Another Darkness, Another Dawn Page 6
And yet we need to guard against making easy comparisons between different groups of outsiders. The shifting climate of the sixteenth century also saw the emergence of witchcraft trials across Europe, as states sought to impose discipline and uniformity on plebeian popular culture via religious uniformity. As well as official moves to stamp out local religious traditions and extend their authority, local communities also used accusations of witchcraft as a means of managing inter-communal tensions in a time of rapid social change.31 While we might expect that Gypsies would have been prime targets for the hunts, which reached their peak in south and west Germany between 1561 and 1670, in fact they appear to have been untouched by the phenomenon. Although Gypsies were both outsiders and strongly associated with fortune telling and sorcery, the move against witches was actually driven by a fear of malevolent magic posing a threat from within a community rather than outside: an analysis of trials shows how most accusations stemmed from close neighbours who were only marginally differentiated by social class and standing within a community from those they accused.32 An understanding of this is useful for reinforcing the importance of being sensitive to the different social meanings ‘outsiders’ could carry within different communities and historical contexts and is a theme to which we will return, most notably in relation to the Second World War.
While it is tempting to see the processes of tighter state control combined with the suppression of potentially unruly elements as somehow historically inevitable, it is important to remember the contingent, messy and uncertain nature of this shift. For those living through these times the changes were by no means inevitable, and outcomes at the local or individual level could as easily run counter to as reinforce the general picture. We need to remember that the state was emerging simultaneously with the problems it was trying to tackle, working out the extent of its own remit: there was no set ‘state’ and at this time the main concern of central governments was the issue of security, both domestic and international.33 We can see this if we look at evidence from Hereford council following a proclamation in June 1530 which had been published and sent out across England ‘for the punishing of vagabonds and sturdy beggars’ through stripping them naked and whipping them.34 This was just two months before a group of Gypsies arrived in the Hereford area, and resulted in this document:
1530, AUG. 17. – CERTIFCATE OF THE DELIVERY OF CERTAIN GIPSIES TO A JUSTICE.
This indenture made the XVII day of Auguste in the XXII yere of the reigne of Kyng Henry the VIII. bétwene John Cantourcelly, meyre of the citie of Hereford on the one partie, and Roger Millewarde, gentilman, on the other partie, witnessith, that the seid meyre hath delyvered to the seid Roger Milleward one Antony Stephen of the countrey of lytyll Egipte as hedde and capytayne of XIX persons of men, women and chylderyn named them selfes pilgrims, the whiche came to the seid citie of Hereford the VIIIth day of Auguste the seid XXII yere of the reigne of Kyng Henry the VIIIth, and soo taryed there by the space of IX dayes and IX nyghtes, and in the seid citie dydde no hurte as I can perceve as yet, savying only there was persute made after them by one Thomas Phelipes of Ludlow for a certeyne sume of money to the sume of IIIIl. VIIs. VId. taken by certeyne of them owte of the house and chambre of the seid Phelips contrary to the Kynges lawes. And soo I the seid meyre have delyvered to the seid Roger Milleward the seid capytene with all his compeny, to the nombre in all with the seid capytyne, as men, women, and chylderyn, of XIX persones, with bagge and baggayge, and the seid Roger to use them after the Kynges commaundement. In witnesse wherof I the seid Meyre and Roger Millewarde to this present indenture entyerchangeably have put to our seales the day and yere above seid.
[Signed] Per me Rogar Mylleward.35
Unlike most similar surviving documents, this indenture does not closely mirror the Latin standard form. Essentially, what we have here is a glimpse of the English state making itself up, albeit within existing legal parameters, in this case the indenture and the idea of obligation that it carries. Generally the mayor’s court used a standard form for indentures that were written in Latin and conveyed commercial debts, so this document is unusual because on the one hand it is in English, and a different format, and on the other the ‘goods’ being exchanged are people. There are three further points of interest that set it apart from normal legal rhetoric. Firstly, the Gypsies identifying themselves as pilgrims was a local example of what we know to be a Europe-wide phenomenon. Secondly, that the document states they have done ‘no hurt as yet’ simultaneously suggests a presumption of suspicion towards strangers while also acknowledging, in all fairness, that they did nothing wrong during their stay in the city. Finally, the phrase ‘the king’s laws’ is quite unusual. Generally the term used was ‘the King’s Peace’ (as in, for example, ‘Tom committed trespass against the King’s Peace’) or ‘the common law’ (as in ‘Becky can find no remedy within the common law’). This is thus interesting because it potentially implies that the Gypsies did not live within, or did not normally abide by, the jurisdiction of the king. This fits with the wider evidence from across Europe from this period that shows Gypsies being exempted from local laws, either because of their letters of safe conduct or because it was accepted that they had a right to some degree of internal self-government. The other thing that this phrase signalled, from a legal perspective, is that it removed the problem from the mayor’s jurisdiction and placed it in the hands of the Crown.
