Stephanie Merrill
Early Modern Gypsies: A People without a Place
Shortly following the arrival of Gypsies in early modern times the government enacted legislation that expelled this itinerant group pf wanderers from the place of inhabitation of sixteenth century England. The governments and the societies these nomads encountered persecuted and feared these foreigners, these gypsies. They traveled from foreign lands and settled in camps for a time only to pack up to move again. While Egypt was considered their home, or place of origin, by those who named the outlandish people, most gypsies were not born in Egypt. Gypsies considered any place they set up their itinerant camp to be a home of sorts. They were everywhere yet nowhere; they were nowhere yet everywhere. The gypsies were a people without a place. The governments of the lands the gypsies wandered responded to the nomads with legislated acts against them. The gypsies had no permanent dwelling in England but the legislature against them mapped out their existence beginning in 1530 with the Egyptian Act and subsequent acts to follow in the following centuries. The wanders with no place, were feared and as a result governments needed to control the unstable, nomadic people. The legislation against the gypsies mapped out the spatial existence of a people who had no place.
In the statutes made at Westminister, the first law concerning the gypsies entitled the Egyptians Act, 1530 introduced the act as pertaining to “outlandish people, calling themselves Egyptians.” This is the first law in England’s history that legislated against the gypsies. Subsequently the Act of 1530 mapped out the gypsies’ space in society as it expelled the Egyptians from the realm. By law they were forbade to enter and commanded to leave. They were excluded from the realm because they were a group of people who by
using no craft nor feat of Merchandise have come into this realm, and gone from Shire to Shire, and Place to Place in great Company, and used great, subtil, and crafty Means to deceive the People, bearing them in hand, that they by Palmestry could tell Mens and Womens Fortunes, and so many Times by Craft and Subtility have deceived the People of their Money, and also have committed many heinous Felonies and Robberies, to the great Hurt and Deceit of the People the have come among[1]
For a government to enact legislation that expelled a people from a region implies some sort of threat from the barred people. The act of 1530 identified their travels as a “great company.” A large group of invading foreigners was often viewed as a threat to government and society. To have called the gypsies a “great company” implies large numbers. Conversely evidence suggests that the population of foreigners in England was low during the 1500s and did not increase dramatically until a century later.[2] They customarily traveled in small groups congregating only on special occasions throughout the year.[3] However large or small these groups of foreigners congregated the sixteenth century noted an influx of foreigners’ travels to Britain. The relatively small numbers nevertheless caused a noticeable change.[4] This influx sometime during the first half of the 1500s was even called an invasion of the gypsies.[5] This large group was threatening, however, the law did not legislate merely against congregating or traveling in groups. The Act of 1530 felonized a particular group, the Egyptians. The gypsies were the concern to society. It was not necessarily the numbers but the presence of a “masterless” society within a society. Gypsies were considered a threat to the “established social order.”[6] It would have been foolish to let the presence of a threat go unattended no matter how large or small.
This Egyptians Act of 1530 described this “masterless” group called the gypsies. They were an “outlandish” people in society, meaning they were from another country and they were foreign to England. They were called Egyptians but more often than not, the foreigners were not from Egypt. The Gypsies were presumed to be of Indian origin and were also known as Rom or Romany.[7] Skin color, facial features and dress identified the gypsies as “Indian.”[8] Current studies attempt to genetically map out the DNA and origins of the Roma-Gypsies to India, but the conclusions are widely debated.[9] While the gypsies’ face and garb made them more easily identifiable their outward appearance was not the only defining characteristic. Whether the gypsies were from Egypt, India or any other foreign, the threat to society was not necessarily the origin of the invading strangers. It was the gypsies’ “mysterious nature” that was their most menacing characteristic.[10] Mystery was one of the biggest threats that caused the basis for the fears surrounding this group of foreign travelers.
Gypsies were from a foreign place and refused to settle in any shire or place. They preferred to wander in groups with no permanent dwelling. Not only was there uncertainty to their origin, it was also impossible to know where they were going. They were unpredictable and non-conformist. Their place was nowhere and everywhere all at the same time.
When one constantly wanders, refuses to settle down and form roots, one will never secure friends, neighbors, or acquaintances that know them. Xenophobia, or fear of the unknown can easily be applied to a foreigner who cannot be permanently located because their place of dwelling is itinerant.[11] Having a house, or a permanent dwelling, makes it easier for one to be known, identifiable or locate-able while having no place makes one mysterious or un-definable. This sixteenth century fear of and the need to control those without a conventional home, those who wandered from “place to place” and “shire to shire,” came during a time when one’s home and reputation defined one’s status. During the early modern period, after the Renaissance, value began to be placed on the private aspects of life and the home.[12] The gypsies had no home and therefore could not engage in the emerging value of privacy.
