Another Darkness, Another Dawn Page 9

  We can see this in Germany in the seventeenth century, which was thrown into turmoil by the consequences of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). By 1648 it was in a desolate state, having lost an estimated third of its population, and for decades armies had been crossing its territories, surviving through plunder, and often supporting a huge troop of women, children and hangers-on, which included families of Gypsies. For example, Wallenstein’s army towards the end of the war had around 40,000 troops and 130,000 camp followers. These included disparate family groups of Gypsies whom he employed as spies and soldiers. Similarly, the Gypsy Rosenberg family from Groningen had a long history of serving the Dukes of Sachsen-Lauenberg and Brandenberg as mercenaries, with their extended families travelling alongside the armies during campaigns. In July 1664 a ‘large, well-armed and mounted band’ of them appeared in Saxony, on their way to entering the service of the Swedish army, while another group of them came through, having already been refused entry into the emperor’s army due to the number of women and children in their ranks.19 All this supports the view that by the end of the conflict Gypsies’ experience as ‘privileged raiders when attached to armies would tend to make them bolder and more organized in their methods of raiding’, something they would carry through into the post-war years.20

  While writers have agreed over the role of the Thirty Years War in worsening the position of Gypsies across the German states, they have disagreed over the amount of responsibility Gypsies themselves should take for this. In doing this they are reflecting a more general split in writings about Gypsies right through history and up to the present. Essentially the difference hinges around the extent to which the actions of Gypsies themselves are taken in isolation (often resulting in more negative portrayals) or set in the wider context of prejudice and actions of states and wider society (often resulting in more sympathetic portrayals). It is worth here looking in some depth at the writings of two different members of the Gypsy Lore Society from the 1930s, Miss Hall and Eric Winstedt, both of whom looked at Gypsies in Germany in the seventeenth century. Not only does their work give us an insight into the lives of Gypsies in this period, but it also shows us how authors can put different interpretations on similar evidence. Miss Hall emphasized ‘the increasing rigour of the laws instituted against them by the authorities themselves’:21

  One is tempted to surmise that Gypsy ‘crimes’ were in the beginning merely of their customary variety: petty pilfering, mendacity, fortune-telling, and a little sorcery accompanying the wanderers’ drifting progress through the country. But it is also easy to understand how the sedentary, agricultural population grew to dread the Gypsies’ approach: their very appearance – the strange attire, swarthy skins, coarse black hair, and eloquent eyes – made them objects of mistrust and fear. Their intimate customs, bearing all the alien quality of the East, were branded as immorality . . . Matters grew even worse as war conditions and the waxing ambition of Frederick William i of Prussia sent bands of ‘recruiters’ (described by Baron von Trenck as ‘the very refuse of the human race’) scouring through central Europe seizing able-bodied men of all nations . . . rebellion from this incredibly brutal military discipline made of [Gypsies] dangerous deserters, with a knowledge of firearms and a craving for vengeance of their captors. The bands were occasionally joined by other outlaws and deserters, not of their own race.22

  Here she stresses the behaviour of the ‘recruiters’, the dehumanizing effect of military life and the presence of ‘outsiders’ in the bands, while attributing negative feelings about Gypsies to prejudice over their foreign appearance, rather than actions they may have taken. In contrast Winstedt sees Gypsies themselves as far more accountable for their crimes, and marshalled evidence of large bands engaging in persistent raiding. In 1674 a group of 600 Gypsies made a surprise attack on a Silesian village, overcoming the resistance of its inhabitants, beating them and threatening them with death. They then billeted themselves, ten to fifteen per house from the Tuesday evening to the Thursday, ‘exacting food and all other necessities and stealing what they could lay their hands on’. Records from this period also indicate that Gypsies were well armed, to the extent of travelling with small field pieces. In addition the archives show that the law did not always work against them. In 1675 Gypsy Rosenberg appeared again in Saxony and accused a nobleman of attacking his band and taking their arms and horses. On showing a pass from the Brandenburg general, Friedrich von Hessen, the nobleman was ordered to restore his goods. At the same time a company of up to 100 Gypsies under the leadership of Johann von Reinhardt appeared at Stolpen with ‘fine hunting rifles and greyhounds, and stole fodder and cattle’:23

  Gypsies had yielded to the temptation to continue their war-time careers as raiders, becoming naturally bolder and more criminal owing to the comparative immunity they enjoyed during the weakened state of Germany for some generations. They had become a real menace to the country, and brought upon themselves the severe measures.24

  However Miss Hall argued that they had little choice given the conditions they faced:

  Gypsies were arrested on sight and branded, being banished after a flogging, and in the event of their return, put to death without mercy. Under such bitter provocation the Gypsies had no other course than to withdraw into the wilder parts of the country, where, banded under leaders, fifty or a hundred strong, armed and defiant, they stole for their sustenance and skirmished with the soldier-police to expel them . . . From the lists of goods stolen on these occasions, it is evident that the Gypsies’ main objects were food and decent clothing – butter, cheeses, fowls, flour, and bacon; coats, gowns, and cloaks.25

