He is so silly he would rather have a half pence than a shilling: Discovering the history of learning disability

Simon Jarrett explores the fascinating and little-known world of
the history of people with learning disabilities, known variously
over time as idiots, imbeciles, defectives and the mentally
handicapped. Using court records, government files, parish records,
prints, art and even jokes we can unearth a rich vein of often
surprising information, reaching back to medieval times. Simon
Jarrett is a Wellcome Trust doctoral researcher at Birkbeck,
University of London, working on 'idiocy' in the eighteenth
century. He is the author of Disability in time and place, an
English Heritage web resource, and is writing a book on the same
subject. You can see Hogarth's Marriage a-la-mode series on
Wikipedia and photographs of Cell Barnes Hospital on the Out of
Sight, Out of Mind? website This talk formed part of The National
Archives' Diversity Week 2014.