Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/365

 Ceremonia/ Customs of the British Gipsies. 343

Coffined burial in cliurchyards and cemeteries is now their universal custom. It has always been prevalent from the sixteenth century onwards, so prevalent in fact that many writers have been sceptical about the existence of any other form of burial. This scepticism I should like to dispel. In Lai'i'ngro^'' Borrow describes the funeral of an old Mrs. Heme, who was buried uncofiined in a deep dell, after the manner of " a Roman woman of the old blood." Mr. John E. Cussans, writintj to Notes and Queries in 1869,^' asserts that the Shaws, Grays, and Dymocks used to bury their dead in a field at Strett Hall, near Saffron Walden, and also that it was no uncommon thing for bodies to be buried at the side of the road. The authors of English- Gipsy Sottgs state that until about 1825 the Gipsies buried their dead in lonely and remote places.^** This last state- ment is too inclusive ; they ought to have written " some few of the Gipsies " and not " the Gipsies," for it is only in East Anglia that there is any strong tradition of such burial. Grays, Smiths, and Browns have all assured me that it was once the invariable custom of some of the Gipsies, the Hemes being particularly mentioned, secretly to hide away their uncoffined dead in such lonely places as the remoter parts of Mousehold Heath, or to deposit them in ditches by the sides of lanes.^^ It is considerably less than a hundred years, they state, since such practices entirely ceased, owing to the attentions of gcijo officials. From their account it must have been somewhere about 1830 when Borrow's friend, Ambrose Smith ("Jasper Petulengro"), found one of the Hemes burying his wife in a ditch near Gorleston, took the body away, and gave it a Christian burial, to prevent further trouble befalling the old man.^° About the same time a party of Gipsies

86 Opcit. (1851), vol. iii., p. i68.


 * ^ 4lh S., vol. iii., p. 462 ; Morwood, op. cit., p. 172.

9* By C. G. Leland, E. H. Palmer, and J. Tuckey (1875), P- 31-


 * ^ Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, N.S., vol. iii., p. 169.

^"^ Ibid., vol. v., p. 78.