The Monks’ Secret Sign Language

Talking was banned across huge stretches of monastic daily life — in church, in the dormitory at night, at mealtimes in the refectory — so from at least the ninth century onward, monks developed something genuinely remarkable to get around it: an elaborate, fully catalogued sign language, formally taught to every novice as a routine part of their training.

The system began at Cluny Abbey and was eventually written down and passed between houses; the earliest surviving English version, the Anglo-Saxon Monasteriales Indicia, contains 127 distinct signs, probably compiled in the late tenth century. Later lists grew considerably more elaborate: two fourteenth-century sets from Bury St Edmunds run to 141 and 198 signs respectively, and a list used around 1500 at Ely Cathedral Priory contains 109. The signs themselves were mostly simple, mime-based gestures for everyday nouns and needs: extending and turning the hand like a page turning meant “book”; a circle made with both thumbs and fingers meant “bread”; sticking out the tongue and touching it with the fingers meant “honey”; a finger pressed to closed lips meant, appropriately enough, “silence.”

Not everyone found the whole system dignified. When the Welsh chronicler Gerald of Wales dined at Canterbury Cathedral Priory in 1180, he was unimpressed by the spectacle: “There were the monks… all of them gesticulating with fingers, hands and arms and whistling to one another instead of speaking… so that I seemed to be seated at a stage play or among actors and jesters.” It’s a wonderfully specific bit of medieval culture-clash — one visitor’s solemn religious community was, quite literally in Gerald’s eyes, indistinguishable from a comedy act.

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