of Leicester, along with local men and women, became involved in the case. The issue of whether Thomas was capable of consenting to marriage seems to have been settled swiftly: what was more worrying was how Thomas would show his consent. Although it was widely agreed he could use signs, there was some discussion about which signs he could use. Few people could use deaf signs, and few understood Tilsey’s normal signing. Who could be trusted to interpret for him? How could witnesses, including the minister Edward Turner, be sure Tilsey was willingly agreeing to get married? Signs might replace the spoken word, but – like any language – they needed to be understood by others.
16In the end, a number of signs were “approved” for Thomas’s use, and they were copied out in full by the parish clerk who may have been concerned to prove that Tilsey had consented to marriage. They were as follows:
The said Thomas for the expressing of his mind instead of words, of his accord, used these signs: first he embraced her [Ursula] with his arms, and took her by the hand, put a ring upon her finger, and laid his hand upon his heart, and then upon her heart, and held up his hands towards heaven, and to show his continuance to dwell with her to his life’s end he did it by closing of his eyes with his hands, and digging out the earth, with his foot, and pulling as though he would ring a bell. (St Martin’s Parish Register 24)
17There appear to be a number of adaptations to make it clear to non-signing witnesses that Thomas was happily agreeing to marry Ursula. Thomas closely followed the service of marriage in the Book of Common Prayer from 1559: a service familiar to everyone in the church that day. His signs were also a form of miming rather than the more complex visual-manual gestures that make up most deaf sign languages. This may have been a deliberate attempt to “perform” for his hearing audience. No knowledge of sign language was required to understand that Thomas understood what marriage entailed and that he willingly chose to enter into it.
18The experiences of both Tilsey in 1576 and Speller in 1618 show a lingering prejudice about the capacity of deaf men and women to offer informed consent, along with a particular concern about marriage. This is not to suggest that there was widespread anxiety about deaf marriage: several deaf men and women married quite happily in the seventeenth century with no concern about the use of signing in the ceremony. Many deaf marriages passed unremarked, and few required the degree of community involvement we saw with Thomas Tilsey or Thomas Speller.
19And yet, there was just enough lingering doubt about deaf capacity that families could challenge the marriages of their deaf sons or daughters when they were not happy about the chosen partner. Here ideas about the validity of sign language were tested, with disputes about who could be trusted to translate and whether signs or vocal speech had more authority.
20Thomas Speller’s mother, Winifred, was not the only parent to object to her child’s marriage in the seventeenth century; nor was she the only parent to claim that her deaf son or daughter could not (or in some cases had not) willingly consented to get married. There are two more cases from the middle of the seventeenth century in which families challenged the validity of their deaf children’s marriages, and in both instances the case revolved around what exactly the deaf person’s signs meant – could they reliably be taken to be as authoritative as vocal speech when only a few people truly understood signing?
21The first of these was a young man called George Blount, who was one of three deaf children born to Giles and Frances Blount. Sometime in the late 1630s, George married Anne Rusell, a woman who had previously worked as a servant for Giles and Frances. George’s parents were outraged. They complained that Anne had seduced George, and forced him to marry her. She was much older than George, and – they argued – of a much lower social status than their son. They had also heard rumours that she was illegitimate. In 1642, Giles wrote to a local magistrate to ask if his son George’s marriage could be annulled. By then the couple had been together long enough to produce several children, but Giles and Frances argued that George had been forced into marrying Anne Russell. Again, the case revolved around the question of whether George – prelingually deaf – was capable of getting married, and whether his signs could be judged as providing legal consent. The minister who married George and Anne was questioned, and he reassured the Justices that while George did not “distinctly pronounce” his wedding vows, he was able to express his willingness to get married and this was supported by other witnesses. The marriage was declared to be valid and the pair continued to live together until Anne’s death in 1680 (Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service Bishops Transcripts b 736 / BA 200, boxes k-59, 62; Bishops Transcripts Y 36/ BA 2006/22/104; MS 1/1/79/18; Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford, MS DR 98/1652/20; The National Archives, Kew, MS PROB 11 219/390 ; 11 232/153).
22In the cases of both Thomas Speller in 1618 and George Blount in 1642, the deaf person’s signs which showed they did want to marry were taken more seriously than the complaints of their hearing parents. However, as the final case shows, contemporaries could disagree about what those signs meant. When this happened, it was almost impossible for the non-verbal person to assert themselves in the face of contradictory interpretation. In the 1670s, in the case of one deaf heiress, Miss Anne Darcy, the dispute was less about whether Anne could consent to marriage, but whether she had. Namely, who was qualified to translate her signs, and how could they be repeated as evidence? The following details come from papers of the Court of Arches in London, an ecclesiastical court which tried to judge whether Anne had been forced into marriage or whether she had, in fact, agreed to marry her apparent abductor (Lambeth Palace, Arches MS).
23After Anne’s father died in 1670, she went to live with her sister, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s husband, William, in Pall Mall in London. The sisters were heirs to a considerable fortune, with Anne rumoured to be worth around £1000 per annum, so she was perhaps particularly vulnerable to men in search of a fortune. Shortly after moving to London, Anne met a neighbour’s son. They got on well, he learned some sign language, and so Anne’s sister, Elizabeth, began to arrange a marriage for her sister. But during the marriage negotiations, it became apparent that Anne’s guardian – her brother-in-law William – had been using her inheritance to bail himself out of debts, and so Anne would not be bringing a fortune to the marriage. Her fiancé identified a much richer young woman and quickly married her instead. Anne was devastated and retreated to her room.
