A painting of an encampment similar to that of the Ragamuffins
by Alfred Munnings.
The village in general, tolerates this ragamuffin family, even secretly welcomes their presence, mainly because an odd coin or two keeps them honest and when they're feeling honest they make an excellent job of minding the animals grazing on the common.
Bare feet, ragged trousers, torn shirts, dirty hands, unwashed necks, big grins in freckled faces, all topped off with a halo of carroty curls, that's the Ragamuffins. Two children with sharp minds and annoyingly vibrant personalities, despite living at the very bottom of the social order.
Their home is a decrepit horse-van on Mardlingham's Upper Common, where they live close to poverty with their mother, through good times and lean. A long hard winter will leave them, like many villagers, with stocks exhausted, undernourished and desperate for the start of the growing season.
We first meet them in Episode 1.07.1 when Dolly plays a practical joke on her brother by convincing him that she can fly. Of course, we can never be quite sure that his reactions to this are genuine, or if he's just playing along, particularly as he then involves the vicar by trying to convince him that his sister has turned into a chicken.
The two children are about a year apart in age, but it is impossible to be sure which is the elder. Asking their mother will not solve this either as her memories of the times and events were somewhat clouded by an addiction to the opiate, laudanum, since then much reduced. About all she is sure of is that Dolly's father was a Durham coalminer and the boy's father was an Irish tinker. The fact that her only evidence of this is that she has the men's boots, suggests that the relationships were exceedingly brief and that she left in the morning with everything she could carry but more than she bargained for.
They do attend the village school, when they find it convenient. Dolly's attendance could almost be described as diligent and she has acquired an interest in the printed word, but tends to give up as soon as she's satisfied she knows “what they're going on about.” In Episode 2.05.7, she impresses the gentleman-angler when he discovers that she keeps a “library in her boot.” Boots worn on that occasion, not as a necessity or fashion statement, but as an expression of social defiance on the part of her mother. Around the village, the Ragamuffins are usually barefoot, but for the day-trip, their mother has supplied each of them with a pair of brown boots. In doing this, matching boot to foot-size had not been an obvious priority, since a snug fit could be had by padding with rags and newspaper. See Episode 2.05.1.
Their mother calls them her ‘Muffins’ which seems to have prompted the villagers to adopt Ragamuffins as a collective for the pair. The girl is named Dorothy after her mother and is known as Dolly or Dollymuffin, and her parent as Dot or Dotty. The boy dislikes his name, which is Conan, because somebody told him it means a small dog. He answers to the name Ragamuffin or Muffin, but not to variations on the word ‘Rag’ because as everybody knows Raggs is Ginny's dog.
Victorian children's books are one of my 'things'. Especially in the books of Mrs Molesworth such gypsies were used as a threat or a way to have the child heroine run off and realise life at home wasn't so bad after all. They must have been relatively common in certain parts of the countryside.