'The Damned Fraternitie': Constructing Gypsy Identity in Early Modern England, 1500–1700

Frances Timbers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781032402536
• eBook ISBN: 9781317036517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: Literature

'The Damned Fraternitie': Constructing Gypsy Identity in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 examines the construction of gypsy identity in England between the early sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century. Drawing upon previous historiography, a wealth of printed primary sources (including government documents, pamphlets, rogue literature, and plays), and archival material (quarter sessions and assize cases, parish records and constables's accounts), the book argues that the construction of gypsy identity was part of a wider discourse concerning the increasing vagabond population, and was further informed by the religious reformations and political insecurities of the time. The developing narrative of a fraternity of dangerous vagrants resulted in the gypsy population being designated as a special category of rogues and vagabonds by both the state and popular culture. The alleged Egyptian origin of the group and the practice of fortune-telling by palmistry contributed elements of the exotic, which contributed to the concept of the mysterious alien. However, as this book reveals, a close examination of the first gypsies that are known by name shows that they were more likely Scottish and English vagrants, employing the ambiguous and mysterious reputation of the newly emerging category of gypsy. This challenges the theory that sixteenth-century gypsies were migrants from India and/or early predecessors to the later Roma population, as proposed by nineteenth-century gypsiologists. The book argues that the fluid identity of gypsies, whose origins and ethnicity were (and still are) ambiguous, allowed for the group to become a prime candidate for the 'other', thus a useful tool for reinforcing the parameters of orthodox social behaviour.

1‘From Aegypt have I come’

After a long, lonely day in the Special Collections of the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, I was enjoying a pint in the rare English sunshine outside Wetherspoon House, before catching a train back to my lodgings in Headingley. While engaged in casual conversation with a dark-haired man in his thirties, the topic turned to the reason for my trip to England and the focus of my research. I quickly discovered that I was sitting across the table from a twenty-first-century English Roma, who worked at the university. Steve proceeded to regale me with a story passed down from his grandmother, now deceased. According to Grandma, Steve’s ancestors had escorted Joseph of Arimathea¹ and the boy Jesus to the British Isles. They travelled to Somerset and built the first church at Glastonbury, which is well-known for its connection with the medieval legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. Steve’s grandmother bequeathed to her family the idea that gypsies originated in North Africa. Steve’s personal proof of his gypsy lineage was that he had always known things, alluding to an innate prescience transferred through his bloodline.

In Steve’s story, Egypt was the birthplace of English gypsies. This was the first theory of the origin of gypsies, from which the moniker of gypsy itself derives: Egyptian was first shortened to Gyptian and then to gypsy.² Origins, whether real or imagined, play a large part in the identity and credibility of any people. On the one hand, the true origin of sixteenth-century English gypsies matters little if our focus is on how their identity was constructed after they surfaced in England. On the other hand, what the group stated about itself and what the host country believed about the origins of the group shaped that construction. Origins and lineage, whether real or imagined, were the foundation stones for gypsy identity. Ever since the gypsies’ arrival in England at the beginning of the sixteenth century, writers and legislators were concerned about who they were and where they came from. Authorities established the legal and political rights and restrictions of the group based on their alleged origins, in conjunction with the religious, economic and political conditions of sixteenth-century England, as reviewed in Chapter 2. The subsequent identity of the group evolved from these legal constraints, in combination with their interaction with the rest of the population. The stories surrounding the group’s origin shaped the construction of the fraternity as exotic aliens, experts in the occult and dangerous vagrants, all of which affected state policies towards them. In the early modern period, history was viewed as a linear progression from barbaric to civilised and from nomadic to sedentary. The wandering aspect of the gypsies reinforced their primitive nature and contributed to the construction of them as outsiders within.³

The narrative of gypsy origins is as wandering and ambiguous as the group itself. In sixteenth-century England, the most widely accepted theory was in agreement with Steve’s grandmother: gypsies originated from North Africa, specifically Egypt. On the Continent, the theory of Eastern European origins, and beyond to the Ottoman Empire, was also suggested. Starting in the eighteenth century, gypsiologists and folklorists stretched the Eastern theory all the way to India, based mostly on linguistics. Modern scholars continue to rigorously debate the origins of the group. In addition to the Egyptian and Indian theories, another theory started in the sixteenth century and extends to the present day – the possibility that the alleged aliens were really home-grown Brits. Chapter 4 will present my evidence for this possibility. Current scholarship is divided between the Indian origin theory and a social constructionist approach, which downplays the importance of beginnings and concentrates on the development of identity in situ. This is the path that I am following.

