Exiles from Egypt, travellers from the East, ‘counterfeit Egyptians’, strategic performers: Romani people or ‘Gypsies’ in early modern England evaded easy categorization.[1] They were often vilified by policymakers and moral authorities who considered them to exist dangerously beyond the scope of English law and government. ‘By name they are called Gypsies, they call themselves Egiptians’, reported Thomas Dekker in 1609. ‘They are a people more scattred then [sic] Jewes, and more hated’.[2] They have ‘the bodies of Frantick persons’ dictated by influence of the moon, acting like the ‘onely base Ronnagants [renegades] upon earth’.[3] ‘Foraging’ and mobile, carrying their belongings with them as they travelled from town to town or parish to parish, Gypsy communities mingled with English parishioners in the localities while remaining recognizably separate.[4]
The Romani people are now largely recognized to have originated from north-western India. They migrated into Persia, then the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires, and were present in Europe from the Middle Ages.[5] Within Europe, Gypsies settled in the Balkan provinces, north of the Danube in present-day Romania (though the etymologies of ‘Romania’ and ‘Romani’ are unrelated), or travelled further west, eventually arriving in England and Scotland.[6] While present in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries by the 1420s, Gypsies are not recorded in the British Isles until the early sixteenth century.[7] Since Gypsies moved between towns and geographic spaces, they were viewed as ‘a strange and illegitimate hybrid, neither Egyptian nor English, neither black nor white’.[8]
To English observers, mobility remained a key marker of Gypsy identity. According to a tale that some Gypsies also reportedly perpetuated, they had originated from a tribe in Egypt, condemned to wander as exiles for refusing to shelter Mary and Joseph. At the ordinance of the pope, they travelled through Europe on a pilgrimage as penance, one of the few accepted forms of mobility in the medieval period.[9] Early modern individuals expressed scepticism at this tale; as Andrew Boorde related in 1542, ‘[t]her be few or none of the Egypcions that doth dwel in Egipt, for Egipt is replected now with infydele alyons’.[10] Gypsies purposely enhanced their origin story, Samuel Rid maintained in 1614, by staining their faces, adopting colourful and patched-up clothing, and imitating nomadic groups from the Mediterranean and the East, but their origins were not easy to verify.[11]
The religious element in ethnographic depictions of Gypsies in early modern England is remarkably muted. While ‘Turk’ or ‘Jew’ were terms that did not easily separate religion and ethnicity, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers rarely focused on the religious beliefs of Gypsies. Though their palm-reading at times seemed to evidence superstition, Gypsies were rarely accused of witchcraft and put on trial. Becky Taylor suggests this was because the fear of malevolent magic was generally considered to be a threat within a community, rather than outside of it, which highlights the exclusion of Gypsies in English parishes.[12]What authors seemed more concerned with was the fluidity of Gypsy identities, including ‘counterfeit gypsies’, or English men and women who joined Gypsy communities. Anti-vagrant legislation specifically attempted to limit Gypsies’ geographic mobility to better regulate them.[13] A 1530 act against Gypsies called ‘Egyptians’ an ‘owtlandisshe’ people, dangerously mobile and resisting the realm’s parish system, travelling instead ‘from Shyre to Shyre and place to place’ telling fortunes and deceiving ‘the people of theyr Money’.[14] Repeated legislation in 1552 and 1554 threatened Gypsies with imprisonment and loss of goods. Gypsies could be whipped, mutilated, and even subject to death if charged with repeat offences. The Act for the further punishment of those vagabonds calling themselves Egyptian (1562) included ‘counterfeit’ Egyptians or those ‘vagabonds calling themselves Egytptians’ in their legislation, exhibiting concerns with English-born subjects who adopted the manners and lifestyles of Gypsies.[15] Looke what difference there is between a civill cittizen of Dublin & a wilde Irish Kerne, so much difference there is betweene one of these counterfeit Egiptians and a true English begger’, Dekker wrote.[16]
English men and women who assumed Gypsy identification were liable to the same severe punishments as Gypsies themselves. In 1596, all persons pretending to be Egyptians, or ‘wandering in the Habite Forme or Attyre of counterfayte Egypcians’ were to be punished as felons. This law was significant in that it disregarded previous categories of ‘real’ and ‘counterfeit’ Gypsies, suggesting that the identity of the ‘genuine’ Egyptian no longer existed and that Gypsies and vagrants were viewed as one of the same thing.[17] Both Gypsies and ‘such fellowes as tooke upon them the name of Egiptians above the age of fourteene, or that shal come over and be transported into England, or any other persons, as shal be seene in the company of Vagabonds calling themselves Egipctians, or counterfeiting, transforming, or digsuising themselves by their apparel, speach, or other behaviours into Egyptians and so shall continue, either at one, or severall times, by the space of a month they should be adjudged fellons’.[18] Though not condemned under the Egyptian Act of 1562, Agglinton was sent back to his master and subsequently re-apprenticed to a shipwright. As David Cressy has observed, the apprentice’s time among the Gypsies, and his return to settled English society, ‘indicates...the porosity of the boundaries between migrants and mainstream populations’.[19] At the same time, the desire to see Gypsies, ‘throughe wholsome lawes...dispersed, vanished & the memory of them cleane extynguyshed’ did not succeed, even when authorities took measures to assimilate or drive them from the realm.[20]
The severe sentencing against Gypsies suggests a disproportionate fear – not of large numbers of the English population actually becoming Gypsies, but that national character was threatened by those who sought to reject their loyalty to the centralizing state and the vision of Englishness it advanced.[21] Gypsies were incorporated into concerns of a larger vagrant underworld populated by spies, thieves, Catholics, and other figures of ambiguous loyalties to the central government, at a time when population increase, food riots, and harvest failures were contributing to a climate of malaise and societal discontent.[22] It is no coincidence that Dekker compared Gypsies to the ‘wilde Irish kerne’ – kerns were Gaelic soldiers from Ireland, many of whom fought for Gaelic lords or Catholic powers on the Continent, and who represented a threat to Protestant order. [16] Gypsies were thus portrayed as elusive figures, English and not-English, ever-present, yet able to evade the control of local authorities.
