Tim's Tales - When people were hanged simply for being gypsies

It was a cold November morning and a crowd had assembled.

She was a poor young woman and there is no eyewitness account of her last moments. I can conjecture that some spectators stood in silence, while some will have jeered and celebrated that the laws of the land were being enforced.

She was not alone: her friend Jean Baillie was also condemned to die by her side - two young women whose short lives were brutally ended.

They were undoubtedly guilty in the eyes of the law. But what was their crime?

Sadly, we know next to nothing about Agnes or Jean, but we can make some guesses as to how they may have earned a living.

Both women were very likely creative and skilled in making household utensils or in selling them. They will probably have been knowledgeable about herbal remedies and perhaps sold them or used them for medicinal use. They worked hard to eek out a living.

Strangely, given their fate, they may have been trusted and welcome in the communities they visited. But they had to be very careful as they travelled, keep a low profile, because by simply existing, they were breaking the law. Perhaps they survived by concealing their true identities, although that cannot have been easy.

But finally, the law caught up with them and they were sentenced to death. Their crime was to be gypsies.

Yes, that was enough.

The persecution of gypsies had begun many years before they were born, in 1541, when the first anti-gypsy law was passed. The law was in the form of a royal decree by James V. This gave people leading a gypsy lifestyle 30 days to leave the country or face the death penalty.

Gypsies had been part of Scotland and its culture since the 12th century or earlier. They were also an important part of its economy, working seasonally and doing jobs others couldn’t. Yet the spotlight of hatred was put upon them, they were blamed for the ills of society (just as women accused of witchcraft were) and were deemed not to belong.

The laws were tightened in the 1570s, with many hangings but also other forms of persecution inflicted upon them, including cruel punishments like brandings and mutilations. Gypsies were nailed to trees by their ears and often beaten. Women and children were not spared these horrors.

Then, in the early 1600s, the legal screw was once again tightened. An act in 1609 made it a capital offence just to be a gypsy, or Egyptian as they were termed, because of the colour of their skin and supposed origins. Their ethnicity, way of life and language were considered a threat, despite having been an integral part of Scottish life and culture for centuries, and what we would today call essential workers.

More hangings took place for “being Egyptians”. Transportation to the plantations in the Caribbean as slaves also became a punishment. The law allowed owners of coalmines and salt pans to apprehend gypsies and enslave them, and put them to work in the mines and salt panning industry.

The law urged “good subjects” to act like vigilantes in finding and rooting out gypsy families.

In 1636, that’s what a man called Arthur of Whittingehame did when he discovered gypsy families living not far from Haddington. History doesn’t record the scene, but we can imagine the screams and terror as men, women and children were forcibly taken to be imprisoned in Haddington’s cramped and insanitary Tollbooth.

It was the law that they should be imprisoned, all of them. It was also the law that they should be executed, but the town’s authorities were unsure how to proceed as there were women and children, and a mass execution would be unsightly. But the cost of the imprisonment was “burdensome” and so they asked the privy council for instructions.

The answer was laden with dehumanising language, comparing gypsies to a nest or hornets that needed to be exterminated. They wanted to make an example and instructed that all the men be hanged, and all the women who had no children be drowned. So a mass execution of 20 souls did take place.

The children and their mothers were spared death but scourged through the town (which means beaten and humiliated), then burnt on the cheeks and banished for life, under pain of death if they returned.

It was ethnic cleansing of a people whose appearance and lifestyle were deemed just too different. There is no record they ever committed a crime other than their ethnic identity.

There were other examples of this, but the execution of Agnes McDonald and Jean Baillie were to be the last under these heinous laws. Even so, the persecution and discrimination continued in different forms, and the otherising continues to this day.

I grew up with this, but then got to know people from the gypsy/traveller communities and learnt about their history, and tried to understand their culture and traditions. Every community has its good and bad apples; we are all in that barrel. The gypsy contribution to Scottish culture is huge, even if most folk aren’t aware of it.

In the last moments of Agnes McDonald’s life, did she even understand why so many people hated her so much they wanted her dead? Just because she was different to them? She’d done no wrong, other than be who she was. It was her ethnic identity which was her crime.

I’d like to think we have moved on since those times, but it feels like the age-old tactic of fearmongering and scapegoating an entire ethnic group, accompanied with dehumanising language, is returning in new clothes but with the same intentions.

The antidote, I think, partly anyway, is not to scream at each other but to understand and share our culture and history together, celebrate our different contributions and see ourselves as equally human.