There was much mirth when my sister bought a bungalow, complete with a cartwheel in the front garden. According to our mother, descended from a long line of Kentish Romanies, the lack of stairs and the presence of some rural and road-related memorabilia were clear signs of a Romany who’d moved “into brick”.
There were others, too. my Mum, Jacqueline, was an expert, unsurprisingly, since she and her legions of cousins had been bricked in among the gorjers (the goyim, if you like) for decades.
A restless Romany might, according to her, take up an occupation or hobby that entailed moving about the country, selling things at fairs and fetes. Then there was the jargon: chokki for shoes, yog for fire, dinlo for a fool. And surnames: Boswell, Lee, Smith.
It’s similar to the ways in which Jews recognise one another around the world. “Colours, commodities and metals,” my first (East Coast Litvaker) boss used to say, about Jewish surnames. Then there’s bageling: when one Jewish person ascertains the Jewishness of another by dropping a Jewish word or phrase into a sentence.
The similarities don’t end there. Like the Jews, the Roma have internalised their exile. There’s a Talmud’s-worth of precepts and prohibitions governing the purity of the Roma body and home. In the absence of a homeland, Roma carefully guard an inner sanctity.
The inside of a vardo (wagon or caravan) is showroom clean, the toilet never used, utensils fiercely zoned.
But there were big differences in the way the two groups were absorbed (or not) into British society. In the three centuries between William the Conqueror bringing the Jews in and Edward I expelling them, moneylending actually made the mediaeval diaspora as useful as it was unpopular, but that scarcely mattered. By depicting them as Christ’s killers, the New Testament guaranteed their persecution, and the Jews were victimised just for being the Jews.
In contrast, by the time a westward-heading migrant wave from northern India reached Britain in the early 16th century, the Roma were initially welcomed.
Europe knew Egypt from the Bible, believing it a land famous for dream interpreting and soothsaying. So, did some enterprising Romanies spot an opportunity to make wonga?
Or had they packed their tarot cards and crystal balls when they left India up to ten centuries earlier?
What is clear is that here and over the Channel, Roma were happy to confirm that they came from wherever people wanted them to come from, and thus did they end up — here — being “gypsies”.
In Scotland in 1505, King James IV gave some “Egyptians” who’d entertained him seven quid, and letters of safe conduct to one Antony Gagino, “Count of Little Egypt”. Such strategies had worked throughout Europe, with the shero rom — the elder statesman of an extended kin group — approaching some local notable in terms he would understand.
But, assisted by a roaring trade in letters of safe conduct, the novelty faded. By 1567, publications were discussing the “wretched, wily, wandering vagabonds, calling… themselves Egyptians”.
From then on, Roma in Britain would be defined as essentially fraudulent. A 1725 dictionary defines them as people who “endeavour to persuade the ignorant that they derive their origins from Egyptians… discolour their faces and rove up and down in a tatterdemalion habit”.
Their language was deemed as false as their brown skins, at best a secret thieves’ argot, at worst a “gibberish or gibble gabble”. Similar attitudes attached to the Roma arriving from Eastern Europe after communism: certain newspapers exclusively reported the migrants in terms of crime.
For the earlier Romanies, though, British attitudes could be called a mixed blessing. While Jews were banished, or murdered, for being Jews, the “counterfeit” Roma were given the option of fessing up, and going legit.
In Europe, Austria-Hungary’s Empress Marie-Teresa attempted bloodless genocide upon the Roma, banning their language, forbidding marriage and sending children to live with non-gypsy farmers. But Britain’s laws were loosely enforced; more focussed on what Roma did (itinerancy, fortune telling) than on who they were.
As a result, perhaps, more people moved into brick, their identity not destroyed but encrypted, hidden in the odd word or garden ornament as a sign to one another, and a mystery to the gorjers.
Matthew Baylis studied anthropology at Cambridge; he is the author of the Rex Tracey crime trilogy as well as the bestselling non-fiction work ‘Man Belong Mrs Queen: Adventures with the Philip-Worshippers’
