Gypsies: An English History

by David Cressy

Gypsies, Egyptians, Romanies, and--more recently--Travellers. Who are this marginal and mysterious people who first arrived in England in early Tudor times? Are tales of their distant origins on the Indian subcontinent true, or just another of the many myths and stories that have accreted around them over time? In fact, can they even be regarded as a single people or ethnicity at all, or are they little more than a useful concept?

Gypsies have frequently been vilified, and not much less frequently romanticized, by the settled population over the centuries, but social historian David Cressy now attempts to disentangle the myth from the reality of Gypsy life over more than half a millennium of English history. In this, the first comprehensive historical study of the doings and dealings of Gypsies in England, from their first appearance in early Tudor times to the present, he draws on original archival research, and a wide range of reading, to trace the many moments when Gypsy lives became entangled with those of villagers and townsfolk, religious and secular authorities, and social and moral reformers.

Crucially, it is a story not just of the Gypsy community and its peculiarities, but also of England's treatment of that community, from draconian Elizabethan statutes, through various degrees of toleration and fascination, right up to the tabloid newspaper campaigns against Gypsy and Traveller encampments of more recent years.

Genres: History

428 pages, Hardcover

Published September 12, 2018

About the author

David Cressy is Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University. His specialty is the a social history of early modern England, a topic on which he has published a number of monographs.

Reviews

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful academic study of Gypsies in England since the first arrivals, drawing on the almost exclusively 'external' sources of law and order, polemicists and, later, Gypsyologists and romantics.

Unsurprisingly, it's a pretty unbroken story of ostracism, suspicion, blame for dark arts, theft and idleness, pretty much to the present day.

I'm probably most interested in the language origins (shame not to have a bit of a breakdown of those Sanskrit / Anglo-Romany terms) and the northern Indian connection (it'd be nice to know more about where). I'd have also included the account of US-side gypsies in Joseph Mitchell's 'Up in the Old Hotel', which are brilliantly dark. Surprised too that Viz's notoriously bad-form cartoons aren't mentioned. Still, good, solid work. In as much as it's possible to learn more (in the absence of much 'internal' data), it's a good introduction.

[History Today]

There can be few historical topics that pose more problems than the story of the Gypsies. How do you write a history of people who have tried so assiduously – not without good reason – to avoid the gaze of the state, who have left hardly any written sources of their own and who have been the subject of centuries of fear, prejudice and misunderstanding? It is not even especially easy to say who England’s Gypsies are or were: are they a group with a shared ethnicity, or a literary and social construct? Is the term ‘Gypsy’ a racist one?

This is an elusive, difficult and frustrating topic – a puzzle with many missing pieces. Alas, this book can tell us little about faith, gives only a fleeting glance at demography and tells us much less than we would like about Gypsy culture. Instead, the focus is on Gypsy relations with the wider community: relations founded in the prejudice and fear of that wider world. ‘Perceived as people without roots and without honesty’, Cressy reminds us that the Gypsies were seen as ‘a danger to society, an affront to the state, and offensive to God’. Indeed, between 1563 and 1783 the very fact of being a Gypsy was a hanging offence. The statute was, said a 19th-century commentator, ‘the most barbarous … that ever disgraced our criminal code’. They had a point: although the last hangings were as far back as 1628, this will have been of little comfort to the victims. Indeed, prejudice survived well beyond the anti-Gypsy laws. One correspondent to a local newspaper in the 20th century spoke for many when they dubbed Gypsies ‘shiftless, worthless people … Their morals are not bounded by ordinary rules, and nearly all of them are thieves’.

Cressy is especially good on the early modern period and at puncturing some of the bad history that has attached itself to the subject. He shows an early modernist’s scepticism for the letter of the law: the statutory prohibitions were brutal, but they were hardly ever used. The fanciful ideas – held by some scholars – that Gypsies were some kind of literary construct, or emerged as a response to the alleged transition from feudalism to capitalism, are rejected. Cressy accepts, surely correctly, the evidence that sees the Roma as a group with a history that goes back to ancient India. That said, through the centuries, they came to be bolstered by recruits from the settled population: the poor, the restless, the unsettled, perhaps even those simply wishing to escape the prying Leviathan.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Jonathan Healey is Associate Professor in Social History at Kellogg College at the University of Oxford.

[Calum Mackenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was like a long, academic essay. This is very much for information and analysis, rather than enjoyment or consideration of the reader.

However it has to be 5/5 as it delivers what it aims > the history of gypsies in England.

Recommend if you like Reading academia

[molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

i can only imagine how frustrating this was to research but it was rlly well done n i learnt a lot ! would like to read about the community in a larger european context next