Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/368

 346 Ccre))ioniaI Cnshms of the Ih'itish Gipsies.

one-armed Chris Smith was recently buried with a sod placed in a saucer on his breast, — a custom once preva- lent in that county, I am told, but now extinct.^"^ The Lancashire Boswells usually employ shrouds, but enclose the favourite dress of the deceased in the coffin under the body. None of the above-mentioned Gipsies wore their jewellery, as far as we know, except Jack Lee, but to do so is really by no means uncommon. Full dress, preferably the best clothes that the deceased possessed, seems to be the general rule, and many Gipsies, — I am thinking par- ticularly of Bui Brown ^'^''- and Johnny Gray, — have made a point of struggling into this before they died. The former part of this statement applies equally well to most Continental Gipsies. For instance, when Sophie Kirpatsh, — one of a band of Eastern European Gipsy coppersmiths, — was buried at Mitcham in 191 1, she was fully and elabo- rately dressed and bedecked with a necklace of coins and a massive silver belt.

Things other than the clothing and jewellery placed on the dead body are frequently enclosed in the coffin, though this cannot be set down as a general rule, the East Anglian Smiths, for instance, thinking any such practice to be quite improper. Clothes were buried with Isaac Heme, a watch and a purse of jnoney with Cecilia Chilcott, a fiddle and a pocket-knife with Pyramus Gray, a whip with Johnny Gray, and a fiddle, cup, saucer, plate, knife, etc. with an uncle of Rodney Smith. ^"^ Leland ^^^ records a case in which a pair of new shoes was bought, and put in the coffin, but I have been unable to obtain in England any other examples of the practice of enclosing new things. According to Liebich, (pp. aV., pp. 54-5), the German Gipsies of fifty years ago used to bury the' dead man's weapons

101 Westmorland Gazette, Nov. 23, 1912.

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

los Gipsy Smith, His Life and Work ; by Himself, p. 7.

'"* The English Gipsies and their Language (1873), pp. 5S-9.