  Both Hall and Winstedt agree that the punishments meted out to Gypsies were harsh, although the latter argued that the ‘charge of especial severity seems to me to have been exaggerated’.26 Evidence from the period shows that alongside the Gypsy hunts – which saw at least 100 people being killed across Germany – following capture, states attempted to assert control through highly ritualized and public floggings, maimings and executions.27 Details of three Gypsy women arrested in Saxony in 1715 give a sense of the physical impact of such ‘severe measures’. One of the women had already been arrested twice, the others once. They carried the legacy of these arrests in the loss of an ear each, with the first woman additionally missing two fingers. Whippings and banishment were also common punishments: one case recorded a Gypsy woman flogged with her child tied to her front, in the hope of being able to carry it away with her into exile.28

  Here it is useful to take a moment to consider the insights offered by Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), which famously opens with a grisly account of an execution, complete with the difficulties of tearing away flesh with pincers and a botched attempt to quarter the condemned by pulling him apart with four horses. Foucault reflects on the body as a subject of political power, and how in the early modern period the power of the state was limited and contested, and so was forced to use violence as a means of exerting its control.29 Certainly it is the case that in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the punishments faced by Gypsies were comparable to those given out to vagabonds, bandits and other criminals. If we look in detail at the torture and execution of Johannes la Fortun, known as Hemperla, the ‘great Galant’, his brother, Anton Alexander (the ‘little Galant’) and the rest of their Gypsy robber band in the winter of 1726–7, we can see the material and physical efforts put into creating what were deemed appropriate punishments and the importance of the ritualistic nature of these punishments in asserting the authority of the state.30 After capture Hemperla and the other leaders denied their guilt, were placed in solitary confinement and condemned to torture in extremis and under the public gaze.

  One of the less important band members, Lorentz Lampert, was the first to be called. He was ‘ushered into the icy-clammy “rackchamber” at 4am, undressed by the hangman’s vassals and seated in the “Pein-Stuhl”. He apparently paid little regard to the “thumb-screw” (an
instrument with small serrated jaws that close down upon the lower thumb joint), and so the torturers moved onto the “Spanish Boot” (leg vice), that was “firmly screwed together”.’ Under ‘writhing agony, and tempted with the promise of relief and warmth, he gave way and confessed the guilt of the band’, after which he ‘was allowed to be unscrewed and taken to a warm room’. Next was Hemperla himself, who resisted both ‘the pains of the thumb-screw and “boot”’:

  Having searched his whole body in vain for some concealed charm, the Inquisitors’ men cropped his hair – a thing which disturbed him curiously – afterwards applying the ‘boot’ yet more excruciatingly, so that under the crushing of muscle and bone he at least broke down and made the confession they required.

  At this stage, ‘as a final touch of artistry to the torment’, the officials brought forward Hemperla’s mother, so ‘she might share the spectacle of her son broken by the extremity of agony’. At this point he broke down and confessed, which then resulted in a blanket guilty verdict: the leaders were to be ‘broken on the wheel’, nine others to be hanged, and thirteen (mostly women) beheaded, an event that was watched by ‘many thousands of onlookers’, and recorded by a contemporary artist in a woodcut.31

  If this account is revealing of the physical suffering imposed as part of early modern justice, the contemporaneous imprisonment, trial and execution of a group of Gypsies in Bohemia gives an insight into how law and order was constrained by material factors and contested and acted out at the local level.32 Initial laws banishing Gypsies from Bohemia had simply ordered them to be deprived of weapons, exiling them without harm. As this and subsequent legislation was not enforced, despite there being ‘such large bands of Gypsies found pillaging that the military had to be sent against them’, by 1689 banishment backed up by hanging. In 1697, this was further strengthened so that Gypsies were proclaimed outlaws, with men being condemned to death and women to flogging and having their right ear cut off. These measures were followed by a period of severe persecution, which ‘soon passed over’, with the fact that the laws were repeated in both 1721 and 1726 suggesting that they were not fully enforced.33 But what did this mean at the local level, both for individual Gypsies and for those expected to carry out the measures?

  Following their capture in eastern Bohemia, owing to a shortage of cells, a group of Gypsies was distributed across a number of towns in the region, whereupon the town of Netschetin, which received two of the prisoners, promptly complained of ‘the expense to their poor community and of the unfitness of their prison’. The subsequent escape of one prisoner may have been more attributable to the limited prison facilities and reluctance of the town authorities to mount an adequate guard than to the officially cited reason, which was witchcraft. Pressed by Prague, the town reluctantly sent out 28 citizens to capture the escapee, a process that took three weeks and ‘the assistance of some local peasants’. The escapee was sentenced to be hanged, the women to having their right ears cut off and to being ‘flogged with rods round the gallows, and banished from the country after giving a bond not to return on pain of death’. What we see next is a further insight into the inconveniences and benefits visited on local communities who were required to enact punishments on behalf of a distant state: the ‘execution of this sentence involved the town in more expense and trouble, but provided it with considerable entertainment’. Part of the trouble lay in the fact that Netschetin had no functioning gallows, so every citizen was required to provide three oxen and to help with hauling wood in order to construct new ones. When this had been done and the gallows made, ‘the whole company were treated with beer and the carpenters, masons and Dorfrichter [town judge] to bread as well’.

