Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/356

 334 Ceremonial Ctcstoms of the British Gipsies.

might be delayed for months after the civil ceremony. The Hemes would have nothing whatever to do with Christian marriage; only prostitutes and cripples (? those already contaminated), they remarked, were married in churches. Was their real objection to the presence of a mixed crowd, or to the close proximity of graves? Almost certainly it was dread of contamination in some way or another.

A great variety of other marriage rites, once practised but now extinct, have been recorded, but most of them are none too well attested. The most widely-spread form of union in England was a very simple ceremony in which the bride and bridegroom clasped each other's hands in the presence of their relatives and friends, and vowed to be faithful to each other.^- Amongst the Hemes, if a scholar could be found, he used to read a i&w words from the Bible ! " Handfasting," which symbolizes union, is of course common enough amongst Indo-European peoples ; it is, for instance, a Scottish folk-custom, and it forms part of the marriage ceremony of the English Church.

A very different rite to this is reported to have been practised by one of the Lancashire Boswells and her husband, and by Alfred Heme and his wife. A cake in which blood drawn from both of the contracting parties was mingled, was baked, and subsequently eaten by them together. Amongst the settled Servian Gipsies a cake is baked, and afterwards eaten together by the bride and bridegroom,''^ whilst in Germany the Toivode used to touch the lips of the pair with wine, spill a few drops on their heads, and then drink the remainder himself^* From India an exact parallel is forthcoming, for amongst the Rajputs and Kewats blood is drawn and mixed with food, which the bridegroom and bride eat together.^^ Eating

^'^ Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, N.S., vol. iii., p. 170. ^'^Gjorgjevic, Die Zigetiner in Serbien, Teil i., pp. 60 et seq.
 * Liebich, op. cil., pp. 47-9 ; Mrs. Miln, op. cit., p. 385.
 * ^ A. E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose (1902), p. 3S5.