Just as the provenance of the document is murky, its overall purpose is not entirely clear. On the one hand the indenture was one way for the Mayor to demonstrate how he was obeying the king’s proclamation, while on the other enabling him to distance himself from the situation. In the normal course of events he would have to detain the suspects and keep them until September under surety (bail), but in this case he bypassed this procedure, in all probability because he did not want to fill up his prison primarily with women and children. He thus gave them up straight to Roger Millward, who was probably a Justice of the Peace. But it is not at all obvious whether all the Gypsies were physically detained, only the ‘captain’ or in fact none of them. From a legal perspective, the document is rather unclear about what sort of crime the Gypsies might have committed. The sum of money taken – £4 7s 6d – was very large, and would count as grand larceny (a capital crime), while the fact it was taken ‘out of his chamber’ would also imply burglary (another capital crime). Certainly it was a serious offence; but it is important to remember that, in practice, relatively few people hung for robbery, and that the person ‘pursuing’ them may have been more interested in getting his money back than having them convicted. If so, he might have sued them for trespass (in which case, if he had won, he would have been awarded damages of the same amount or more), rather than had them charged.
Interestingly this document does not imply an automatic assumption of guilt, or indeed that punishment might follow from the indenture. What we have here then, is not only a glimpse of Gypsies staying in Hereford for nine days in 1530, but an insight into how a newly arrived group to England interacted with an emerging, and fluid, legal system. What is perhaps most telling about this document, apart from revealing something of the ambiguous documents with which historians of the early modern period must work, is how it shows that the Tudor state was making a claim to govern everyone in the realm, even if it was not always successful in doing so.
One of the key areas into which the Tudor state, and indeed states right across Europe, extended itself was that of the increasingly intractable problem of the poor, and the vagrant poor in particular. While recent research has shown that there are continuities between the late medieval period and the early modern era, and therefore we need to be careful about overemphasizing the speed and nature of change, it is clear that the world for the poor was different in 1600 than it had been in 1400.36 From the late fourteenth century until the early sixteenth century structural poverty – that is, poverty caused by factors beyond that of the individual or the family – decl
ined. The massive population loss following the Black Death meant that landholding sizes increased, and employment opportunities in agriculture and in the towns also widened, resulting in higher real wages. These were combined with climatic improvements that meant that bad harvests were infrequent, and the second half of the fifteenth century saw the tax burden reduced.37 However, by the early sixteenth century the balance had shifted away from favouring the poor: a combination of declining real incomes, population growth and bad harvests, with consequent food shortages, acute poverty and unusual amounts of migration led to social disruption that was manifested as much in changes in established marriage patterns as it was in outbreaks of violent unrest right across Europe.38
At the same time we can detect a sea change in attitude between ideas of poverty in the early modern period compared with the medieval era. Again, while we need to be wary of overstating the discontinuities, historians are in broad agreement that this period saw a general hardening of attitudes towards the poor at the same time as a number of long-term trends including a move from religious to secular priorities, from private alms to public measures, from charity to welfare and from voluntary contributions to compulsory levies.39 Up until the Reformation poor relief had largely been concentrated in the hands of the Church. The giving of alms not only provided the poor with material support but bestowed them with a status in society by interpreting poverty as religiously sanctioned. Similarly, begging was seen as an acceptable way of life, central as it was to the medieval practice of charity.40
Protestantism has often been credited with changing approaches to the poor, with writers traditionally pointing to the dissolution of religious orders and the introduction of the Protestant work ethic contributing to the harsher climate for those in need of support. In part this was manifested through a gradual process of secularization, so that town authorities rather than the Church increasingly handled the relief of the poor as part of their work, with this being most obvious in the German city states that embraced Protestantism and took over the funds and work of their church foundations as part of the Reformation. It is important, however, to recognize recent evidence that has stressed the broadly comparable shifts in how poverty and the poor were managed across both Protestant and Catholic states, suggesting that the ‘ubiquity of disease, crime and crisis’ across the Continent prompted similar responses irrespective of the religious makeup of the government in question. Indeed, as early as the fourteenth century there was the beginning of writings suggesting that it was wrong to relieve the wilfully idle, and gradually the ‘sin of sloth’ came to be defined as including physical as well as spiritual vices. By the beginning of the fifteenth century many humanists believed that some types of poverty, far from leading to holiness, caused social disorder and should be supressed. In this they were part of a wider shift in thinking that can be seen as part of the humanist Renaissance, which celebrated values of activity, success and engagement with the world. This chimed with the increasing clamour for reform of the Church, for although good works and almsgiving continued to be popular, their spiritual value was called into question, while friars and pilgrims were mocked as impious frauds. Broadly then there was a movement towards St Paul’s attitude that a good Christian works to pay their way.41