24It was not long afterwards that Anne encountered Ebeneezer Overton in circumstances that can only be described as suspicious – and indeed may have been engineered by one of her former servants, Jane Adams. One day, Anne was staring out of the window when she saw a young man walk past who looked remarkably like her former fiancé. According to Jane Adams, Anne called her to her side and asked her to give the young man – Ebenezer Overton – some oranges while she, Anne, stayed and watched from the window.
25Now unfortunately for Anne, Ebenezer Overton was a well-known rake, who was both short of money and fond of gambling. As he said himself: he “lived without any sense of religion” and “allowed himself great liberties in many ill practises chiefly in gaming both at cards and dice” (4). A potentially rich heiress may have seemed like a great prize. And when Jane approached Ebeneezer with the oranges, he immediately arranged to take Anne out for dinner. Secretly, they then went to meet Ebeneezer at a nearby inn, with Jane interpreting for Anne all evening.
26Ebenezer then managed to get a marriage license from the Bishop of London by claiming that Anne’s guardian approved of their marriage (he did not). Jane Adams helped Anne to collect some of her jewels, before escaping Anne’s sister’s house and getting into a waiting carriage. Ebeneezer had arranged for this carriage to take Anne and Jane to a church a couple of miles away from their house, St Bartholomew the Great. Ebeneezer had already warned the minister that Anne was deaf, but assured him that “she was an expert in signs and capable to express her marriage” and that she understood what she was doing. So, when Anne and Jane arrived at the church, the minister married Anne and Ebeneezer, but – significantly – allowed Jane Adams to say the words of consent on Anne’s behalf. Afterwards, the three of them celebrated in a local tavern, later heading to another inn in Stoke Newington where they had rooms. There Anne was waiting in bed, and Ebenezer was just getting undressed, when the doors burst open, and several armed men charged in. It was Anne’s brother-in-law and his friends, sent by Anne’s sister. They seized Anne and took her home to London, while Jane Adams was sent to Newgate Prison (LP MS Arches Eee 4. LP MS Arches E/4 70. ; E/90).
27Anne’s family immediately tried to claim the marriage was invalid and pursued the case through the Church courts. At the heart of the case was whether Anne had consented to the marriage: was Jane Adams merely translating for her, or, more sinisterly, was she forcing Anne into an unwanted marriage? One witness claimed that Jane was working with Ebenezer so that they could get their hands on Anne’s fortune, and that Jane was promised a lump sum after the marriage with an annuity following. Another witness assured that court that Ebenezer was a ”Gentleman of good fame and credit and worth five hundred pounds per annum besides a considerable personal estate,” with no need of Anne’s money, he was motivated only by his affection for Anne.
28Both sides of the case offered very different interpretations of Anne’s signs. Ferdinand Stanhope, who was part of the gang of men who burst in on Anne and Ebenezer’s bedchamber, claimed that when he found Anne she “by signs declared […] that Mr Overton never had carnal knowledge of her body,” and then made “signs” of hatred towards Overton. In contrast, a former servant, Anna Godfrey, who visited Anne shortly after her marriage to Ebeneezer recalled that Anne “made known by signs” she had married “a very pretty bodied man, [who] danced well, and was a very good, humoured person.” Anne told her old servant “that she loved him so well” and “how much he had made of her while she was with him.”
29Supporters of Ebeneezer and supporters of Anne’s family offered vastly different interpretations of Anne’s signs. One servant claimed Anne wanted Ebeneezer to hang, making signs to her throat. Another that Anne was terrified that he would be hanged – again the evidence was that she had made signs to her throat. So how did the judges in the Court of Arches decide the case? They asked for other signs of Anne’s willingness, not the formalised visual kinetic gestures of sign language, but signifiers of consent that anyone would be able to read. The parish clerk who witnessed the marriage recalled that when Anne saw Ebenezer Overton produce a ring during the service, she pulled off her left glove, and “held her hand out” for Ebenezer to put the ring on her finger. This, he argued, showed that Anne wanted to marry Ebeneezer. The minister, Anthony Burgess, reported that “Anne seemed cheerful and well pleased with what passed” during the wedding service. Further enquiries were made as to Anne’s appearance afterwards, with multiple witnesses at the inn the couple went to after the marriage, reporting that Anne was “very cheerful and merry” and expressed “her love and affection” to Overton when they dined. However, Anne’s family were successful in getting the marriage annulled. Anne was taken back to the family home in Warwickshire, where she was swiftly married off to a local gentleman, showing that it was not her capacity to consent but whether she had consented that was the issue at stake. Jane Adams appears to have been considered an unreliable interpreter (Oates, Silent Histories).
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30As these different cases show, although consent and speech were closely entwined in the seventeenth century, there were clear legal precedents for prelingually deaf people to use signs as a valid alternative to vocal speech. Centuries of canon law developments, as well as Christian ideas about the eloquence of gestures, enabled the recognition of deaf signs as a form of communication. And, if deaf people could “speak” – albeit silently and using their hands and bodies – then they were as rational and capable as any other human being. By the end of the seventeenth century, the question that was being argued in the Court of Arches was not whether Anne Darcy was capable of consenting to marriage, but how her signs should be interpreted. There was a healthy dose of self-preservation in these arguments, with the Darcy family keen to prevent Ebeneezer Overton from getting his hands on the family’s property. But their success, in the end, relied on discrediting Jane and denying that she had accurately translated for Anne during the ceremony. The argument was no longer about whether visual kinetic signs were a valid replacement for speech, but rather – as with any unfamiliar language – who could be relied upon to interpret those signs. And in the case of Anne Darcy this was not an example of le non dit, but a desperate attempt to communicate her fears, hopes and aspirations: to articulate those things unspoken.