Who decided what was the “real” Gypsy way to get married?

Many debates happen online about Gypsy and Traveller culture.

And when they do, differences of opinion can become very strong, very quickly.

I found the whole “if you use a mop to clean your floors, you’re not a real Gypsy or Traveller” debate fascinating.

Not fascinating enough for a full academic deep dive, mind you.

A video? Absolutely.

Maybe two.

Who knows.

But there is another debate I keep seeing that fascinates me much more.

Because the deeper I look at it, the less I think it is actually about marriage.

Running away versus getting legally married.

Or, more specifically, which one is the proper, traditional, real Gypsy or Traveller way.

And I am going to spoil the ending before I even begin.

I don’t think there is one.

I think there are different practices within different families and communities, shaped by different journeys, different places and different histories.

And, perhaps, by something else too.

What if some of the things we now defend fiercely as “tradition” were also shaped by what our ancestors had to do to survive?

What if persecution, law, religion, respectability, poverty and the constant demand to make ourselves understandable to the settled world left memories in our families long after we forgot where those memories came from?

Not genetic memory.

Not some mystical suggestion that I can literally remember what happened to my great-great-great-grandmother.

I mean inherited memory.

Family scripts.

Warnings.

Silences.

Rules.

“This is what decent people do.”

“Never do that.”

“Make sure you’re married properly.”

“We’ve always done it this way.”

And after enough generations, perhaps nobody remembers the sentence that originally came before it:

“Because if you don’t…”

So, what do I mean by “running away”?

In my family, what we now call running away doesn’t necessarily mean disappearing for weeks or months.

It can mean two single people spending the night together and then saying they are married.

Some families still practise and recognise this.

I have known young people in my own family run away because they want to get married before their parents are willing to give permission, or because they believe their family won’t give permission at all.

Once they have run away, most of my family would recognise that a line has been crossed. They would see them as a couple.

But increasingly they would also want to see them legally married afterwards.

Then there is walking off.

That is different again.

The wedding is planned.

Everyone thinks they know when it is happening.

But the couple tell nobody, leave separately that morning — often supposedly going to work — and return later that day as a married couple.

Surprise!

I am deliberately describing these as practices and language from my own family and community.

I am not claiming every Romani Gypsy or Traveller family uses these words, or understands marriage in the same way.

And actually, that distinction sits at the heart of this whole blog.

Because perhaps the problem starts when:

“This is what my family does”

quietly becomes:

“This is what all real Gypsies do.”

Years ago, an archivist showed me something I have never forgotten

Many years ago, I was doing an archival deep dive for a heritage project in Doncaster.

The archivist pointed me towards some records and asked what I noticed.

And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

Gypsy and Traveller people seemed to appear repeatedly through two particular doors:

crimes and christenings.

That stayed with me.

Because archives are not neutral windows into people’s lives.

They record what institutions thought was worth recording.

A largely oral community might marry privately, share knowledge between generations, move between parishes and conduct huge parts of cultural and family life without producing a single official document.

Then along comes somebody with institutional power.

A magistrate.

A constable.

A parish officer.

A clergyman.

And suddenly we are visible.

That creates a very particular archive.

Research guidance from Surrey History Centre makes a remarkably similar point about Romani and Traveller genealogy: Gypsy marriages were often private family affairs and documentary evidence for them is much scarcer than baptismal records.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that an archivist in Doncaster could summarise our historical visibility as:

crimes and christenings.

When the archive sees us, it is often because somebody else had reason to write us down.

And that means we need to be careful about using somebody else’s paperwork to decide what our ancestors believed.

And then I found bastardy

During that Doncaster research, I kept coming across bastardy records.

For years I had carried a simplified version of what they meant in my head:

being an unmarried mother or father was basically treated as a crime.

That isn’t quite accurate.

But what actually happened is, in some ways, even more important to this marriage conversation.

Under the Poor Law system, a child whose parents were not legally recognised as married could be treated as “illegitimate”. Parish authorities had a financial interest in establishing paternity because otherwise the cost of supporting the mother and child could fall upon the parish. Women could be examined about the identity of the father and men could be pursued through affiliation and maintenance proceedings. Research on the Old and New Poor Laws shows just how deeply unmarried motherhood, paternity and poverty became matters of state administration.

