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Notes -
A much stranger episode in Engligh civil law history also involving gypsies has to be Attorney-General v Corke [1933] Ch 89. The case itself doesn't mention whether the "nomadic caravan dwellers" were Irish travellers or Romani but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that a landowner of a brick field near a town allowed them to camp on it for a while. The expected happened and they dumped shit and caused general mayhem in the surrounds outside the landowner's field. The locals were, as you can expect, not amused. Knowing that suing the "nomadic caravan dwellers" was pointless the local authority decided to go after the landowner instead.
They won in court. But the twist was that it wasn't for nuisance or some other everyday tort like that. Instead the judge ruled that this was a situation which came under Rylands v Fletcher. This is a little known rule of English law which holds that:
Normally this tort applies to things escaping due to unnatural use of land, so stuff like fire, water, gas or other dangerous substances (the original case was one relating to a water reservoir breaking and flooding a neighbour's mine) leaking out and carries strict liability, so there's no easy defense for the landowner. Mr. Justice Bennett, in his infinite wisdom, decided though that inviting gypsies to live on your field constituted an unnatural use of land likely to cause mischief if they escaped, and the landowner was accordingly held liable. Now that's something you don't get to see every day!
Of course there's no way such a claim would succeed in the same terms today, this is a bygone relic from an era where English judges were still Based.
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