  As well as being revealing about the mechanics of the early modern state, this account allows us to reflect on the importance of distinguishing between the impact of laws on individuals and that on Gypsies as a group. While we may point generally to the failure of the legislation at a broad level to remove Gypsies from European, or even German, society, this is not the same as it having no effect. The physical brutality of imprisonment, torture and punishment, the practical and emotional difficulties of losing husbands and other family members, as well as the impact of banishment, would have all been manifestly devastating for any individual or family group. Indeed, records of a number of women involved in one group punishment demonstrated a high number of double surnames alongside ‘the mention of two husbands [of one woman] who had been shot, [which] shows how frequent violent deaths were among these people’.34

  In the sense raised by Foucault, brutal punishments were a way of drawing Gypsies and other criminals into the body politic: using their bodies as a way of inscribing and demonstrating the power of emerging states. Although apparently living outside the law and social norms, through such public displays of institutionalized violence their punishment served to provide an example to the wider population of the dangers of criminality and deviance. At a time when the authorities could not hope to catch everyone engaged in lawless activities, it was deemed important that those who were caught were punished in such a way as to act as a deterrent to the wider population: ‘Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.’35 In this sense then, although manifestly brutal, the treatment of Gypsies has to be seen as part of the normal continuum of behaviour of early modern states rather than as an aberration.

  While we might argue that one profound difference for Gypsies was that they were outlawed and hunted purely on the basis of their identity rather than behaviour, a close reading of the evidence suggests that this distinction was far from clear cut. If we take, for example the pronouncement made on 18 August 1722, by Charles VI of Austria, we can see that he complained how his decree of 1 July 1720 had been ignored. With the death penalty as sanction, it had aimed for

  the complete banishment of the gipsies wandering about the country along with their wives and children and the other rabble of thieves, robbers and murderers who have joined themselves to them . . . for the general quiet and security of the country.

  Here we get the sense that the target was in fact the large bands roaming the countryside engaged in criminal activities, who though made up of people from a range of backgrounds (including Gypsies), had for convenience’s sake been lumped together as ‘Gypsies’. Interestingly, the reason cited for the failure of this legislation to work was not simply that it had not been properly implemented, but rather that it had been actively thwarted: ‘Certain of our subjects have had the audacity to give the forbidden lodgements and shelter to this gipsy rabble, pests of the country, both within and after the most carefully arranged time allotted for their departure.’36 This suggests that, far from being complete outlaws, certainly some Gypsies were seen enough as part of a local community to be given protection and a place to stay.

  Other evidence from this period also points to the mixing of Gypsies with wider society. Just because many of those who seem to have travelled and lived alongside Gypsies came from the dispossessed this does not mean we can or should underplay the importance of this contact. Given the chaos produced by conflict in central Europe in the seventeenth century, the vagrant poor would have included peasants forced from the land, those migrating for work between cities and states, as well as ex-soldiers and longer-term vagabonds and people of the road. Evidence from Nuremberg suggests that this mixing was of particular cause for concern to legislators. In 1732 when more severe legislation was being discussed, the fact that ‘deserters and other undesirables had joined the Gypsies to escape detection’ was cited as a reason for tightening the law, as was evidence that a farmer’s son had joined a band of Gypsies. There was also concern that the Gypsies were trading with metal dealers and others in order to make their living, suggesting that they had normalized contact with the wider population based around trading and artisanal activities.37

  Evidence of the place Gypsies were making for themselves in European economies and societies does not simply come fro
m the German lands. Complaints from the French crown in 1682 over the failures of previous legislation demonstrated that

  it is impossible to entirely hunt these thieves from the kingdom due to the protection which they have always found, and which they still find daily with gentlemen and judicial lords, who give them sanctuary in their castles and houses, despite the orders of parliament, who expressly defend them under pain of privation from their status as judges, and of arbitrary fines, this disorder which is common in the majority of the provinces of our kingdom.38

  Taken with the evidence from Germany and the Spanish edict of 1695 this document gives us something of an insight into the lives of Gypsies of the period. It allows us to look beyond the writings and laws that stressed the lawlessness and foreignness of Gypsies and see that at the local level in France, in some places at least, they were able to evade the galleys and punishments set out in law. More than this, such evasions were made possible through the complicity of local elites and the wider community who actively sought to protect them. Similarly, in Royal Hungary decrees for expulsion were only very patchily enforced by the nobles who implemented the laws in this frontier land. Some lords implemented the decrees of banishment on pain of mutilation and execution, but others were anxious to keep their Gypsy populations in situ, as they valued their work as smiths, soldiers and musicians. So, for example, György Thurzó, the Count Palatine of Hungary, in direct contradiction to imperial policy, issued safe conduct to a company of Gypsies who were ‘performing military services’.39