In December 1618, a young couple, Thomas Speller and Sara Earle, were married in the church of St Botolph Without Aldgate in the City of London. They were both from Essex, but had been forced to marry in London because of increasingly heated arguments surrounding the match. But this was not a secret marriage: it went ahead with the full blessing of the Bishop of London’s chancellor. What had made it controversial was that Thomas Speller was deaf and communicated entirely in signs, using a rudimentary form of sign language.
The case reveals a surprising amount about the experiences of people in the early modern period, and the ways in which they were regarded by the society around them. Today we would describe Speller as prelingually deaf - having never learned a spoken language but in this period people used the term “deaf and dumb”. Yet while Speller could not speak vocally, he was more than capable of communicating with hearing friends and family.
Thomas was deaf from birth, one of several congenitally deaf children born to a wealthy family in Hatfield Broadoak in Essex. His father, Henry, was close enough to the county’s leading gentleman,