In 1584, William Harborne wrote to Francis Walsingham about his encounter with ‘a Rude, Rough, rustical Arabian [horse], Presently putt to sale by a black, base, empti-pursed Egyptian.’ Harborne notes that he ‘Pittied his povertie, paid his price, & bettered his beeing’.[24] Whether Harborne’s financial offering improved the quality of life of the ‘Egyptian’, the letter offers insight into the life of a Gypsy man, seen as ‘black’ and set apart, but who played a role in the circulation of goods and who was a familiar figure occupying the English landscape.
The skill that authorities attributed to Gypsies in creating a place for themselves within those networks of social and economic circulation led to extraordinary accounts of Gypsy self-fashioning. However exaggerated, Gypsies were seen to occupy complex subaltern societies, deviously carnivalesque and staunchly in control of their lives and livelihoods. Like actors, they were accused of wearing costumes that changed their appearance and instilled a resistance to conformity. Thomas Harman’s 1567 tract against vagabonds, printed three times in the 1560s and again in 1573, spent a good deal of ink describing ‘Egiptians’, who spent their time ‘fedinge the rude common people wholy addicted and geven to novelties, joyes, and newe inventions’.[25] ‘Their apparell is od[d], and phantasticke’, Dekker wrote, with women dressed ‘like one that plaies, the Roague on a Stage’.[26] Dekker conceded that though Gypsies wore garish scarves and mantles, their undergarments were ‘hansome and in fashion’.[27]Both Harman and Dekker made clear that they believed Gypsies fell in the category of undeserving poor because they wilfully cozened others, building a strong community for themselves through distinct fashions and habits. They inveigled others with ‘the strangeness of the attyre of their heads, and practising paumistrie’, through their secret language and riotous, indulgent behaviour.[28] Aristocratic performances perpetuated such stereotypes. In Ben Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed of 1621, the Duke of Buckingham, after much singing, dancing, and pickpocketing, washed away his black face to reveal the graceful courtier underneath. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s play, The Spanish Gypsy, performed at court in 1623, explicitly linked counterfeit Egyptians – ‘Gipsies, but no tann’d ones, no Red-oker rascalls umberd with soot and bacon as the English Gipsies are’ – with evasion of the law and the antics of a travelling troupe.[29] The recognition of their skill cast further ambiguity on Gypsies and their public image, but they remained categorized by visual difference.
In many ways, the difficulties of categorizing Gypsies were precisely what made them such a source of fascination. Gypsies continued to be associated with oracles and prophecies, cozening underworlds and vagabondage into the late seventeenth century. A painting of a ‘Gipsy Woman with her children’ appeared in an auction catalogue in 1690 alongside landscapes, shepherdesses, and Mary Magdalens.[30] ‘Like a right Gypsie’, Antony laments in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1616), she ‘fast and loose Beguil’d me’.[31] ‘She was a very Gipsie’, says one character of his innamorata in James Shirley’s Changes, or Love in a maze (1632), ‘she us’d me / Basely’.[32] Such examples disparagingly associated female power with the subversion of tricksters while perpetuating ideas of ethnographic difference. Nonetheless, they also point to the agency and independent mindedness of women, not just in literature but in life. In 1594, Judith Phillips, otherwise known as ‘Doll Pope’, was imprisoned and examined for cozening a widow out of a gold chain: ‘Judith had used this manner of trade of cozenage a long time and had wandered the country in the company of divers persons naming themselves Egyptians’.[33] Into the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women who aligned themselves with Gypsies continued to be brought to trial for theft and vagabondage. In 1695, one Elizabeth Johnson was accused of ‘pretending her self to be an Egyptian, and having familiarity with evil Spirits, and pretending by Magick Arts she could discover where Treasure was hid’.[34] Seeking to punish unregulated male and female mobility, authorities condemned the wanderer who associated his or herself with Gypsies, punishing them for their ‘wicked Lives...and sinful Courses’: it was a sin ‘to pretend’.[35]