Now put a Romani family beside that system.

The woman says:

“That is my husband.”

Her family says:

“Yes, they’re married.”

His family agrees.

Their community understands exactly what has happened.

But the state says:

“No they’re not.”

And suddenly the same relationship has two completely different meanings.

Within one system: husband, wife, family.

Within the other: unmarried woman, illegitimate child, putative father.

That is what academics might describe through legal pluralism — different systems of social rules and recognition existing alongside one another.

Except they are not really alongside one another when only one of them gets to decide who inherits, who has parental rights and whose marriage legally exists.

And being an unmarried mother could become far more dangerous than I had realised

This is where something I had half remembered came back to me.

The phrase wasn’t “morally incapable”.

It was much uglier.

“Moral imbecile.”

The Mental Deficiency Act 1913 created categories including what the legislation called “moral imbeciles” and “feeble-minded persons”. Importantly, I don’t want to reproduce a common historical exaggeration here: simply giving birth outside marriage did not automatically make every unmarried mother a “moral imbecile”.

But the legislation specifically included circumstances in which a woman already treated as “defective” could come under the Act if she was receiving poor relief while pregnant with, or giving birth to, an “illegitimate” child. Parliamentary debate records that provision directly. Historian Jan Walmsley’s research has subsequently examined the way women were targeted for sexual regulation under this legislation.

Think about the combination.

Poor.

Unmarried.

Pregnant.

Female.

And somebody in authority deciding whether your sexuality demonstrated deficiency.

This wasn’t just morality being whispered by neighbours.

At points in British history, ideas about female sexual respectability became entangled with law, welfare, medicine and institutionalisation.

And because history has a strange habit of circling back on itself, there is a Doncaster connection.

Research by historian Sarah Wise, reported when her book The Undesirables was published, describes three women found at St Catherine’s Hospital near Doncaster in 1972. They were then in their sixties and seventies and had reportedly been institutionalised as adolescents in the 1920s after having babies outside marriage under the mental-deficiency system.

Doncaster.

The same place where an archivist many years later pointed me towards bastardy records and asked me what I noticed.

I don’t know whether there is any direct connection whatsoever between those women and the GTC records I was looking at.

There probably isn’t.

But there is a connection in the system.

It tells us what could happen when the state decided that marriage wasn’t simply private, religious or familial.

It was a marker of respectability.

And women could pay an enormous price for falling outside it.

But what happened to the father?

This is another part of the legal history I hadn’t properly understood.

Because if your community recognised you as husband and wife but English law did not, it wasn’t only the woman who became legally unmarried.

The father could become legally almost invisible too.

A 1920 parliamentary debate describing the bastardy laws put the position in extraordinary terms: an “illegitimate” child was described as having no legal father and only one legal relative — their mother. MPs argued that if that mother died, the child could be left without a recognised legal relative at all.

And this wasn’t a legal oddity that disappeared immediately afterwards.

As late as 1967, the House of Lords was discussing the fact that an unmarried father still had no automatic legal right to his child in English law.

The law changed over time, of course, and I am deliberately not pretending one rule remained unchanged for centuries.

But think about what that historical situation might mean culturally.

Imagine a man who considers himself married.

His wife considers them married.

Their families consider them married.

He is Daddy.

He works for his children.

Protects his children.

Belongs to his children.

Then she dies.

And the state says:

You weren’t her husband.

And therefore your relationship to those children is not what you thought it was either.

Suddenly a legal marriage certificate is not just somebody else’s ceremony.

It can become protection.

Protection for her.

Protection for him.

Protection for the children.

And that makes me wonder whether somewhere, in some families, the insistence that:

“You MUST get legally married.”

didn’t begin as religious conservatism at all.

Perhaps it began as somebody learning the hard way that the state only protected the family it could see.

So when did church marriage become the “traditional” thing?

This is where things get even more complicated.

Because I hear:

“We’ve always married in church.”

And I hear:

“Real Gypsies didn’t need church marriage.”

History makes both statements difficult to universalise.

