Elizabeth Canning, a maidservant, was abducted as she walked to her lodgings in the City of London on New Year’s Day 1753. She claimed that two men dragged her away to “a house of ill-repute” in Enfield where she was confronted by an old Gypsy woman who asked her to become a prostitute. When Canning refused, the Gypsy cut off the girl’s corset and shut her up in the loft. After being kept prisoner for a month, Canning managed to scramble out of a window and limp the 10 miles home.
Initially it seemed an open and shut case with a pleasingly simple moral design. The “ugly, old, decrepit hag”, Mary Squires, was condemned to hang and meek and mild Canning was lauded for her maidenly virtue. But something wasn’t right. There was the stubborn fact that on the day of the abduction Squires and her adult children were 160 miles away in Dorset, and would not arrive in Enfield until three weeks later. The attorney general, solicitor general and mayor of the City of London all busied themselves on the Gypsy’s behalf, eventually obtaining her pardon. Canning, meanwhile, was convicted of perjury and sentenced to transportation. Perhaps the girl had made up the story to conceal an elopement, an abortion or the birth of an illegitimate child.
The case is famous and has been examined many times through different lenses – as an exposé of mid-Georgian gender politics, as an embryonic form of true crime reporting, as a stock narrative capable of endless embellishment (Josephine Tey borrowed it for her 1948 mystery novel The Franchise Affair). But in his magnificent book David Cressy shows that it is possible to mine new meanings from old sources if you’re prepared to read “against the grain”. What excites him most about the Squires case is the part of the Old Bailey proceedings where villagers from Dorset, Wiltshire and Surrey line up to confirm that throughout the midwinter of 1753-4 the Gypsy and her adult children were slowly looping their way through southern England. This detailed testimony, Cressy suggests, is nothing less than ethnographic pay dirt, a rare chance to understand how British Gypsies rubbed along with their host communities in the early modern era.
There are some surprises. From the witness statements it’s clear that the Squires family do not have a horse or any kind of cart. They cover 10 miles a day on foot and sleep in cheap lodgings, which is how they eventually came to fetch up at the “house of ill repute” in Enfield. Far from being tatterdemalions they are “very clean and neat” and happy to join in the dancing and flirting at various village hops along the way. They don’t mend kettles but they will, if pushed, tell fortunes. Their main trade is “in old clothes and silver lace”, providing a niche service to the isolated rural economies through which they have been travelling for decades.
It is this tension between Gypsies as they were lodged in the social imagination – as stealers of maidens and maidenheads and other precious items (Canning’s purloined stays were worth 10 shillings) – and Gypsies as historical embodied subjects that Cressy negotiates so well. He starts with the first reported arrival of “Egyptians” in Britain at the beginning of the 16th century. The muddle arose because these dashing, sunburned strangers were happy to let everyone think that they were exiled aristocrats from the land of “Little Egypt”. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that philologists discovered that the language Gypsies spoke among themselves was derived from Hindi. DNA testing confirms that Romanies are descended from family groups that left north-west India 800 years ago and made their way via central Asia to the eastern Mediterranean and from there to every corner of Europe. Many Anglo-Romani words in use today still bear the mark of their Hindi origins: cushti, wonga, nark.
Long before that point, though, Gypsies had lost their protected status as visiting nobility and become rascals who lived “naughty, ungodly, idle” lives. A statute of 1563 decreed that “vagabonds calling themselves Egyptians” were to be classed as felons and would be hanged if they stayed in the country longer than a month. Yet by combing the records, Cressy is able to show that, while in theory Romanies were menaced by Tudor law, in practice they were only occasionally drawn into its clutches. Certainly, there is no evidence of the 16th-century “Holocaust” insisted on by some modern-day Gypsy advocates. The real cruelties went on outside Britain – in Holland where Gypsies were hunted and in Moldavia where they were enslaved.
At the same time as the English court was threatening Gypsies for being Gypsies, it was also busy stealing their look. Under Henry VIII it became briefly fashionable for women to wear turbans and swirly skirts, a cultural borrowing that continues to this day: once every seven years you are sure to find embroidered shawls and puffy blouses in the windows of high street shops. But by far the most intense and sustained period of appropriation came in the late 19th century when the increasing busybodyism of civic life – all those town halls and taxes – set many restless gentlemen wondering whether the Gypsies didn’t have the right idea. What could be more authentic than going where you pleased, answering to no one and spending the minimum on material possessions? Well-meaning amateur ethnographers such as Charles Leland, building on the earlier work of George Borrow, descended on Gypsy encampments in their newly-acquired vardos, tucked into roast hedgehog round the campfire, and pumped their hosts for anecdotes. These tall tales then found their way into such earnest, inaccurate accounts as In Gipsy Tents (1880) and I’ve Been a Gypsying (1881).
Cressy repeatedly makes the point that Gypsy voices “remain hard to hear”, filtered as they so often are through sensationalist news stories, dull NGO prose or, indeed, the well-meaning fantasies of “Romany Rais” (the title proudly adopted by late-Victorian gentleman enthusiasts). So you would think that Damian Le Bas’s The Stopping Places would be a welcome addition to the corpus. Le Bas grew up in a settled Gypsy family in the 1990s, listening to his great-grandmother’s stories of life on the road before the second world war. He decided to kit out an old Ford Transit and go in search of the “atchin tans” or laybys, verges and scraps of meadow where Nan and her family used to camp.
As he trundles around the UK, from his home ground of Kent to the borders of Scotland, Oxford-educated Le Bas gives us insights into Gypsy life that are not there in Cressy’s book. The fact, for instance, that there are rules about keeping certain household activities apart even in confined spaces – the paraphernalia used to wash bodies must be stored away from areas of food preparation. That presenting oneself as box-fresh at all times is a matter of honour: Squires, back in the 18th century, was no anomaly in appearing “very clean and neat”. Whenever Le Bas encounters Gypsies on the road he knows them first by the gleam of their fresh white shirts and the sheen of their Brilliantined hair.
Where The Stopping Place stumbles, though, is in its arduous lyricism. Linguistic richness demands a tight grip on meaning if it is not to unravel into lovely, but empty, sound; Le Bas dots his prose with similes and metaphors, which often buckle under the strain of a second reading. The result, ironically, is a narrative that continually calls attention to its flashy surface yet frustrates any reader who had hoped to dig deeper.
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