A WANDERING RACE

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 265, 5 August 1937, Page 18

A WANDERING RACE

Who Are the Gipsies?, LIFE AND CUSTOMS Murray’s Oxford Dictionary says gipsies are: A wandering race (py themselves called Romany), of Hindu origin, which first appeared in England about the beginning of the sixteenth century and was then believed to have come from Egypt. , . They have a dark and tawny, skin and black hair. They make a living by basket-making, horse-dealing, fortunetelling, etc.; and have been usually objects of suspicion from their nomadic life and habits. Their language (called Romany) is a greatly corrupted dialect of Hindi, with a large admixture of words from various European languages. The first news we have of gipsies m England is that the Government told them to go away, says George Edinger, in the “News Chronicle.” Here i|s the Act of Henry VIII’s councillors framed at the first coming of the gipsies to this country in 1530: “An Act concerning Outlandish People calling themselves Egyptians. . . . As divers and many outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians using no craft nor feat of merchandise have come into this realm and gone from Shire to Shire and used great subtle and crafty means to deceive the people that they by Palmistry could tell fortunes ... be it enacted that henceforth no such person be suffered to come within this realm. . . .” Of course the gipsies went on coming into this realm. Their numbers increased till the introduction of railways and the intensive cultivation of the soil began to drive them out again in Queen Victoria’s time. When George Borrow’s, gipsy friend, Petulengro, the smith, heard of the new “iron road,” he began thinking that would be a poor road to tether a horse beside and his descendants are thinking the same way about our motorways. Passing to America. So the gipsies are passing on to America, where there are still wide wastes where they can wander. There are over a hundred thousand of them over there now. I doubt if we have five thousand left in all the British Isles. Where they come from nobody has a clear idea. Our word gipsies is simply Egyptians, so is the Spanish Gitanos. In. Hungary, where they play, their fiddles to make the corn grow (a seed time without gipsies is not lucky), and in Rumania, where they are licenced to trap the mountain bears and show them around the country, they call them Pharaoh’s people. Their word for man, Rom (after "which they call themselves the Romany's), is ancient Egyptian.

Their own story is that they are from a far country called Little Egypt, but where that might he nobody knows. All sorts of odd lies have been believed of gipsies. Exiled from country after country on pain of death, drowned at Edinburgh in the sixteenth century. burned in Spain in the seventeenth, hanged in Hungary in the eighteenth, simply for being gipsies, thev have come to regard “pitching their tent for five days” as the rest of us view settling down for life. About 150 years ago they were solemnly indicted for eating Christians alive. The Spanish Church burned several for devouring a friar 1 , the Hungarians cut the heads off 40 of them when the body of a murdered man had disappeared, and these gipsies, bein' stretched on the rack, admitted that they had eaten him up,,

The Emperor Joseph, II heard about this and ordered an Imperial Commission to open an inquiry. The Commissioners acquitted the gipsies, but they had been beheaded by then.

J Have No Art.

They have no art beyond the painting on their caravans; no literature save their proverbs, many of which, extremely suggestive of their origin, have passed into English—“ One bird in the hand is worth two in the hedge,” and “Don’t look a. gift horse in the mouth.”

But their music has inspired half the folk songs in Hungary and Spain. Liszt and Brahms have immortalised it. There ’are some English words, too, which the gipsies gave us. Pal and trash and row and shindy, and now posh from their word poshero (money).

They have no religion of their own; in fact, there is one school of thought which says they derive from Pariah Hindus driven out of India because they would not accept the Brahmin Faith. - Their morality is not quite ours (I am not going to say it is any worse), yet they are swift to repay kindness.

In most countries the gipsies are called after the last known place they came from. In France they are “Bohemians.” in Germany they are "Tartars,” and at various times and places they have been “Saracens,” "Nubians,” .“Wallachiaus” and simply “Heathens.”