Before Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, marriage law in England allowed forms of marriage that would later become legally impossible. From 1754 the legal landscape changed dramatically: for most people in England and Wales, marriage had to be conducted through the Anglican system to receive legal recognition, with limited exemptions. Parliament’s own history of marriage law identifies Hardwicke’s Act as the turning point.

Again:

Hardwicke’s Marriage Act was not an anti-Gypsy law.

I am not saying it was.

But laws do not need to mention us specifically to reshape our lives.

If your marriage is recognised by your family but not by the state, and legal recognition affects children, inheritance, property, poor relief and parental status, it doesn’t take many painful examples before somebody says:

“Next time, make sure you do it properly.”

And then their daughter tells her daughter.

And her daughter tells hers.

Eventually nobody remembers the legal case, the parish officer or the dead mother.

They just remember:

“Gypsies get properly married.”

Could something learned through legal vulnerability eventually become experienced as cultural tradition?

I think that question is worth asking.

Then religion adds another layer

This is one of the most fascinating parts.

Romani people do not historically share one universal religion.

A peer-reviewed study published in 2022 compared eighteenth-century historical material with contemporary fieldwork and concluded that Romani communities had, historically and in the present, tended to adopt the dominant religion of the country in which they lived.

That makes geographical patterns of Romani religion much easier to understand.

Christian here.

Muslim there.

Catholic.

Orthodox.

Protestant.

And still Romani.

Now, I want to be careful about the next bit.

That research demonstrates religious adaptation.

It doesn’t prove that every conversion happened because somebody consciously thought:

“This will help us fit in.”

People believe.

Faith can be genuine.

Religion changes.

Communities influence one another.

People convert for thousands of reasons.

But when I put that evidence alongside what we know about Romani survival in Europe, I think we are allowed to ask whether religious adaptation could sometimes also make people more socially legible and acceptable to the population around them.

Because our ancestors worked things out remarkably quickly.

Win the Gentry. Take their religion.

My slightly flippant version has always been:

Win the Gentry, take their religion.

And yes.

Don’t forget the gifts!!!

There is some history underneath my joke.

Research on early Romani arrival in Britain describes groups initially being welcomed by royalty and gentry. In Scotland in 1505, there is a court record of Romani people receiving £7 at the King’s request, possibly for entertainment or because they were understood to be pilgrims.

Across Europe, adopting or presenting the identity of Christian pilgrims could bring hospitality and protection that an unknown travelling population might otherwise not have received.

So no, I can’t evidence the sentence:

“We became Christian for presents.”

As brilliant a blog title as that would be.

But I can evidence that being understood through a religious framework the settled population recognised could open doors.

And yes.

Sometimes apparently £7 worth of doors.

Except there is an enormous contradiction here

Because while Romani people were adopting the religions of the places where they lived, European churches were not consistently welcoming Romani people with open arms.

Far from it.

A historical study of relations between churches and Romani communities from the medieval into early-modern period describes a long and complicated history of suspicion and exclusion.

A twelfth-century canonist threatened six years’ excommunication for church members involved in practices such as fortune-telling, magic and amulet-making that were associated in the text with athinganoi. A later canon imposed five years’ anathema around contact with Romani fortune-tellers.

Then it gets even more explicit.

A Reformed synod at Debrecen in 1567 described “Gypsies and similar apostates” in rules denying baptism and Holy Communion to those judged insufficiently Christian and prohibited clergy from marrying them. A collection of church decrees in Upper Hungary in 1595 similarly referred to “Gypsies and similar sinners” when denying sacraments and even a “decent funeral”.

The historian is careful to point out that these decrees did not amount to a universal exclusion of all Romani people from Christianity; church registers also demonstrate Romani baptisms, marriages and burials.

And that distinction matters.

So I wouldn’t write:

“The Church excommunicated all Romani people several times.”

The evidence doesn’t support something that neat.

But I would write this:

There were periods when church authorities associated Romani people and Romani-linked practices with apostasy, heresy or superstition; threatened excommunication or anathema around those practices and interactions; denied Romani people sacraments; prohibited clergy from marrying them; and even denied Christian burial.

And suddenly our adoption of dominant religions looks more complicated again.

We were adopting the religions of the countries in which we lived…

while sometimes being told by those same religious institutions that we were not quite acceptable Christians.

