ABSTRACT
Exiles from Egypt, travellers from the East, ‘counterfeit Egyptians’, strategic performers: Romani people or ‘Gypsies’ in early modern England evaded easy categorisation. 1 They were often vilified by policymakers and moral authorities who considered them to exist dangerously beyond the scope of English law and government. ‘By name they are called Gypsies, they call themselves Egiptians’, reported Thomas Dekker in 1609. ‘They are a people more scattred then [sic] Jewes, and more hated’. 2 They have ‘the bodies of Frantick persons’ dictated by influence of the moon, acting like the ‘onely base Ronnagants [renegades] upon earth’. 3 ‘Foraging’ and mobile, carrying their belongings with them as they travelled from town to town or parish to parish, Gypsy communities mingled with English parishioners in the localities while remaining recognisably separate. 4 Their status, ‘culturally different yet legally naturalized’, challenged the categories of ‘subject’, ‘stranger’, and ‘traveller’ that authorities sought to impose, instigating broader discussions about vagrancy and social defiance. 5
