Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/353

 Ce7'emonial C^istoms of the British Gipsies. 331

in recent times, at least as far as brothers and sisters are concerned." His remarks apply equally well to their English and Welsh kindred, and probably to the Gipsies as a race. It is almost certain that there never have been any degrees of kinship within which marriage was prohibited, except the direct line. No matter how small the group unit is made, no traces of rules or customs designed to produce exogamy are discoverable, nor is anything known which suggests that exogamy was once the prevalent system. At the same time it is very doubtful whether a closer endogamy than that of the race was originally practised. The present day frequency of marriage between relatives may possibly be a survival of primitive family endogamy, but there are indications that it is due to a comparatively modern tendency of certain families to isolate themselves more or less completely from the rest. The statements of Trenit Heme that " Hemes by rights oughter only to marry Hemes," and of a Herefordshire Smith that " we never marries out of the name," obviously cannot be regarded as reminiscences of an ancient endo- gamic system.

There is nothing to indicate that the Gipsies were ever polyandrous, nor should we expect them to have been, but polygamy occasionally occurs at the present day in Britain, and was more common in the past. The man very fre- quently married sisters, Charlie Pinfold, for example, taking three to wife, and Dick Heme, Niaboi Heme, and Edward Wood, two each.

Before marriage no sexual intercourse is allowed ; in fact the Gipsies set the very highest value on corporal chastity. Many observers noting this combined with a certain obscenity of conversation and song and lewdness of gesture and dance, have been not a little mystified, failing to grasp that the one is consistent with their dread of contamination, and the other with their being in a low stage of civilization. Some proof of the bride's virginity