There is something painfully familiar about that.

Assimilate.

But not too visibly.

Become like us.

But don’t imagine you are one of us.

And that makes church marriage even more interesting

Think about all these histories sitting together.

A community whose marriages could exist privately.

A state increasingly defining which marriages legally counted.

Poor Law authorities determining legitimacy.

Unmarried women being morally scrutinised.

Unmarried fathers having weak or nonexistent automatic legal status.

Children classified differently according to their parents’ marriage.

Romani people adopting the dominant religion of the places where they settled.

Religion sometimes making travellers more understandable or acceptable to the powerful.

And churches simultaneously having their own long history of rejecting or regulating Romani people.

How could all of that not leave a cultural mark?

That doesn’t mean church marriage is fake Gypsy culture.

Quite the opposite.

Something doesn’t stop becoming ours simply because our ancestors originally adapted it from somewhere else.

Every culture changes.

The interesting question is why particular adaptations became so important that eventually we forgot they were adaptations.

This is where inherited memory helps me make sense of it

Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory was developed in relation to descendants living with traumatic histories they did not personally experience, but which are transmitted so powerfully through family and cultural life that later generations are profoundly shaped by them.

I’m not trying to lift a theory developed around one historical experience and pretend it maps perfectly onto ours.

It doesn’t.

But the idea of inherited memory gives me useful language.

Because perhaps we don’t only inherit stories.

Sometimes we inherit instructions whose explanations have disappeared.

Never trust that institution.

Always get paperwork.

Don’t tell outsiders.

Never let them take the children.

Get married properly.

Don’t bring shame.

Stay close to family.

Don’t marry outside.

Don’t let people think badly of us.

And eventually the historical sentence:

“Because when your grandmother was young…”

disappears.

All that survives is:

“Because that’s how we do things.”

And that is fascinating.

Because perhaps two families can have completely contradictory traditions and both can be carrying genuine inherited responses to Romani history.

One family may preserve:

The state does not make our marriage. Our families do.

Another may preserve:

Never leave your marriage unrecognised by the state. It leaves your family vulnerable.

One carries resistance.

One carries protection through adaptation.

And most families probably carry both, in different measures.

This is also where I think colonial thinking becomes useful

I use colonial carefully.

I am not saying every piece of anti-Gypsy legislation was technically colonial legislation.

It wasn’t.

And Romani Gypsy, Irish Traveller and Scottish Gypsy Traveller histories cannot simply be collapsed into one another.

But there is now serious work within Critical Romani Studies asking what a decolonial approach can reveal about who has historically had the power to define Romani people, Romani knowledge and Romani legitimacy.

For me, that gives us a useful question.

What happens when one culture possesses the institutional power to declare its own practices simply normal?

One form of marriage is proper.

One family is legitimate.

One religion is respectable.

One home is permanent.

One history is written.

One language is official.

And everything outside it needs explaining.

Correcting.

Civilising.

Recording.

Or removing.

That is where I think colonial thinking helps this conversation.

Not because our ancestors were passive.

They absolutely weren’t.

But because adaptation is also agency.

Learning which door opens and walking through it is agency.

Learning which religion gets you welcomed is agency.

Learning which paperwork protects your children is agency.

Surviving somebody else’s system is agency.

But survival strategies can outlive the danger they were created to survive.

And eventually they can become rules.

Which brings me back to running away

Because I can comfortably sit somewhere in the middle of this argument.

I know families who would recognise running away as a marriage.

I know families who would be horrified by that sentence.

I know people who believe the church wedding is essential.

I know others who think the legal wedding happens afterwards.

I know families where permission is incredibly important.

And others where young people have run away precisely because permission wasn’t going to happen.

None of that makes me particularly interested in deciding who is more Gypsy.

I’m interested in understanding why we became different.

There is, though, another side to running away that I think we need to talk about.

Because cultural practice does not exist outside consequences.

I have known girls whose running-away relationship ended and who were returned home into extremely secluded lives.

The pressure around reputation, shame and what people will say can be enormous.

And I know of one young girl whose life ended after the pressure she experienced following the breakdown of such a relationship became unbearable.

I don’t include her for dramatic effect.

