Another Darkness, Another Dawn

by Becky Taylor

  By the beginning of the eighteenth century then, Gypsies had undoubtedly established themselves in niches in the local economies. This could include music, dancing and general entertainment, as well as fortune telling, which had been part of Gypsy work since the first accounts from the early fifteenth century, and was often carried out alongside begging and asking for alms. Overall, evidence of the period stresses the versatility of Gypsy livelihoods, with the varied activities of Antoine Delon in Bourbonnais being a case in point. From the age of eight he worked as a valet, going on to sell remedies, play the tambourine and violin and performing as a Harlequin before moving onto producing and selling remedies and balm. Accounts from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries also show how Gypsies worked as regular soldiers, mercenaries and as military musicians, with evidence from Spain suggesting most Gypsies lived as blacksmiths, butchers, shearers, basket weavers, horse traders and agricultural workers, and were settled in villages and towns.40

  Occasionally we find contemporary evidence giving an insight into the realities of everyday life. György Thurzó in the early seventeenth century issued a document urging authorities to allow Gypsies to settle in their lands, pitch their tents and practise smithery, and is notable for showing some sympathy for the harsh reality of nomadic life:

  In accordance with their ancient custom they are used to leading a very hard life, in fields and meadows outside the towns, under ragged tents. Thus have young and old, boys and children of this race learned, unprotected by walls, to bear with wind and rain, cold and intense heat; they have no inherited goods on this earth . . . with no sure resting place, knowing no riches or ambitions, but, day by day and hour by hour, looking in the open air only for food and clothing but the labour of their hands, using anvils, bellows, hammers and tongs.41

  This document gets to the heart of the precarious and tough existence often lived by Gypsies, and then raises the question of how Gypsies’ lifestyles, apparently so free and ‘careless’, adapted to deal with this. One way of doing this is revealed in the trend we can see by the seventeenth century of becoming far more closely associated with particular countries and often to particular regions within them. This is in contrast to the early years of their presence in Europe, where groups seem to have travelled extensively right across the Continent. So, in France for instance, between 1607 and 1627 a Captain David de la Grave was reported around twenty times in the same twelve places in Lower Provence.42 In the context of growing repression, while the ability to leave a place quickly obviously had its advantages, there was also increasing value in developing local knowledge of a place and its people. Becoming a familiar part of a community, perhaps arriving at roughly the same time each year, and providing the same services, or settling down in a discrete area of a town to fulfil niches within a local economy were ways of reducing uncertainty. Evidence from Spain indeed suggests that many Gypsies had fairly fixed annual itineraries determined by labour demands of the changing agrarian seasons.43 One result of this was that Gypsies began to develop national identities of their own: while continuing to speak variations of Romani, they adopted the languages and surnames of their countries, and adapted their lifestyles to fit with local conditions.

  The extent to which Gypsies might become integrated within local state systems, as much as within economies, is demonstrated in how they became affected by vagrancy legislation in the seventeenth century. We have already seen how over the previous century legislation attempting to tackle issues around vagrancy inevitably drew in Gypsies. While this meant ‘Egyptians’ as well as ‘counterfeit Egyptians’ were drawn into repressive efforts to control the mobile population, it also had the effect of including them within emerging attempts to provide relief to the country’s poor. In England the Old Poor Law – in fact a series of laws in operation from 1601 to 1834 – and the closely related Settlement Act of 1662 created a system of ‘miniature welfare states’, with each parish collecting poor rates in order to provide relief to its ‘impotent’ poor, with the able-bodied expected to work in return for their upkeep.44 Crucially, the vagrancy legislation was discretionary, casting a broad net within which justices and constables were able to discriminate, meaning that not all poor wanderers were punished as vagrants. In fact constables’ accounts reveal that fewer than one in ten migrants passing through a parish were whipped, with the rest being given alms – often 3–4d – and sometimes a night’s lodging provided they left the parish the next day.45 Interestingly for us, constables’ accounts across the seventeenth century show consistent evidence of parochial expenditure towards Gypsies.46 The account books for Repton (Derbyshire) in the years 1651–66 recorded ten payments given variously to ‘Jepses’ or ‘a compane of Jipes’, with other towns similarly showing evidence of irregular but not uncommon disbursements. The amount given was small, but in line with the averages given to other vagrants, the highest being 2/6d and the lowest 4d. Occasionally more detail is given, so that in Repton between 8 May and 7 July 1655 sixpence was ‘giuen to a companie of Jipes that wos sent with a pas frum Ser[geant] Samaill’, while another account notes that money was ‘given to a companie of gipsses and [for] watching them all night’. An entry from Utoxeter’s books in 1647 details the presence of ‘forty-six Egyptians . . . with a pass from Parliament to travel for the space of six successive months for relief’, who were given 4s before moving on.