The rising number of paupers from the late fifteenth century and an emerging idea of the ‘true poor’ or deserving poor – orphans, the sick, infirm, aged or widowed – left no room to recognize unemployment per se as a reason for beggary. Essentially, unless someone was seen as physically incapable of earning a living, increasingly all who begged were to be considered as idlers and to be treated severely. To the dominant classes vagabonds were a profound threat to the established social order: they were ‘masterless’ in a period when the able-bodied poor were supposed to have masters, and they broke conventions of family, economic, religious and political life. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century vagrancy consequently involved more than simply being poor and rootless. It is difficult to capture the meaning that terms like ‘beggar’ and ‘rogue’ held for contemporaries: today’s equivalent might be terrorist, extremist or anarchist. Edmund Dudley, writing in England in 1509, stated that they were ‘the very mother of all vice . . . and the deadly enemy of the tree of commonwealth’.42
Unsurprisingly the focus of state attention was not on effective relief of the poor as such, but rather taking measures to control vagabondage and minimizing the socially disruptive potential of bands of wandering ‘masterless men’. While no other piece of legislation of the sixteenth century matched Edward VI’s ‘infamous’ Act of 1547, which prohibited begging and sentenced vagrants to branding and two years’ servitude for a first offence and execution for a second offence, it all wrestled with the problem of dividing the deserving and undeserving poor and controlling a potentially dangerous section of the population. Spain and Portugal took similarly repressive approaches. In 1552 Spanish vagabonds were sentenced to the galleys, and over subsequent decades the state repeatedly passed similar legislation reinforcing its terms, sending a strong signal of their deviant status. In Portugal, crowds of beggars and foreign vagrants roaming the capital were accused of refusing to work, ‘becoming thieves and getting into other bad habits’, and faced increasingly punitive measures. The law of 1544 created a hierarchy of punishment – from imprisonment, to flogging and expulsion – and within this a further hierarchy of expulsion: for the first offence, from the place where they were arrested, for the second from the kingdom, and for a third offence, transportation to Brazil.43
These measures were in tune not just with England, but with states right across western Europe, as the first half of the sixteenth century saw the passing of laws restricting access to poor relief aimed at excluding the migrant poor, vagrants and ‘sturdy beggars’. Such legislation saw the first genuine efforts to codify and rationalize poor relief through, for example, a move from voluntary to mandatory contributions towards the support of the poor and the formalization of a central coffer in each parish to provide for the upkeep of the locally needy. These developments generally benefited the local poor but only at the expense of excluding and punishing ‘outsiders’, the sturdy beggars, ‘rogues’ and vagabonds. Turning back to Frankfurt, as early as 1476 the town authorities divided the poor into residents and outsiders through the local poor being required to identify themselves with a special badge when they were collecting alms. A decade later the guidelines were clarified, so that ‘local’ paupers were only those who had been burghers for at least eight years, or who had served the city for that length of time. These were the only ones entitled to municipal support and who were allowed to beg, with all others being ejected from the city walls.44 Not only were such rules common across German cities, but they were also introduced across French and a number of Italian cities at roughly the same time.45
In such a context the Gypsies’ claim to be pilgrims, deserving of and dependent on alms from those they met, increasingly rang hollow. They were far more likely to be seen as vagabond outsiders making demands on already overstretched parish funds, and marginalized and vilified accordingly. It is no wonder that in the rapidly changing world of sixteenth-century Europe, where migration and vagrancy was on the increase and Gypsies were on the move, that all the different groups travelling and living on the road should become entwined, both in popular imagination and in law. Contemporary writers and legislators in Spain made explicit links between vagabonds and Gypsies. In 1597, in his Política para Corregidores, Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla stressed how the term vagamundo (vagabond) should be understood to include the Gypsies, as well as healthy beggars. For him the word was taken to include ‘anyone who is not settled in an area, and with neither property, nor trade, nor a master, nor work, wanders idle and suspect, and liable to steal or commit other crimes’. In using this definition he was simply following contemporary practice and reflecting existing legislation.46 Similar eliding of categories could be found in England where in 1554 the introduction of th
e death penalty for ‘Egyptians’ refusing to leave the country struggled to be implemented owing to the number of Gypsies who stated that they had been born in England. As a result the 1562 version of the Act extended the death penalty to anyone ‘in any company or fellowship of vagabonds, commonly called, or calling themselves Egyptians’, as well as those ‘counterfeiting, transforming or disguising themselves by their apparel, speech or other behaviour’ as Egyptians. For contemporaries, then, vagabonds and Gypsies were interchangeable categories in their unwelcome, outcast status.
Alongside the moves against the vagrant poor, the sixteenth century saw the creation of a new social outsider: that of the religious deviant. The western Church had faced reform movements and breakaway sects throughout its history, but nothing on the scale of the Reformation, which swiftly gained momentum, creating divisions within and between states. In part we might attribute its wider success to its conjunction at a historical moment that was also seeing the gradual rise of nation states. The Reformation consequently enabled religious freedom from Rome to combine with political independence, strengthening the authority of national monarchies vis-à-vis Rome. It also ensured that new ways of understanding and defining loyalty – who belonged to a state and who did not – became paramount. Throughout the early modern period Catholics in Protestant states and Protestants in Catholic states were doubly suspect, being traitors as well as heretics. And while there was often only a connection in the minds of suspicious governments, they often became tied up with concerns the vagabond and the Gypsy. We see this in accusations of spying so that, for example, the Tudor state blamed Gypsies for plots against Elizabeth I and of harbouring Spanish spies in their midst.47 Frankfurt was one of the first German states to pass laws against them on the grounds that they were spies: