by Becky Taylor
I must observe in this respect, Mr Under-Prefect, that since time immemorial, several families of the caste of bohemians vulgarly called cascaroits, live in this town, where they are lodged in houses where they pay the rent to the landlords, in part through days worked. The men of these families are all sailors and pay their levy to the government by serving years as the vassals of the king, and the women work without cease, either on a day-to-day basis [in a house or shop], or by making baskets and ropes.8
Here, as in other parts of France, the population of the region was falling at this time, and the authorities were quick to recognize the need for labour during a period that was simultaneously one of economic growth and significant trading opportunities. So, when the Justice of Amou proposed the deportation of Gypsies to America, he was quick to specify that ‘the intention is not to depopulate a place of people who have made themselves useful by their work, and who are otherwise of good conduct, much less navigators and their families’.9 Such protection of ‘good’ Gypsies, often linked to local economic interest, was a regular theme of contemporary mayoral pronouncements across the region.10
The variegated nature both of the laws and their enforcement interacted with pre-existing patterns of settlement and travelling routes so that certain areas, such as the French Midi, became a particular focus of Gypsy populations. In the process, illustrative of a pattern common across Europe, many Gypsies of this region became closely associated with particular routes and towns, such as Perpignan, Elne, Thuir and Béziers, and within specific quarters of these towns. Here Gypsy communities became well established in and wealthy from particular businesses – such as the horse dealers of Perpignan – and in the process more obviously regionalized in their culture, taking on both local dress and dialect if not mainstream religious practices over the course of the century. Similarly Gypsies of Ciboure and Saint-Jean-de-Luz in Labourd became associated with a number of maritime trades, notably as seamen on merchant trade ships and as fishermen.
In Spain the process of regionalization was particularly marked, to the extent that within the Basque country the Erromintxela – Kalderashi Roma, a Romani subgroup, who had settled there in the fifteenth century – had become deeply integrated into Basque society, expressing closer affiliation with the settled community than with other Spanish Gypsy groups. By the nineteenth century they had adopted much of the Basque language, as well as certain aspects of local culture including explicit rights for women and important traditions such as bertsolaritza (improvised poetic song) and pelota (the national Basque ball game). In Andalusia the merging of Gitano and local culture was perhaps even more profound, and perhaps best exemplified in the emergence of flamenco as an art form. Although Andalusian rather than Gitano in origin, it rapidly became associated with Gypsy culture to a remarkable degree: both within Spain and then across Europe generally, by the end of the nineteenth century it was taken as the embodiment of authentic ‘deep’ Gypsy culture. In no small part this was due to the writings of George Borrow, a Norfolk-born Bible salesman and writer, who allegedly spent five years travelling through Spain. His most famous work, The Bible in Spain, while building on his own experiences in the country also borrowed heavily from Spanish Golden Age sources and philologists to create one of the most influential works of popular gypsiology.
His writing both fed, and was fed by, the growing appetite for picturesque depictions of ‘authentic’ pre-industrial cultures. As the Grand Tour of Europe’s idle classes, emboldened by improved transport links and the romantic’s desire for exotic locales, extended their scope to include Spain, encounters with Gypsies became something to be added to the travel experience. Andalusia in particular ‘was constructed as a dream world where the course of time could be slowed, life savoured to its fullest’ and modernity avoided. Central to the Andalusian experience became the spectacle of flamenco, with descriptions of performances in the Triana district of Seville becoming a staple of European travelogues alongside the requisite descriptions of monuments and cathedrals. While many travellers confirmed the attitudes of the French tourist Jean Francois de Peyron that Gypsies were a pack of thieves who ‘only seek to rob and injure you’, still others saw them as an essential part of ‘realistic’ local colour. Many of these tourists watching flamenco were blind to the professionalism of these performances, instead choosing to see them as a spontaneous and passionate expression of the exoticism of Gypsy lifestyles.11
What we should perhaps pay attention to is less the spectacle of flamenco and more how it was a demonstration of the ways in which Gypsies had become an intrinsic part of local and European culture. While we also see this in other cultural and musical forms across the Continent – most notably in the Gypsy choirs of Russia and the tradition of Hungarian Gypsy violin groups – there are myriad rather more mundane and everyday indications of the close relationship between Gypsies and majority populations right across rural and urban Europe. So, a clergyman from Prussian Lithuania, for example, described how, ‘Gypsy men in this region dress exactly like the local Germans do on Sundays.’12 Other eye witnesses similarly stressed, alongside the poverty of Gypsies, the way in which their lives were intimately bound up with the local peasantry and local economies. Carl von Heister’s account of meeting with a Gypsy family living in a Baltic coastal village in 1842 suggests a life closer to the peasantry than that of an ‘Indian wanderer’. The village he visited housed around eighteen Gypsy families, totalling 140 people, with the inhabitants mainly working the land. When he was invited into one of the houses, ‘in order to find a seat . . . [he] had to expel a sow . . . although the house was dirty, it was well-ordered and the adults were well dressed’. He also noted that Gypsies in this part of East Prussia tended to be Catholic and ‘only worked out of necessity’,13 neither of which presumably endeared them to the local Protestant bourgeoisie. Not all the Gypsies of the region were settled: some worked as rag sellers and horse dealers, moving in circuits through the region and taking in the main markets of Wehlau, Tilsit and Labiau. Similarly, accounts from the 1860s detail how along with horse dealing, occupations included wood carving, music and fortune telling.14 We see similar patterns of living in the ‘Gypsy’ settlement in Kirk Yetholm, on the English/Scottish border, with Gypsy Travellers living alongside, but largely separate to, other villagers: still recorded as speaking Romani, the 1841 census for the village counted around 100 ‘Gypsies’, and stated that although they were based in the village, they still mainly travelled from the spring to autumn, making a living through making goods, hawking and poaching.15
