Priscilla Penfold came from a Roma Gypsy family. Particularly throughout the 1800s, the Roma Gypsy community in Dorset played a vital role in the agricultural industries that made up the majority of Dorset’s workforce. Moving where the work was needed, families such as Priscilla’s would travel great distances between counties, maintaining strong values of family, following their ancestral routes and setting up camp at their traditional stopping places.
It is due to the transient lifestyle of the Roma Gypsy community, that surviving records are patchy. We don’t know exactly when Priscilla was born, for example. We know her parents, Robert Penfold and Priscilla James (often referred to as Priscilla the elder), were married in 1859 and we also know that Priscilla the younger (or our Priscilla) was baptised on March 30th 1862.
Following this, however, Priscilla disappears from the records. It isn’t until October 1874 that she reappears again, along with her mother in the Dorchester Prison Register. Priscilla the younger is now 12 years old, both her and her mother had been accused of stealing a cloak belonging to William Atkins in Whitchurch Canonicorum. Priscilla the elder, aged 36, also carried an additional charge of stealing a printed dress worth 8 shillings belonging to Hannah Bevis back in March 1874.
The cloak had been worth 25 shillings, a substantial price in 1874, and so the case was taken to the Epiphany Sessions at Shire Hall in January 1875. 12-year-old Priscilla would therefore have spent 2 months in the adult prison in Dorchester, awaiting her trial.
During the trial, Mr. Walden defended Priscilla the younger, stating “the younger prisoner had evidently acted under the control of her mother”. Mr. Walden also notes that while Priscilla the younger remained in prison before the trial, the mother had been released on bail.
In the end, both mother and daughter pleaded guilty to larceny. Priscilla the elder was sentenced to eight months of hard labour in Dorchester prison. Priscilla the younger, however, was sentenced one month of hard labour and five years at the girl’s reformatory school in Exeter.
By the Victorian period, attitudes towards the punishment of crimes, particularly amongst juvenile offenders, had shifted. Rather than trying to deter people through extreme punishment, the focus was on providing the opportunity for reform. The reformatory schools were intended to punish children through harsh conditions and labour, but also to give them an education and training, stopping them from reoffending.
Local reformatory schools filled up fast. Whilst boys were trained for military or manual labour, girls were taught housekeeping and service skills, such as laundry, sewing, cooking, and cleaning. Priscilla was also taught to read and write, along with simple mathematics, something she would not have received otherwise.
By 1880, Priscilla had left the reformatory school. Moving to Chapel Allerton in Somerset, she lived with her Uncle John Orchard, his wife Sarah, their five children, and five nieces and nephews (some of which were Priscilla’s siblings!). Likely to be living in a camp, the 1881 census simply describes them as living “on the road leading to Wheat Sheaf Inn and Killing Lane”.
On November 1st, 1881, we find Priscilla once again, this time on her marriage certificate. She wed Henry Orchard, her cousin she had been living with. Remarkably, the certificate bears the marks of her time at the reformatory school. Henry, unable to write his own name, just signs with a cross, whilst Priscilla writes out her name in beautiful handwriting.
An account of the wedding is given in local newspapers, describing the procession leaving camp and the crowds gathered to see the dress of the bride. The newspaper also goes into great lengths to describe the “fair bride”:
“…attired in a dress of pamperdour, gaily trimmed with scallops and scarlet braid, she also wore a scarlet sash, yellow silk neckerchief and a hat of white straw trimmed with feathers, orange, jessamine and hop bloom and a blue veil.”
Ending at the Anchor Inn, the festivities lasted multiple days, involving plenty of food, music, and dancing. It appears that the celebrations were available to all comers, with the bride and groom forsaking a honeymoon period in favour of joining the celebrations with family and friends. It sounds like quite the party!
Once again, the patchy records mean we don’t see Priscilla until the 1901 census, living with her husband and their 4 children. John, Josiah, Edward, and another Priscilla!
The years that follow expose the difficulties which faced many within the Roma Gypsy communities throughout Britain, both then and now. Priscilla and Henry can be found in numerous newspaper reports, committing various petty crimes throughout Dorset, Somerset, and Devon. Many of these, however, can be linked back to the way of life of people within the Roma Gypsy community.
Crimes related to hawking (selling goods door to door without a licence), where they camped, what their livestock did, and how they failed to fit into the norms of what society expected were the most common.
For many of these crimes, hawkers could lose their licenses, with the only way of getting them back to travel to centres of administration, like Dorchester, and pay for a new one. With no license to sell their goods, however, many had no means to raise the money to pay for their new licenses. Despite the role they played within the agricultural industries in Dorset, it appears the Roma Gypsy communities were often looked down upon by the landowners and the authorities.
Priscilla’s story continues until 1938. In 1907, Henry Orchard passes away at the age of 55. Priscilla remarries in 1910 to a man named James Thompson, a general labourer. They move into together, along with her daughter, Priscilla the even younger (now 16 years old).
Priscilla passed away in 1938 in Weston Super Mare, aged 79. With the average life expectancy of a person living in the 1930s to be around 60 years, Priscilla Penfold lived an extraordinary, long, and interesting life.