ABSTRACT
This account begins with the gypsy groups who arrived in Britain in the 16th century. Having travelled from Northern India, they came from the Balkans, upon being uprooted from their settled communities and occupations and pushed towards Western Europe (Holmes, 1988, p 24). The case of the gypsies who came to Britain appears to be paradigmatic in several senses. First, they are an early example, in the so called ‘modern’ period of English history, of a distinct non-European people recorded as having migrated to Britain more or less forcibly due, in their case, to the persecution they faced in other European countries. Secondly, the treatment of gypsy groups arriving in Britain is marked by a hostility which has reproduced itself through the centuries, right down to the present day. The small gypsy groups which arrived in the early 1900s, and again in the late 1990s, were treated in remarkably similar ways.