Overall, the nineteenth century saw increasing numbers of Gypsies, as with Europe’s population more generally, living not simply outside the walls of cities and settlements, but as an integral part of urban districts. So as Britain and France, for example, became more urbanized, Gypsies, alongside the whole range of people engaged in the travelling economy, moved partly or wholly to cities and towns. Often they based themselves in poorer neighbourhoods over winter, living in tents or vans on wasteland or commons, or moving into houses, huts and temporary shelters, but taking to the road as the weather improved. The work of the French reformer Henri Bunel, which focused on the eighteenth and twentieth arrondisements of Paris, showed how these districts had Bohemians living in an ‘agglomerations of shacks, made of planks, cloth and rags’.16 The mixing of Gypsies with other zoniers of the area and the difficulty for authorities (and historians) of distinguishing them shows how well-enmeshed they were within the communities in which they lived.
In London they could be found in the peripheral commons and Forests of Epping, Loughton and Mitcham, as well as the brickfields, wastelands and shanty areas of Crystal Palace, Shoreditch, Battersea and Notting Dale potteries, and poor slum neighbourhoods such as in the East End.17 The memories of the small-time crook, Arthur Harding, who grew up in the East End at the turn of the century, reveal just how integrated Gypsy Travellers were into the local economy: families based in Bethnal Green exchanged second-han
d clothes for plants, ferns and china, hawking around the estates of London, and selling the clothes at markets and at the Exchange in Houndsditch. Many of these families were Gypsies ‘living a more settled life’, while also qualifying, in Harding’s mind anyway, as ‘proper cockneys’.18 Living in the cities, for some of the year at least, did not remove the importance of the seasons for Gypsy Travellers: many went on the road from March to October, punctuating their year with regular stints fruit- and hop-picking, as well as race meetings and fairs. These were important parts of the calendar, not only for the important money-making opportunities they often represented; they were also social highlights, where families met up and, crucially, young people were able to socialize and court.
If this provided an example of an increasingly typical way of organizing their year, the most prominent example of Gypsy settlement in Britain was an indication of how they were able to adapt to the new economic opportunities presented by the nineteenth century. Blackpool had become well established as a coastal resort by the mid-nineteenth century, partly due to the rapidly expanding popularity of seaside daytrips and holidays and the improved rail links of Blackpool to the Lancashire cotton towns of its hinterland. The presence of the ‘Gypsy’ camp on its South Shore, providing rides, side shows and fortune telling, was aided by the ‘endless disputes over the ownership and control of the beach below the high water mark’.19 Gordon Boswell’s childhood coincided with the heyday of the camp, when it contained over 300 stallholders and showmen. His mother ran a palmistry tent and they spent their summers on Blackpool’s South Shore:
She always had good seasons, as our position was a good one – near the old switchback, in the run of the people . . . [I would have] fun and play from morning to night . . . all summer through, when thousands of other children would only get the privilege of one day a year.20
While settlement and close affiliation to particular areas was a key feature of Gypsy life, we need also to be aware of the ongoing importance of cross-regional and international movement. This was perhaps best exemplified by the long-established presence of Sinti and Jenische within France. Sinti, who had emerged as a distinctive group within German-speaking territories from the sixteenth century and had also developed a strong presence in northern Italy, by the mid-1800s had also started moving into south-eastern France. As with the wider phenomenon of Italian migration in this period, there were strong economic push factors driving their movements. They rapidly established particular routes, such as along the banks of the Loire, which they then extended as they moved into France’s interior. Once they had developed a good economic base within a region, geographic stability often followed: so, for example, the ‘interior passports’ of one family (the Michelets; given to them as foreigners in France) show that they primarily followed the same pattern of recognized routes across a particular area of western France.21
Similarly, groups of Jenische moved from Germany and the Low Countries into Alsace and Lorraine, notably the north Vosges region, where they lived and competed with the more established Sinti by the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time they expanded from this base throughout the east, the north and the Paris region.22 Their mobility was profoundly affected by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, with Prussian victory pushing many Gypsies from the annexed territories of Alsace and Lorraine westward: the scattered birthplaces of the seven children of one Jean Winterstein – Reole, Abbeville, Vannes, Castres, Montagnac and Cerilly – are testament to this phenomenon. In other cases families simply shifted the centre of their travelling to another department, such as the Muntz family of basket makers who established themselves in the Yonne area.23 Choices of route were also tied to economic opportunities – both in terms of markets and access to raw materials – so that the decision to circulate in Burgundy, for instance, was directly related to the presence of wild reeds that were used in wicker-working. Evidence suggests that while they developed a reputation as musicians, Jenische in fact practised a wide range of trades, so that one family group might contain, for example, individuals involved in cabaret, carpentry, remoulding and hatting.24
