A MYSTERY PEOPLE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4565, 5 November 1937, Page 6

A MYSTERY PEOPLE

ORIGIN OF GIPSIES.

LINKED WITH THE EGYPTIANS?

There were no gipsies encamped on Epsom Common for this year's meeting, says a writer in the "Daily Express." The Conservators warned them all off. But for the hospitality of individual land owners there would have been no gipsies at all at Epsom in 1937.

The first news we have of gipsies in England is that the Government told them to go away. Here is the Act of Henry VIII's Councillors, framed at the first coming of the gipsies to England 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 sail 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. So the gipsies are passing on to America, where there, are still wide wastes where they can wander. Thousands in America Now. 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 licensed 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 Romanys), is ancient Egyptian. Their own story is that they are from a far country called Little Egypt, but where that might be 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, hanged in Hungary in the eighteenth, simply for being gipsies, they 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 inducted for eating Christians alive. The Spanish Church burned several for devouring a friar, the Hungarians cut the heads off forty of them when the body of a murdered man had disappeared, and these gipsies, being 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 enquiry. The Commissioners acquitted the gipsies, but they had been beheaded by then. 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). Without a Religion.

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. I know a young barrister who was walking with his host, a Hampshire squire, over a heath in the New Forest when a gipsy called him back. He recognised a man whose acquittal he had secure four years before from a local bench. "Is he a friend of yours?" asked the gipsy, nodding towards the host. The barrister said he was. And two mornings later the yard was mysteriously full of chickens, all the chickens the squire had missed for the last month, and many other chickens he had never seen before. In most countries the gipsies are

called after the last known place they

came from. In Prance they are "Bohemians," in Germany they are "Tartars," and at various times and places they have been "Saracens," "Nubians," "Wallachians," and simply "Heathens." Gipsies have adopted the religions, the languages, and sometimes even the complexions of the people among any part of the world straying among whom- they live. Yet the gipsy from any part of the world straying among his countrymen in another would hear the same words spoken, meet the same customs, and see the same ceremonies at birth and marriage and death.

On the highlands of Albania, in the Pyrenees, on the green and purple heaths of the New Forest, he would hear the same melody, now vivacious, now plaintive, played on the violin. I did.