I include her because this is why:

“That’s tradition.”

can never be the end of a conversation.

Traditions live inside people.

And people can be hurt.

We need to be capable of loving our culture enough to examine what happens inside it.

That is not the same as agreeing with centuries of outsiders telling us our culture itself is the problem.

Those things are completely different.

Perhaps one reason internal reflection can feel so threatening is precisely because external scrutiny has so rarely been safe for us.

For centuries, somebody examining us could mean legislation.

Removal.

Moral judgement.

Missionary intervention.

Child separation.

Eviction.

Criminalisation.

Assimilation.

So perhaps we learned to defend first and examine later.

I understand that.

But community-led reflection isn’t assimilation.

It is ownership.

Maybe our differences are actually evidence of survival

There is a sentence I keep almost writing.

Something about whether your opinion on running away and legal marriage depends upon where your family settled, how long they stayed there, or how continuously the family claimed and retained their GTC ethnicity.

But I can’t evidence that.

And I don’t think I need to.

There is a better question.

What did different families learn they had to do in order to survive?

What did we learn in England?

Scotland?

Ireland?

Spain?

France?

Eastern Europe?

The Ottoman territories?

What did Catholic Romani families learn?

What did Muslim Romani families learn?

Orthodox families?

Protestant families?

What happened when we moved again?

What happened when a daughter married somebody from another family carrying completely different inherited rules?

What happened when the state recognised one marriage and ignored another?

What happened when a priest married us?

And what happened when a priest refused?

These questions interest me far more than deciding which Facebook commenter gets to award the Real Gypsy Certificate.

Because maybe both families are remembering something

One family says:

“We have always run away.”

Listen.

Another says:

“Absolutely not. In our family you marry properly in church.”

Listen to them too.

Don’t immediately decide one has retained its culture while the other has lost it.

Ask:

Why?

Who taught you that?

How did your grandparents marry?

What happened when somebody didn’t?

Was there a story attached to the rule?

Was there once a consequence nobody talks about anymore?

Perhaps Granny didn’t know Lord Hardwicke existed.

She didn’t need to.

She only needed to know what happened to somebody in the generation before her when the paperwork wasn’t right.

That is how institutional history becomes family memory.

And eventually:

family memory becomes culture.

So which is the proper Gypsy marriage?

Running away?

Walking off?

Church?

Registry office?

Parents’ permission?

No permission?

Massive wedding?

Tiny wedding?

Both families present?

Nobody knowing until you come home that evening?

I don’t think history gives us permission to be nearly as certain as Facebook does.

And perhaps variation isn’t evidence that some of us have lost our culture.

Perhaps variation is evidence of how successfully our culture travelled.

Romani communities crossed countries, kingdoms, empires, legal systems and religions.

It would actually be extraordinary if we emerged from that history with one completely uniform set of customs.

Different families met different dangers.

Different authorities.

Different churches.

Different laws.

Different opportunities.

Different strategies for staying together.

Of course our traditions vary.

And perhaps this is the research we should be doing

The archive can tell us when Parliament changed marriage law.

It can show us a bastardy order.

It can record an affiliation case.

It can show when somebody baptised our children.

It can show when a church refused Romani people its sacraments.

It can show a woman disappearing into an institution.

It can even show that somebody gave our ancestors £7.

Again: the gifts!!!

But the archive struggles with Granny.

It doesn’t record what she whispered to Mam.

It doesn’t know which marriages the family recognised before the vicar did.

It can’t easily tell us why a rule became sacred.

And it certainly can’t tell us why two Romani families standing ten miles apart can both say:

“We’ve always done it this way.”

For that we need archives and oral history.

Documents and inherited knowledge.

Academic research and community memory.

And perhaps most importantly, we need enough compassion to hear one another without immediately deciding that difference equals inauthenticity.

Because for a people who have spent centuries having outsiders decide who we are, it would be a terrible irony if we became equally determined to police one another.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

Which one is the real Gypsy way?

Perhaps it is:

What happened to our families that made each of these ways feel necessary?

And after that comes the harder question.

Which of the rules our ancestors needed to survive do we still need today?

I don’t know.

But I think that’s a conversation worth having.