Across the Balkans it appears that the mix of sedentary and nomadic lives, often centred round a particular region, was also a strong feature of Roma experiences in this period. For historians from the early nineteenth century, the absence of comprehensive Ottoman tax records was in part offset, at least in terms of evidence of Roma lifestyles, by an increase in travel writing by European visitors to the Balkans. Many were struck by the large Roma population of the region and left detailed accounts of their impressions. These show that seasonal nomadism had become a common pattern – making it hard to talk of clear-cut distinctions between ‘nomadic’ and ‘settled’ Roma – and also how farm work had become an integral part of many Roma livelihoods:
They breed a vast number of buffaloes, the very best in Eoumelia. In early spring they leave the place in great carts drawn by buffaloes, and travelling in the moist valleys continue their march until they have sold all their animals. Their families and culinary implements are all in the carts. They are all Musulmans, and are most of them wealthy. The carts are generally from five to ten in number. In autumn they return to their winter quarters in Hariupol . . . In a village some forty miles from Adrianople . . . are a number of Gypsies, who make sweetmeats which are sold at all the neighbouring fairs. Nearly all the musicians of Eoumelia are Gypsies. They have sweet voices, and are very clever players on the violin. On the farms they are employed at times in mowing and reaping; sometimes they plough, but they are generally weak, and cannot stand at their work as the Bulgarians. They work generally on the farms as basket-makers and ironmongers . . . At Kizanlik, a small town near Adrianople, they employ Gypsy women as servants in the Ladies’ Baths.25
To this varied, but nevertheless traditional, range of occupations, by the mid-nineteenth century we need to add the ‘Gypsy proletariat’ of the Sliven textile factories. Largely established to provide cloth for the Ottoman army, in 1836 the Bulgarian entrepreneur Dobry Jeliazkov opened the country’s first modern textile mill. Owing to difficulties in recruiting the general local population, he turned to the region’s Roma population. Roma men, women and children all worked in, and lived around, the mills, so that by the time of Bulgarian independence they had formed a substantial working class population within the town.26
The account of two English residents of the Muslim Roma population living in the Christian village of Derekuoi near the Black Sea port of Varna in 1868 is particularly valuable.27 In common with other observers they saw the Roma as only nominally Muslim, ‘conforming outwardly to the State Religion of the country . . . though they never enter a mosque’, while their separation from the wider Bulgarian population was reinforced by the fact that they generally spoke Romani rather than Bulgarian. The Englishmen’s observations went well beyond descriptions of Roma economic activities to reveal something of the close and contentious relationship they had with the wider Bulgarian population:
Our Chinguines exercised the universal gipsy trades of begging, basket-making, tinkering, and forging iron, to which the Bulgarians said that they added in an especial degree that of thieving, but . . . as in all our dealings with the gipsies we found them quite as honest (to say the least) as their Rayah [non-Muslim] neighbours. Every morning the gipsy women, furnished each with a big sack and a long stick to keep off the dogs, who seem to bear them an especial antipathy, start in couples upon an expedition to beg or buy flour and other food amongst the villagers, who occasionally give it to them without payment, not from any motive of charity, but because they are to a certain extent afraid of them, having a deeply-rooted belief in their power to cast spells, cause rain, and other beneficent or maleficent attributes. The men remain at home mending pots and pans, tinning copper vessels, and doing all the iron-work required by the village, whilst the children blow the bellows, or accompany the cattle to their pasturage.
The authors emphasized how it was the villagers who oft
en went out of their way to cheat the Roma, consistently overcharging them for food and other items, or exacting excessive labour penalties when they could not pay in cash. While allowed to live in the village in the winter when they were ‘a positive pecuniary advantage to the villagers’, in spring when they had milk and butter to sell the village elders forced them to move on, since they were ‘not paying for the privilege’ of grazing their cattle on communal land, something which was free for all other villagers. Instead of simply ordering them to leave, the Roma quarter was burned to the ground and its inhabitants forced to vacate it. And yet, the next winter a different group were invited to settle in the village:
The voluntary or forced migration of a tribe in search of fresh quarters is one of the most picturesque sights to be seen in Bulgaria. A long string of oxen, buffaloes, and horses (which we will hope have not been stolen), transports the tents and cooking utensils of the voyagers, as well as the very old men and young children . . . The life of the gipsy in Turkey is very much that of a Pariah: disliked and despised by the Turk, hated by the Christian, he yet earns his living by harder labour than that of the latter, whilst his only crime is petty larceny amongst a people with whom roguery is the rule, honesty the exception . . . The gipsies are allowed to settle in their villages by Mussulmans and Christians, but are usually much worse off amongst the latter than with the former.