Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/354

 ^^2 Ceremonial Customs of the British Gipsies.

used to be exhibited at her wedding, both in England "^^ and Scotland/^ and great precautions were taken lest this proof should not be forthcoming. A girl was compelled to wear a " girdle of chastity " whenever she went out hawking or fortune-telling, — that is, whenever she mixed with strangers, — from the age of puberty to the day of her marriage. If any youth said that he had received favours of a Gipsy girl when he had not, then, according to Borrow, she had a right to demand a kind of trial. The details of this, as given in The Romany Ryep- are so absurd on the face of them that I will not repeat them here.

From Kadllia Brown I once heard that an unchaste girl used to be driven from the tent and never owned again, and Borrow gives the same punishment for one who had granted favours to a gdjo, adding that years earlier she would have been buried alive. As recently as 1875 an old Suffolk Gipsy told Dr. Ranking that the ancient punish- ment for unchastity was burying alive, and pointed out to him a spot where three roads meet near Bamford, a few miles out of Ipswich, where, as a boy, he had seen a Gipsy girl undergo this punishment.*' The German Gipsies take a very serious view of offences against chastity, whether in or out of wedlock, the offender being frequently bale tshido for life.«

The period of courtship is usually short, and any court- ing is conducted mostly in public. Amongst the Hemes the bridegroom, or his relatives, test the would-be bride's constancy by appointing another young man to make a pretence of wooing her. If she gives him the slightest encouragement, then she is cast aside as useless ; if not, marriage follows, subject, within living memory, to the

description of the " girdle of chastity" is given.
 * ' In Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, O.S., vol. iii., pp. 1 58-9, a full


 * ^W. Simson, op. cit., p. 261. *Wol. i., chap. x.

^■^ Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, N.S., vol. iii., pp. 170-1. ^ Ibid., vol. iv., p. 290.