Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/631

Rh GIPSIES which appeared before Augsburg (November 1, 1418), the second before Sisteron in Provence (October 1, 1419), where the terriﬁed citizens bestowed on the “Saracens” a hundred loaves. Next comes a long notice of a troop of fully 100 lean, black, hideous Egyptians in the Clzronica (Ii I>’olo_«;1m (July 18, 1422), which tells how the sorceress, “1)uke” Andrew's wife, could read the past and future of 1nen’s lives ; but Bologna in ﬁfteen days became too l1ot for them, so by way of Forli—where “certain said they were from India. ”—the pilgrims travelled on to llome. Their object was to procure fresh letters fro111 the pope; and such tl1ey afterwards produced, though of their sojourn in the imperial city no record has yet been published. To the burghers of Ratisbon Gipsies presented themselves in 1424 ; they pitched their tents again before its walls in 1426; and at Paris in 1427 the fair of Landit was attended by a dul-:e, a count, and ten other mounted pilgrims, late renegades of “Lower Egypt,” whose women practised palmistry and cleared everybody’s pockets. Later we hear of Gipsies at Arnheim (1429), at .Ietz (1430), at Erfurt (1432), and in Bavaria (1433),—these and all notices of the seventeen years preceding referring probably to the movements of a single ubiquitous band, sent forward to spy out the lan(ls of promise, and composed of from 600 to 1400 persons. For not until 1438 did the great ti(1e of westward immigration begin to flow; then, not in hundreds but thousands, headed no longer by paltry “dukes” and “ counts,” but by a “ king.” King Zindl,1 the Gipsies po11red over Germany, Italy, and France, reaching Poland by 1501, Sweden by 1512, and having already appeared in Spain in 1447. Ve ﬁnd them in England in 1514 (A D3/alo,r/c of .'_z/r .7’/mmrzs 11/ are, 1529), but nothing is known of the (late of their landing; and in Scotland the earliest certain record of their presence is an entry in the books of the Lord High Treasurer: “Apr. 22, 1505. Item, to the Egyptianis, be the kingis command, vij lib.” (Pitcairn’s C'rz'minal Trials, Edin. 1833, vol. iii. p. 592). In a “King of llowmais” ( l Ifémas, Gipsies), twice 111entione(1 in entries of July 1492, as also in the “Erle of Grece” (1502), “King Cristall” (1530), and the “ King of Cipre” (1532), one dimly recog- nizes four Gipsy chiefs : and with Gipsies perhaps the Sara- cens maybe identiﬁed, whom a tradition represents as mak- ing depredations in Scotland prior to 1460 (Simson, p. 98). In no other country were Gipsies better received than in this, where they “ dansit before the king in Halyr11(ll1ous ” (1530) ; where James IV. gave (July 5, 1505) Anthonius Gagino, count of Little Egypt, a letter of connnendation to the king of Denmark; and where James V. subscribed a writ (February 15, 1540) in favour of “ oure louit J olmne Faw, lord and erle of Litill Egipt-,”'-’ to whose son and s11c- cess-or he granted authority to hang and punish all “Egyp- tians” within the realm (May 26, 1540). But in 1541 an Act was passed, con1111anding the “Egyptians to pass forth of the realm ” under pain of death, and similar edicts were iss11e(1 before and afterwards in most of the European states —Germany (1497), Spain (1499), France (1504), England (1531), Denmark (1536), Moravia (1538), Poland (1557), 1 The titles of king, duke, earl, count, and (in south-eastern Europe) waiwodc were and are borne by the chiefs of greater or smaller bands, more to impress the vulgar than as denoting 1'eal authority. 'ith British Gipsies one is bewildered by the host of sci-(lisant kings and queens, from King Jolm Buclle, laid side by side with Athelstan in .Ialmesbury Abbey in 1657, down to the Gipsy queen of the United States, Matilda Stanley, royally buried at Dayton, Ohio, in 1878. 9 This letter has an especial interest, since it presents the earliest spevinlens of the Gipsy tongue, in the names of three of the Gipsies mentioned in it: Grasta (grast, “ ahorsc"), Towla Bailyow (t-lilo bartilo, “ fat pig”), an-l Matskalla (I? -mate/aka, “ eat”). Paspati gives as female Turkish Gipsy names Tchz'ricl[, “bird,” and Srlppnz’, “viper ;" but probably the above were merely assumed by way of a jest, like Corrie, I‘ lloyland. p. 165) and G'tLllz'mensch (Pott, i. 52). See, on Gipsy names, Mr (‘rotten in Notes and Queries (5th ser., vol. ii. p. 349). 613 &c. Conveying across the seas was among the milder measures adopted; it is, however, noteworthy as one of the causes of the dispersion of the tribes. Under Henry VIII. Gipsies were shipped from England to Norway (Wright’s Ilistory qf Ludlow, pp. 389-92) or France; whilst by the latter power, so lately as 1802, the bands infesting Bayonne and Mauléon were caught by night as in a net, huddled on shipboard, and landed on the
