Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/372

 350 Ceremonial Ciisto77is of the British Gipsies.

clothes and bedding were burned at Jackson's Bridge a few days later, the ashes were strewn on the canal close by.^^^ A Gipsy grinder's stone was carried two miles in order that it might be thrown into the River Severn,^^" and the fragments of Sinfai Heme's {nee Gray's) crockery were transported twenty-six miles so that they might rest in the River Tyne. Adelaide Garratt {nee Lee) asserts that not only is drowning preferable to burying, but that it is indispensable, because the gdjos might dig up things that had been buried. Other Gipsies do not, however, share her fears, Iza Heme, for instance, being quite content to bury the fragments of his father's stove and pans and crockery, although the River Trent could not have been far away.

Iza would not allow a gdji to obtain a charred spindle, but he himself kept the hub caps off the wheels, together with some hooks, and gave the iron parts of the waggon that remained after the fire to the blacksmith. After his mother's funeral in 1908, it is said that the hub caps and scrap iron and silver were sold, the latter on condition that it should be melted down. In Germany, where a failure to perform the necessary funeral rites is followed by the punishment of being made bale tshido, it is permissible to retain anything that was removed from the waggon before the entrance of death, and to sell everything else Xo gdjos instead of destroying them.^^^ Of these practices such English Gipsies as I have asked strongly disapprove. In Germany they do not destroy anything at all when a child dies, but in Sept., 191 1, at Dormington, in Herefordshire, Cornelius and Lucina Price on the death of their four-year- old son burned a practically new living-waggon that had cost £Zo to build.i^^ If anything has by chance been

"* The Tramp, Oct., 1910. "' From the note by Cuthbert Bede.

"^ Wittich, Blicke in das Leben der Zigeiiner, p. 29 ; Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, N.S., vol. v., pp. 48-9. Cf. also Liebich, op. cit., p. 55; Wlislocki, op. cit., p. 299 ; Gjorgjevic, op. cit., Teil i, pp. 67-72,

^^^ Hereford Journal, Sept. 23, 1911.