  These accounts show how, just as occurred in mainland Europe, Gypsies were sometimes paid to go away and that sometimes towns felt they needed to pay someone to keep watch while Gypsies were in the area. They also reveal that they could also be treated as other vagrants, and granted relief money, sometimes given lodging or passes, and that constables conducted them in person or by proxy to the next place. The records are as interesting for what they don’t show as much as what they do:

  There is no mention in any of the account-books examined of Gypsies being taken before a justice or to a house of correction, or of their being ‘whipped and stocked’; and that says a good deal for the petty constables’ humanity, or their lack of courage. Other indications are not wanting that they were lax in their administration of the laws in force against Egyptians and other vagrants; and that their laxity in this respect was often shared by the high constables and justices of the peace.47

  So that in 1622 the Hertfordshire justices, and those of Berkshire, were reprimanded by Lord Keeper Williams, Bishop of Lincoln in a letter for failing to ‘extirpate beggars, rogues, vagabonds, Egyptians, and such lazie and unprofitable members of the commonwealth’. While some of those Gypsies being given payments were supposed to be returning to their place of birth accompanied by a guide,

  one cannot help wondering whether the guides who accompanied two of the parties relieved, one at Ecclesfield and the other at Helmdon, were undertaking a grand tour with their charges. In 1596 a certain William Portyngton set off with 187 of the very large band of Gypsies arrested in Yorkshire in that year, intending, it appears, to return, ‘everyone to the place where they were born, or last dwelled, by the space of three years’, which task he was to accomplish in seven months.48

  Fifty years later at the trial in York of five Gypsies, one, Richard Smith, confessed that he and the rest of the group had been arrested in London, that they were ‘ordered to bee sent to their severall dwellings or countryes, conducted by one Grey’, and that they had been in ‘Herefordshire, Stafford, Salop, Cheshire and Lancashire’ and were on their way to Northumberland. All this gives us an insight into the working of the early modern state, and allows us a way into squaring the circle of the harsh legislation enacted against Gypsies with the knowledge that already by the seventeenth century they had become an established part of the social landscape across Europe.

  Although much of the evidence and discussion around Gypsies and the law is based on what might have been done to them, in fact as details from Oxford Quarter Sessions in August 1736 show, it seems that Gypsies might have been comfortable with trying to get the law
to work for them. Here John Boswell and four family members were recorded as ‘Remov’d by Habeas Corpus from Ailsbury and Charged upon the oath of Henry Lovel with Robbing him on the King’s highway of one guinea, one half guinea and 10s 6d in silver.’ Here it would appear that one family of Gypsies had robbed another, who then took their grievance to court. Given the relatively large sums of money involved on the face of it, it appears strange that the charges do not seem to have gone any further:

  It seems unlikely that gorgios [Gypsies], if they charged them, would have failed to see the case through; whereas it is by no means uncommon for Gypsies nowadays to repent of bringing a charge against one of their kindred, and give their evidence so vaguely and volubly that the bewildered magistrate suggests that they should settle the matter out of court . . . Were the thefts real thefts, or were they . . . revenge for some wrong suffered or some debt unpaid?’49

  While we are unable to answer these questions, what this does do is open up an understanding of how Gypsies might have felt that the judicial system was there to be used for their own purposes, rather than simply something that was only ever imposed on them. It shows that at least some Gypsies at some times had the confidence and legal insight to draw the law into their own lives and possibly to use it to provide leverage over other Gypsies and strengthen their own standing within their own community. Taking this alongside evidence of how Gypsies were drawn into poor law arrangements, that they could often be seen as contributing to and part of the wider community, and consequently protected from repressive legislation, we can see how the seventeenth century was more than a period of unrelenting repression. When we add to this an understanding of the precarious and incomplete power of early modern states we can see the importance of looking beyond repeated waves of anti-Gypsy decrees. Undoubtedly, individual Gypsies and communities suffered, and many only survived on the physical and geographical margins of society, but at the same time their persistent presence revealed the weakness of early modern states and signalled the permanence of Gypsies place in European society.

  THREE

  The Dark Enlightenment

  THE TENSIONS WE OBSERVED in the seventeenth century over the expanding desires of states to control their populations – which for Gypsies most commonly translated into edicts of banishment or execution – and the limitations in their power continued into the eighteenth century while taking on new characteristics. Overseas European expansion in the previous 150 years had resulted in the creation of colonies in the New World, presenting states not only with opportunities but fresh challenges. At home, states gradually began to expand their notion of what they were for, beyond the control of territory and subjects for the benefit of a monarch and elites. Through the ideas of the Enlightenment as much as the everyday functioning of poor law relief, the state began to be seen as something that might exist for the improvement and benefit of the wider populace. While the idea of the state as a vehicle for social and political change found its most vigorous expression in the French Revolution, the gradual establishment of professional state bureaucrats and the reforms of ‘enlightened despots’ were equally a response to new ways of thinking. For Gypsies we begin to see periods of concerted action directed at them, not only repression, banishment and execution – although all these continued throughout the century – but transportation to the colonies as well as new attempts at assimilation, settlement and reform.

