Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/351

 Ceremonial Customs of the British Gipsies. 329

Returning to the English Gipsies, it is worthy of note that the husband of one of the granddaughters of "Jasper Petulengro" is treated by his wife and family as if he were a German Gipsy law-breaker ; he is bale tsJiido for life because he is a gdjo. No one will eat or drink from the same vessel, nor use the same knife, fork, or spoon. When taboos were much more strictly observed than they are to-day, the Gipsies would naturally never contemplate marriage with uiokhadi gajos, for they would be afraid of becoming contaminated themselves. This is quite sufficient to account for the fact that in a great many countries, including England and Wales, they are still practically an unmixed race, though racial pride has probably been a by no means negligible factor in determining this. Racial endogamy is, and always has been, their established rule or custom, but there always have been a few who did

not conform.

At the present day they are endogamous within a more restricted circle. The British and German Gipsies, for in- stance, do not intermarry ; they never come in contact with one another, for one thing, and, even if they did, there are sufficient superficial differences between them to prevent intermarriage for two or three generations. Further, the British Gipsies are, as I have already shown, divided up into three classes, each confining its wanderings, more or less, to a restricted area, and these do not intermarry to any appreciable extent, and would not do so freely at first if completely mixed. The same cannot be said of the families within any one of these particular areas. Still, most of them seem to despise and disapprove of all the others, and, even after marriage, her husband's family, unless it is identical with her own, is still contemptible to the wife, and his wife's to the husband. Something more than family pride occasionally underlies the feeling between two families. Once, when I told Lavinia Smith {ticc Boswell) of a proposed visit to the Bosses at Hale Moss, Altrincham,