Blended But Not Forgotten

Blended but Not Forgotten: The Ethnically Cleansed Gypsies of Scotland is a forensic, compassionate account of a people who have lived in Scotland for more than five hundred years, yet remain routinely misnamed, miscategorised, and written out of the national story.

In modern Scotland, "Gypsy and Traveller" is often treated as a single label. This book begins by separating what has been blurred: Scottish Travellers, Irish Travellers, and the Gypsy tribes who entered Scotland in the late fifteenth century and were recorded in law and government papers as "Egyptians". Once that identity was fixed on paper, it became a mechanism of control. What began as recognition hardened into statute, surveillance, banishment, branding, and execution. In Scotland, identity itself became a crime.

Drawing on parliamentary acts, Privy Council orders, local records, and surviving trial material, Blended but Not Forgotten traces how anti-Egyptian legislation escalated across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how Gypsy families were targeted not as individuals, but as bloodlines. It follows named tribes and leaders through the records, including the Faa and Baillie families, and documents how kinship-based communities were broken by law, punishment, and fear.

The book also examines the wider climate of control that enabled this persecution: the tightening grip of the post-Reformation state and kirk, the policing of movement, and the criminalisation of folk practice. It explores the overlap between anti-Gypsy policy and the Scottish witch hunts, showing how healing, divination, and older religious language were reinterpreted through demonology, with Gypsy women and Traveller women left dangerously exposed to accusation. It revisits cases where "Egyptians" appear directly in the witchcraft record and reads them as rare breaks in an archive that usually hides identity behind the categories of "witch" and "cunning person".

At the centre of this history is what Scotland has been taught not to see: ethnic cleansing carried out through law, public punishment, forced dispersal, and systematic forgetting. Families survived by doing what survival demanded altering names, blending into settled populations, marrying across communities, retreating to borderlands, and carrying their knowledge quietly. The result is a Scotland filled with descendants who often do not know what has been blended into them, or why so much of this history was pushed into silence.