  We will begin with the New World. Just as states were attempting to expand their use of the law in order to consolidate their position at home, this period also saw them attempting to use it to expand their ambitions in their imperial acquisitions in the New World. In part the practice of transportation to the new and emerging European colonies across the Atlantic can be seen as an extension of this earlier assumption that Gypsies did not belong within the borders of the ‘host’ nation. And yet while banishment – as in physical removal from a place – was also a symbolic removal from the heart of the realm, penal transportation was more complicated. As with sentencing to the galleys, part of transportation’s function was the extraction of labour by the state to further its own agenda. So, for example, along with Spain, as early modern Portugal struggled with depopulation it systematically used the judicial system to provide emergency labour to power its galleys and to populate its colonies. Approximately 50,000 Portuguese subjects were exiled inside and outside mainland Portugal up to 1755.1 This practice was not unproblematic, for penal colonies were also the vanguard of colonialism, with their garrisons, convicts and ex-convicts forming the kernel of new colonial societies. Yet the bulk of these populations were made up of the socially undesirable – Moriscos and blasphemers exiled by the Inquisitions of Spain and Portugal, criminals and vagrants as well as Gypsies – and we have already seen how early modern states struggled to impose their will within their own borders. What we would expect then, is that in the New World colonies, where of necessity the centre had little control over day to day practice, social and ethnic boundaries could be renegotiated and reformed.

  Portugal’s practice of transportation to Brazil demonstrates how this tension between punishment and opportunity played out for the Gypsies transported both before and during the mass transportation of 1718. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century edicts against Gypsies in Portugal had been largely ineffective, resulting, as across Europe, in their existing on the margins of society in the face of intermittent community and official hostility. In 1718 João v orchestrated a clampdown on Gypsies with the aim of ‘exterminating from the kingdom all Gypsies for their thefts, serious offences, and excesses they frequently commit’. They were to be ‘scattered through the separate conquests of Indis, Angola, São Thomé, Ilha do Principe, Benguela and Cabo Verde, Ceara, and Marahão’.2 This was backed up by the immediate deportation to the Brazilian port of Bahia a community of 50 Gypsy men, 41 women and 43 children. As we will see later with executions, the deportation was carried out in a ‘deliberately ceremonial fashion’, with the port acting as an ‘open stage’ for the ‘sight of Gypsies leaving in chains’. The message being given was that ‘assimilation was no longer an option for Gypsies to escape their criminal status’. This was by no means the first transportation of Gypsies – Inquisition records from the late sixteenth century show Gypsies had been transported following sentences for blasphemy, and magistrates’ records from Rio de Janeiro in 1655 detail complaints of theft by Gypsy men and women – but these were the first in which Gypsies were deported as whole communities, simply on the grounds of their identity rather than for a specific crime.

  Once in Brazil, the transported Gypsies proved impossible for the local authorities to control, physically, culturally and economically. Although it had been intended that on arrival they be shipped either to Angola or to the plantation areas of Brazil, many managed to remain in and around the port towns where they landed. At the same time prohibitions from speaking Romani and teaching it to their children proved impossible to enforce.3 Part of this was due to the fact that the authorities had few means of controlling them: while women were supposed to work as maids or in shops and the children were to be apprenticed to a trade, the gold rush and the rapid increase in the colony’s population made it very hard to keep a close eye on transportees. While they were barred from mining areas, records show how in fact many migrated to them in groups, so that the governor of Minas Gerais issued a decree in 1723 ordering the arrest of ‘every Gypsy man and women together with everyone in their company’. Perhaps inevitably, given the vast frontier, rugged terrain and limited number of troops available, this and other edicts were largely ineffective. In addition, the fact that most of the Gypsies had had long experience of harsh countryside, difficult living conditions and evading the authorities before they were transported, can only have worked to their advantage in this new context. By 1737 colonial authorities had been prosecuting Gypsies for thievery, trading in contraband and murder for a number of years, and their ongoing lawless presence caused the govern
or of Minas Gerais to complain that ‘so many ciganos have arrived here since last year and . . . they trek through this backcountry introducing their wretched lifestyle and other habits’.

  What is perhaps most interesting about the presence of Gypsies in Brazil is how they negotiated the opportunities and constraints offered by the frontier. They had a reputation for travelling in large companies, such as that led by the da Costa brothers who became notorious across the mining territories for counterfeiting and highway robbery. Yet we need to remember the essentially lawless nature of this place and era: the gold rush territories were so violent that it was said that ‘men killed each other like drinking a glass of water’, and that the roads and towns were full of fortune hunters, vagabonds, pedlars and fugitive slaves as well as outlaw bands from all backgrounds. So while Gypsies clearly took part in criminal activities, it was also the case that they often took the blame for the actions of others. As one governor accepted, ‘complaints about Gypsies are only made because they are Gypsies, without anyone being able to point out guilty individuals’. And many Gypsies took part in other economic activities, notably horse dealing and petty goods trading across the frontier towns.

  Most notable in their trading activities was the way in which they acted as intermediaries in the slave trade, which was central to Brazil’s mining and plantation economies. Already travelling widely across the country and engaged in general trading, they used their networks to operate as middlemen between the plantation owners of the interior and slaving agents along the coast. Their presence was so important that by the early nineteenth century reports from travellers detailed how they dominated the southern inter-provincial slave trade: