Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/370

 348 Ceremonial Customs of the British Gipsies.

The East Anglian Smiths and Browns, and possibly also the Hemes, will not eat any food in a house, tent, or waggon where a corpse is lying, which possibly sheds some light on the fact that, when one of the Stanleys died in a cottage in the Isle of Wight in 1900, the surviving members of his family camped out in the garden until after the funeral.^"^ According to Leland,^^° friends used to prepare food for the family of the deceased for three days after his death, but that he obtained this statement by the process of suggestion is, unfortunately, only too probable.

The corpse is usually carried to the grave by the mourners themselves. At the funeral of Paradise Buckler, aged 13, who died at Belbroughton in Worcestershire in 181 5, the coffin was carried on nothing but white pocket-handker- chiefs, because she was an unmarried girl, this being the custom in that county.^^^ When Lepronia Lee was buried at Kirton, sisters and cousins wore white, but the rest black, except that the men had white ribbons to tie their hatbands, white gloves, and white neckties ; she too was unmarried.^^- Mourning colours are, as a rule, avoided ; black is sometimes worn, but Genti Gray regards red as the proper colour. Amongst the Continental Gipsies the colour varies, red and yellow, black, and white all being in vogue.^^^

On the day after the funeral the complete destruction of the deceased's personal belongings, (with the exception of his money), and of the family tent or waggon in which death took place, together with the entire contents thereof, is usually carried out. In the earlier records clothes, blankets, trinkets, a fiddle, and, in one case, books, are

"9^V. iSr (2-, 9th S., vol. xii., p. 496, "ip. H. Groome, /« Gipsy Tents, pp. 119-20 (quoting Truth, Aug. 28, 1879). ^1- Morwood, op. cit., p. 167. ^^ Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, N.S., vol. ii., p. 363.
 * " The English Gipsies and their Language, pp. 127-8.