oldest minority groups? While the details remain contested, it is now broadly agreed that Europe's Roma and Gypsy populations can trace their origins back to an Indian diaspora in the tenth century, with 'Egyptians' arriving in Britain by the early 16th century. Despite persecution, Gypsies established themselves, finding niches in both town and countryside, sometimes being protected by landowners who found them useful as a supply of casual labour, for entertainment and sometimes simply by the inconsistent application of the law. Their treatment reflected majority society's deep ambivalence about the presence of Gypsies and a nomadic way of life. On the one hand it symbolised freedom from the responsibilities and duties associated with settled lifestyles -- typified in folk songs such as 'The Raggle-taggle Gypsy'; on the other it provoked an almost visceral hatred, a suspicion that Gypsies could evade the law and the codes of behaviour that bound settled society to a place and a parish. Rather than being polar opposites, however, we might understand these stereotypes as two sides of a coin -- as the product of a tendency to view Gypsy lives through the lens of the preoccupations and assumptions of mainstream society -- rather than being grounded in reality. Whether articulated positively or negatively these stereotypes stem from the assumption that Gypsies were irredeemably separate from the rest of the population. Yet, contrary to these stereotypes, Gypsies and Travellers traded with, worked and lived alongside the rest of the population: an analysis of the traditional songs