 * coast of Africa (Michel, Pays Basque, p. 137). In Scot-

land four Faas were hanged at Edinburgh in 1611 “for abyding within the kingdome, they being Egiptianisg” and in 1636 doom was pronounced on other “Egyptians ” at Haddington, the “ men to be hangit, and the weomen to be drowned ; and suche of the weo111en as hes children to be scourgit throw the burgh and brunt in the cheeke.” llnder the English statute of 1562 (repealed 1783) making it felony without beneﬁt of clergy to be merely seen for a month in the fellowship of Gipsies, ﬁve men were hanged at Durham “for being Egyptians,” 8tl1 August 1592. Still greater were the cruelties and injustice suffered by Gipsies on the Continent, since there, to the charge of kid- napping, were added the weightier imputations of being cannibals and emissaries of the Turk. Quiﬁones recounts how in 1629 four Estremaduran Gitanos owned under torture to having eaten a friar, a pilgrim, and a woman of their tribe; a11d i11 1782 forty-ﬁve Hungarian Gipsies were beheaded,quartered, or hanged on a like monstrous charge. First racked till they confessed the crime of murder, they were brought to the spot where their victims were said to be buried, and when no bodies appeared they were racked again. “ We ate them ” was their despairing cry ; and forthwith the journals teemed with accounts of “ eighty-ﬁve persons roasted by Gipsy Cannibals”; straight- way the “cannibals” were hurried to the scaffold. Then Joseph ‘II. sent a commission down, whose inquiries showed that no one had been murdered—except the victims of the false accusation. The full, impartial annals of the race have still to be compiled, from edicts and law—books, G'csclu'c(Ucu7zcIib(/e omlerzoel-e'n.r/en a(m_r/amzde feet 2-e7'bl1_'/f der Ilcidens of 1;'_r/_2/ptié'rs in dc 1'oorclcl2_']7ce Z'cdc1'l(mden (Utrecht, 1850), or Veber’s Zz'_(/eu-nr=r in Saclzsen, 1488- 1792, in vol. ii. of his A-us 2-{er Jalu'IzumIerle7z (Leip. 1861). L(m,r/ua_r/c.—Until lately the information about the Gipsy language to be gathered from books was meagre in the extreme. The thirteen works published prior to 1840 which furnish specimens of the Anglo—Romani dialect—— Boorde (1547), Bryant (1785), Bright (1818), Copsey (1818), Harriot (1830), Roberts (1836), &c.——together contain but 396 genuine stems, besides 69 doubtful words, and furnish scarcely any examples of the grammar. N or are the Continental works cited by Pott, from Vulcanius (1589) downwards, much more copious. Even to-day there are still great gaps in our knowledge, especially of" the dialects outside of Europe; but enough has been do11e to show that from the Nile to the Arctic Ocean, from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, the Gipsies speak, with dialectal variations, one and the selfsame speech- The Romani names for “water,” “ ﬁre,” “hair,” and “ eye,” are in Persia ptini, ail, bcil, and alci ; i11 Egypt yxini, rig, lzal, a11d (ml-lei; in Norway ptmi, jag, bal, and ja/c; in ' England pciui, 3/o_r/, La], and 3/01‘. And these four instances, which might be multiplied indeﬁnitely, serve f11rther to show, by their resemblance to the Hindi pcini, (39, MI, and i (72:/.-/2, that in Bomani we l1ave an Indian tongue. Riidiger ﬁrst compared llomani, so long regarded as a thieves’ jargon, 1 with one of the New Indian dialects, and in 1782 published N the result of the comparison i11 his J'cm3stc7' Z’l(3£'(l(‘]£S (Ir-r Sprac/Jmm‘le. In 1783 Grellmann’s I[istor2'sclz€-r Versuch reaped all the fruits of Riidiger’s research ; and in the same from local histories and a few monographs like Dirk’s.