The itinerancy and mystery shrouded the perception of the gypsies with fear. There was a “paranoia rooted in a mistrust of strangers and aliens and a desire to punish and control them.”[13] In addition to lacking value accompanied in a home gypsies were also nomadic and a people “set apart from mainstream society” in an “alternative and threatening underworld.”[14] Accordingly the gypsies inhabited the unknown, un-predictable, unconventional and mysterious in Early Modern England. They inhabited the mysterious places. The gypsies were present one day and gone the next and were mysterious and unknown. Moreover what was known about them was just as startling to the societies they occupied as their mysteries.
While the gypsies were mysterious and unknown the Egyptian act of 1530 described attributes of the gypsies found evident to mainstream society. They were a people “using no craft nor feat of Merchandise.”[15] This line in the Act of 1530 was written during a time when crafts and trades flourished. Apprenticeship and trade in textile, metal, leather, building food and drink, etc., were common and respectable crafts. Craft guilds were established, regulated, and controlled at least a century before the 1530s.[16] The gypsies, devoid of craft and guild, could not be regulated in their professional place. Job deficiency for the gypsies made them even more un-controllable.
Since the gypsies had “no craft nor feat of merchandise” it is inferable that they either did not work or they took part in un-proper careers to sustain livelihood. The gypsies’ idleness and un-employment threatened society with an underlying negative affect on the economy. The gypsies did not participate in the conventional economic activities of early modern England. They were considered to be idle described in the Egyptian Act of 1530 as thieves and “were increasingly stigmatized as lazy and crime-prone.”[17] Conventionally, the economy for early modern England depended on merchant trade, craftsman and hard-laborers. A study on York County follows the decline of textile trade that negatively affected the towns’ economies in the 1500s. Unemployment, orphans and the poor were common and received aid from the Crown.[18] A declining economy did not welcome immigration that would further stress the economy and it was the nomadic lifestyle whose “main livelihood and economy are directly dependent on a sedentary of ‘host’ community.”[19] They were viewed as a parasitical group in early modern society. Gypsies were not only feared for being unknown but they were also feared because they were known to negatively influence the economy.
The gypsies lacked a “craft of merchandise” but were “crafty” in other detestable and criminal feats. The Egyptian Act of 1530 described their “crafty means” of sorcery, fortune telling and deceit. These characteristics are evidenced in many texts written by those the gypsies caused “great hurt and deceit” to in early modern times.[20] One of these sources that described the gypsies in the same light as the Egyptian Act was in the form of a song. This “Gypsie Loddy” while published in 1720 shared many of the same sentiments of crafty sorcery, hurt and deceit. The title word “loddy” is slang for Laudanum,[21] a main ingredient in opium,[22] and likens the affect of a gypsy to narcotics. The song told the story of “seven gypsies who were all in a gang” who came to the wife of an Earl and seduced her with their thievery, sorcery and “loddy.”[23] She left behind her fancy clothes, shoes, house, money and husband to follow the gypsy gang. Her husband searched for her and found her “cold wet and weary.”[24] He brought her home and the song concludes as “there were seven Gypsies in a gang, / And they were brisk and bonny O, / And they are to be hanged all on a row, / For the Earl of Castle’s lady O.”[25] The “Gypsie Loddy” was a warning to all who heard it or sang it of the dangers the gypsies posed to society. The gypsies stole everything of value, squandered it, and left what was of no use to rot. The deceitful, jobless nomads were no good. As a consequence they deserved to be hung for their trickery, sorcery and deceit and legislation expelled them out of the realm for those reasons.
The Egyptians Act, 1530 gave the gypsies 15 days to remove themselves from the realm and no more outlandish people were permitted to enter. Any gypsies who did not comply with the statute were required to give up all “Goods,” however a gypsy who acted in compliance were allowed to keep their goods so long as their goods were not acquired “craftily of feloniously.” Those who had stolen goods were required to pay back the debt by returning a “double value” of the “Goods, Money of Chattles.” The right of seizure of the Egyptians goods was placed in the hands the Justice of the Peace, Sheriff, or Escheator and they were given the authority to use the seized goods for their own purposes.[26]
This act not only persecuted the gypsies for their lack of a proper dwelling place but it expelled them from the space they inhabited and confiscated any property they obtained. This law was written under the prefix that all they acquired was through deceit, as they had “no craft nor feat of merchandise.” This made it nearly impossible for the gypsies who were willing to enter into compliant societal function. They could not afford the stipulations legislation required for them to stay. The government did everything possible to be rid of the gypsies and their detrimental affect on society. Gypsyism was illegal.
