Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/344

 32 2 Cereynonial Customs of the British Gipsies.

offence aj^ainst chastity or against morality, spoken evil of their dead relatives or of their own wives, failed to observe the funerary laws or customs, or been guilty of any serious crime, the offenders being bale tshido (disgraced and partially outlawed). Only in cases of revenge for murder does he possess no rights of settlement. In England Gipsy jurisdiction and Gipsy law are dead.

On their first arrival here the Gipsies had no surnames, and it is possibly in consequence of this that an examina- tion of sixteenth-century parish records reveals such entries as "Joan the daughter of an Egyptian," "William the son of an Egyptian," " Robartt an Egyptic," and "John an Egyptn." After settling they adopted gdjo surnames, choosing in many cases those of aristocratic families. Of names in use at a very early date some have survived, such as Faa, Baillie, Brown, Stanley, and Buckley ; others, amongst which Bannister, Bownia, Leister, and Volantye may be mentioned, are no longer found.^^ As fresh Gipsies arrived, fresh surnames, possibly Heme, Bosvvell, and Lee, were added to the growing list. Then came constant acces- sions, due partly to the subdivision of families and partly to occasional marriages with gdjos. Some of the Boswells, it is said, began to call themselves Boss, others Lock, the latter being a nickname by which they were known. Lucy Lock, to take one example, married a travelling barber called Edward Taylor, and, as their descendants have chiefly allied themselves with Gipsies, the gdjo strain thus becoming diluted, the Taylors, a numerous family, must now be regarded as Gipsies. Whole families, again, adopted a new name for trade reasons, or because some individual member had disgraced himself, or was wanted by the police. But the surname is of little importance compared with the

'^^ Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, O.S., vol. i., pp. 5-24; N.S., vol. i., pp. 31-4; H. T. Crofton, "Annals of the English Gipsies under the Tudors," in Manchester Literary Club Papers, 1S80; D. MacRitchie, Scottish Gypsies tinder the Stewarts.