***

From Aegypt have I come

With Solomon for my guide:

By Ciromanties I can tell

What fortunes thee betide.⁴

Steve’s grandmother’s story is actually not that surprising. Legends containing a link to the Christian foundation myth grant modern gypsies an ancient history as a unified people and make them part of the trans-European Roma community. Several Bible-related legends insert the gypsies into a Christian narrative, which was very important in the premodern Western world. One story claims that the gypsies did not provide assistance to Mary and Joseph when the family fled to Egypt, which determined their fate as a wandering nation doing penance.⁵ Several stories involve the nails used to crucify Jesus. Negative versions position the gypsies as the blacksmiths who made the nails and were, therefore, condemned never to settle down.⁶ Or, they stole the fourth nail from the cross and that was why they had to wander for several centuries.⁷ Alternatively, only three nails were ordered but they offered five nails, the fifth one intended for Jesus’s heart.⁸ A positive variation praised the blacksmiths, who were commissioned to forge the nails, for not giving all four to the authorities, as the fourth nail was going to be hammered through the heart.⁹ The gypsies’ reward was the right to wander the earth and to steal without penalty. During the Middle Ages, a story developed concerning an Egyptian servant who travelled to southern France with three of the biblical Marys to escape persecution after the crucifixion. The legend of Saint Sarah, also known as Sarah the Black, was recorded in the sixteenth century, after the presence of gypsies was well-established on the Continent.¹⁰ Sarah the Black eventually became the patron saint of the Roma. Her shrine is located at Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer in the region of the Camargue on the Mediterranean coast of France. Proponents of the Indian origin theory suggest that Sarah the Black is the Europeanised form of the Hindu goddess Kali, the fierce black goddess associated with death and change.¹¹

Little Egypt

But the aforementioned legends were not the basis for gypsy identity in sixteenth-century England. Nevertheless, there was still a connection to Egypt and to the Christian narrative. The group that would become known as gypsies presented themselves as pilgrims from North Africa. In Britain, the earliest citing is a letter written in 1505 by James IV of Scotland, in which the king recommended Anthonius Gagino, the earl of Little Egypt, to the king of Denmark.¹² During the first half of the sixteenth century, there were several other instances of counts or lords of Little Egypt recorded in Scotland.¹³ Several bands of alleged pilgrims in fifteenth-century Europe also used the terms Little Egypt, Lower Egypt or Lesser Egypt.¹⁴ Some modern authors identify Little Egypt as the geographical territory of Epirus, which was part of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern era and is presently shared between Greece and Albania.¹⁵ This claim is made repeatedly without benefit of a premodern reference to support it. The gypsiologist Eric Otto Winstedt cited an early modern German source that claimed that a hill near the town of Modon in Greece was known as Little Egypt, because it was the headquarters of a large population of gypsies.¹⁶ This reference does not prove that Greece was the source of European gypsies or, for that matter, that the group identified as gypsies by the author were in any way related to German or English gypsies. As we shall see below, many groups who were similar to gypsies were considered the same as European gypsies.

One source that may support the location of Little Egypt being in the East is Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia Universalis, originally published in German in 1544. Cosmographia enjoyed an extensive readership in Europe, with 24 editions in several languages.¹⁷ According to the Latin translation of 1550, Münster asked one of the ‘Tartaros aut gentiles uulgus uocat [called by the common people Tartars, or gentiles]’, whom he was interviewing, where his home was. The man named it as ‘minori Aegypto’ or Little or Lessor Egypt.¹⁸ When asked how to travel there, the man said that it was far beyond the Holy Land and Babylon and that he must travel through the land of pygmies. In response, Münster answered: ‘Then your Lesser Egypt is not in Africa near the Nile, but in Asia along the Ganges or the Indus?’¹⁹ To the modern reader, the mention of pygmies suggests Africa, but according to Münster, a species of very small people, who fought against cranes, lived in India on the border with Cathy or China.²⁰ However, ‘klein Egypten’, as it was rendered in German, could also have been a reference to ‘Africa das klein’, which was how Münster described northern Africa.²¹

The travel literature translated and compiled by Richard Eden also supported North Africa as being the location of Little or Lesser Egypt. Eden’s work was completed and published in 1577 by the geographer Richard Willes. In a section entitled ‘A breefe description of Affrike’, he states that ‘In Affrica the lesse are these kyngdomes: the kingdome of Tunes & Constantina, which is at this day vnder Tunes, and also the region of Bugia, Tripoli, and Ezzah’. He goes on to say: ‘Afrike the lesse, is in this wyse bounded: On the West it hath Numidia: On the East Cyrenaica: On the North, the sea called Mediterraneum. In this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions and abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘The damned fraternitie’: constructing gypsy identity in early modern England, 1500–1700
• 1 ‘From Aegypt have I come’
• 2 ‘Gypsies: thieves and tramps?’
• 3 ‘Chargeable unto the country’
• 4 ‘O’er the Moors to Kirk Yetholm’
• 5 The narrative of gypsyhood
• 6 ‘By lines they read in face and hand’
• 7 ‘These rowsey, ragged rabblement of rakehelles’: Rogue literature
• 8 ‘The stain of my offence’
• Bibliography
• Index