It was a felony to be a gypsy since the enactment of the Egyptian Act of 1530. In the same decade legislation was passed against another itinerant group. The Vagabond Act of 1535 persecuted the itinerant lifestyle as well.[27] This act is closely related to the gypsies because both these groups were persecuted for their idle and itinerant habitation of society. This law criminalized constant beggaring and required vagabonds to be “kept in continual labor.”[28] This law required people to establish a permanent job and a permanent dwelling otherwise their punishment for vagrancy was whipping, cutting off their ear, or execution.[29] It was a felony to be either a vagabond or a gypsy. It was possible for a gypsy to be persecuted under either law because the law not only made it a felony to be a gypsy, but legislation felonized idleness and itinerancy.[30] Gypsies as described in the Egyptian Act had neither job nor home, much like the vagabond.
This act, while being against the sturdy beggars was also an attempt at relocating recipients of aid to the poor that was distributed in the suffering economy we previously mentioned. In 1551 the British government instituted the Poor Act. The church became responsible for aiding the poor “with that which every Parishioner of his charitable Devotion will give” upon legislation of this act.[31] As the church aided the poor, they were only required to aid those confirmed “Vagabonds and idle Persons.”[32] When the act added the prerequisite of confirmation they required the condition of being a full member of the church. A few years later a second act against the gypsies revealed that the original act did not succeed in the goal of ridding England of the gypsies as well as denying this group aid for poor.
Twenty-four years after the Egyptian Act of 1530 another act was legislated “against certain Persons calling themselves Egyptians.”[33] The Egyptian Act of 1554 reinstated the previous Egyptian Act of 1530 and added persecution against any person who might bring an Egyptian into England and gave any gypsies already in England one month to vacate. In addition the legislation against the Egyptians was because they “[were] not fearing the Penalty of the said Statute [Egyptian Act of 1530], have enterprised to come over again into this Realm, using their old-accustomed devilish and naughty Practices and Devices, with such abominable Living as is not in any Christian Realm to be permitted, named or known, and be not duly punished for the same.” The act also required the gypsies to “lose the Benefit and Privilege of Sanctuary and Clergy.”[34] The gypsies who failed to leave will be “judged…felons, and shall suffer pains of death.”[35] The penalty for gysyism was capital punishment.
The Poor Act of 1551 offered aid to confirmed vagabonds and idle persons.[36] The Egyptian Act of 1554 described the nomads as “naughty” preferring prohibition of the gypsies from “any Christian realm.”[37] They were not considered Christian or permitted confirmation. The government also made certain to deny the gypsies sanctuary of the church. The gypsies were such a threat to society that the government tried to make sure they were not able to hide in the realm under the guise of vagabond or poor. The governments of early modern England attempted to rid their county of the people who had no controllable institution and therefore regulated any place the gypsies could be found: in vagrancy, as the poor, and the church, denying them access to the places they could possess.
The gypsies place was nowhere. They were exiled from England or required to assimilate into conventional society. The gypsies were also everywhere. England was not the only country that mapped out their existence through legislation. In 1619 Spain unsuccessfully attempted to “remedy” their land of the gypsy dilemma.[38] Spain also, like England passed legislation that expelled the gypsies and required the death penalty for the dissenters.[39] Then in 1633 the Spanish government decided to solve the problem of the gypsies by enacting legislation that “denied their existence” unless they assimilated.[40] Therefore, gypsies could no longer exist in the early modern times of Spain. They had had no place in society and were left to exist only in the past. They were nowhere excepting legislation, as they were still present through the denial of their existence in the law.
The gypsies were a threat to the governments presiding over the lands the nomads wandered. The qualities of these people were viewed negatively by society in early modern England. It was a felony to be a gypsy. The gypsies were also vagrant and poor and the laws targeted the gypsies as such in addition to their acts of deceit, thievery, and sorcery. The society viewed gypsies as harmful and as a result the government attempted to control these people. This task was rather daunting for the legislature as they tried to target a people who inhabited society in all aspects, everywhere, yet with no permanency. They occupied no single place. They were nowhere, yet everywhere.
