SPECIAL ISSUE: SCOTL AND BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND UNION: 1689-1707
The relationship between itinerant communities and the Scottish early modern state was fraught with difficulties. In Scotland, much like other early modern states, Gypsy, Roma and Travellers were often perceived as the embodiment of social non-conformity and the ostensible source of a wide range of social, moral and legal problems that the government sought to control or eradicate. Consequently, a disproportionate level of fear and anxiety was directed towards the mobile population, who were often denounced as carriers of disease, sowers of sedition, or idle vagabonds who lacked the moral fibre required to live in a civil, Christian society. ‘Egyptians’, as the Roma were typically called, were conceptualised within a stereotypical framework of vagrancy and criminality, subject to state-driven marginalisation, all this commonly being derived from narratives of inferiority and otherness.
The campaign against ‘Egyptians’ was particularly fierce during the 1690s and early 1700s.
Crucially, however, the measures taken against them were not unique and existed as part of a broader effort by the state, and in particular the privy council, to curtail vice and immorality. In 1698, for instance, the council issued a royal proclamation against profaneness that was to be disseminated to the people via church pulpits twice a year. The proclamation summarised and streamlined previous acts and legislation against vice and was used as a general guide for detecting and prosecuting transgressive behaviour within the localities. Courts of immorality and reformation of manners societies were also established in several burghs after 1700 specifically to apprehend and prosecute those accused of cursing, swearing, profaning the sabbath, excessive drinking and other perceived immoralities.
