ABSTRACT
The symbolic language of English nationalism was subverted during the Victorian/Edwardian folk revival through the collecting of English folk music from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. For collectors like Alice Gillington, who spent much of her life among Gypsy travellers around Hampshire, the publication of Gypsy folk music was a means of advocating for their social rights in a period when travelling cultures were increasingly becoming outlawed. A particularly contentious item of legislation in the early twentieth century was the Moveable Dwellings Bill, which was tabled in a number of iterations between the 1880s and the 1930s. The bill would have mandated the compulsory registration of caravans and canal houseboats, the sex-segregation of Gypsy sleeping quarters and the right for inspectors to enter any moveable dwelling. The stories and folk music collections that Gillington published characteristically employed Anglo-Romani words and idioms alongside conventional English and emphasized the roles played by travelling communities in disseminating English folk music among various settled populations. The argument implicit within this work was that the production of English folk music took place in between settled and travelling cultures, rather than within one or the other, such that efforts towards the repression or assimilation of English Gypsies would concomitantly threaten the vitality of traditional culture in England.