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“The City of Coventry: Crafts and industries: Craft organisation to the 16th century.” A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 8: The City of Coventry and Borough of Warwick. 1969. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=16025&strquery=craft Date accessed: 07 December 2009.
Egyptians Act. 1530. Statutes of the Realm. 22 Hen. 8, c. 10.
Egyptians Act. 1554. Statutes of the Realm. 1&2 Ph. and M, c. 4.
Fitzgerald, Brian Vesey. Gypsies of Britain. Great Britain: Chapman and Hall Ltd, 1973.
“Gypsie Loddy.” 1720. Early English Online Books, 20 Oct. 2009. <https://vpn.lib.ucdavis.edu/,DanaInfo=eebo.chadwyck.com+search.>
Hunt, Barbara and others. Gypsies and Government Policy in England. London: Northumberland Press Ltd., 1975.
Lucassen, Leo. “Eternal Vagrants? State Formation, Migration and Travelling Groups in Western Europe, 1350-1914.” in Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc, 1998.
Mayall, David. Gypsy Identities 1500-2000 From Egipcyans and Moon-men to the Ethnic Romany. London: Routledge, 2004.
Oxford English Dictionary Online. “laudanum.” <https://vpn.lib.ucdavis.edu/cgi/entry/,DanaInfo=dictionary.oed.com+50134880?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=loddy&first=1&max_to_show=10.>
Oxford English Dictionary Online. “loddy.” https://vpn.lib.ucdavis.edu/cgi/entry/,DanaInfo=dictionary.oed.com+50134880?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=loddy&first=1&max_to_show=10.
Poor Act. 1551. Statutes of the Realm, 5&6 Edw. 6, c. 2.
Pym, Richard J. The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425-1783. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
“The sixteenth century: Economy.” A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 6: The borough and liberties of Beverley (1989), pp. 80-83. economy Date accessed: 23 November 2009.>
Stone, Lawrence. Public and Private in the Stately Homes of England, 1500-1990. Social Research, 58:1. 1991:Spring.
Vagabonds Act. 1535. Statutes of the Realm. 27 Hen. 8, c, 25.
[2] David Mayall, Gypsy Identities 1500-2000 From Egipcyans and Moon-men to the Ethnic Romany (London: Routledge, 2004), 55.
[12] Lawrence Stone, Public and Private in the Stately Homes of England, 1500-1990, Social Research, 58:1 (1991:Spring), 228-229.
[13] Stone, Public and the Private 57.
[16] 'The City of Coventry: Crafts and industries: Craft organisation to the 16th century', A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 8: The City of Coventry and Borough of Warwick (1969), pp. 157-162. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=16025&strquery=craft Date accessed: 07 December 2009. >
[17] Leo Lucassen, “Eternal Vagrants? State Formation, Migration and Travelling Groups in Western Europe, 1350-1914,” in Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc, 1998), 56.
[18] 'The sixteenth century: Economy', A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 6: The borough and liberties of Beverley (1989), pp. 80-83. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=36417&strquery=economy Date accessed: 23 November 2009. >
[19] Barbara Hunt and others, Gypsies and Government Policy in England (London: Northumberland Press Ltd., 1975), 113.
[20] “Gypsie Loddy.” 1720, Early English Online Books, 20 Oct. 2009, https://vpn.lib.ucdavis.edu/,DanaInfo=eebo.chadwyck.com+search
[21] Oxford English Dictionary Online, “loddy,” https://vpn.lib.ucdavis.edu/cgi/entry/,DanaInfo=dictionary.oed.com+50134880?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=loddy&first=1&max_to_show=10.
[22] Oxford English Dictionary Online, “laudanum” https://vpn.lib.ucdavis.edu/cgi/entry/,DanaInfo=dictionary.oed.com+50134880?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=loddy&first=1&max_to_show=10
[23] “Gypsie Loddy.”
[24] “Gypsie Loddy.”
[25] “Gypsie Loddy.”
[28] Vagabonds Act.
[30] Lucassen, “Eternal Vagrants,” 59.
[32] Poor Act.
[34] Egyptians Act, 1554.
[35] Egyptians Act, 1554.
[37] Egyptians Act, 1554.
[38] Richard J. Pym, The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425-1783 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 86.
[39] Pym, Spain, 87.
[40] Pym, Spain, 92.
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