Gypsies, Egyptians, Romanies, and-more recently-Travellers. Who are these marginal and mysterious people who first arrived in England in early Tudor times? Are claims of their distant origins on the Indian subcontinent true, or just another of the many myths and stories that have accreted around them over time? Can they even be regarded as a single people or ethnicity at all? Gypsies have frequently been vilified, and not much less frequently romanticized, by the settled population over the centuries. Social historian David Cressy now attempts to disentangle the myth from the reality of...
Gypsies, Egyptians, Romanies, and-more recently-Travellers. Who are these marginal and mysterious people who first arrived in England in early Tudor t...