It is quite Shakespearian, this scrap of dialogue; well, that is our earliest evidence for the presence of Gypsies in England. Eight years later, in 1522, the churchwardens of Stratton in Cornwall received twenty pence from the ‘Egypcions’ for the use of the church house; and some time between 1513 and 1524 Thomas, Earl of Surrey, entertained ‘Gypsions’ at his Suffolk seat, Tendring Hall. For all which, and eighty more similar notes of much interest, see Mr. H. T. Crofton’s ‘Early Annals of the Gypsies in England’ (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 5–24).
In Scotland.
In Scotland the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer yield this entry: ‘1505, April 22. Item to the Egyptianis be the Kingis command, vij lib.’; and Gypsies probably were the overliers and masterful beggars whom an Act of 1449 describes as going about the country with ‘horses, hunds, and other goods.’ In no other country were the Gypsies better received than in Scotland, where, on 3rd July 1505, James IV. gave Anthonius Gagino, Earl of Little Egypt, a letter of commendation to the King of Denmark; where in 1530 the ‘Egyptianis that dansit before the king in Halyrudhous’ received forty shillings, and where that same king, James V., subscribed a writ (February 15, 1540) in favour of ‘oure louit Johnne Faw, lord and erle of Litill Egipt,’ to whose son and successor, Johnne Wanne, he granted authority to hang and punish all Egyptians within the realme (May 26, 1540). Exactly when cannot be fixed, but about or soon after 1559, Sir William Sinclair, the Lord Justice-General, ‘delivered ane Egyptian from the gibbet in the Burrow Moore, ready to be strangled, returning from Edinburgh to Roslin, upon which accoumpt the whole [[xv]]body of gypsies were of old accustomed to gather in the stanks [marshes] of Roslin every year, where they acted severall plays, dureing the moneth of May and June. There are two towers,’ adds Father Richard Augustine Hay in his Genealogie of the Sainteclaires of Roslin (written 1700; ed. by Maidment, 1835, p. 136), ‘which were allowed them for their residence, the one called Robin Hood, the other Little John.’ Roslin seems to have been a Patmos of the race for upwards of fifty years, but in 1623–24 they were hunted out, and eight of their leaders hanged on the Burgh Muir. Six of those leaders were Faas; and eleven years before, on 21st August 1612, four other Egyptians of the same well-known surname had been put on trial as far north as Scalloway in Shetland. These were ‘Johne Fawe, elder, callit mekill Johne Faw, Johne Faw, younger, calit Littill Johne Faw, Katherin Faw, spous to umquhill Murdo Broun, and Agnes Faw, sister to the said Litill Johne.’ They were indicted for the murder of the said Murdo Brown, and for theft, sorcery, and fortune-telling, ‘and that they can help or hinder in the proffeit of the milk of bestiale.’ Three of them were acquitted; but Katherine, pleading guilty to having slain her husband with a ‘lang braid knyff,’ was sentenced to be ‘tane to the Bulwark and cassen over the same in the sey to be drownit to the death, and dome given thairupone.’ For all which, and a multitude more of most curious and recondite information, I refer my readers to Mr. David MacRitchie’s Scottish Gypsies under the Stewarts (Edinb. 1894, 120 pages), which has done for our northern tribes what Mr. Crofton had done for the southern. Its one omission is this, the earliest mention of Gypsies in the Highlands, contained in a news-letter from Dundee of January 1, 1651:—‘There are about an hundred people of severall nations, call’d heere by the name of Egyptians, which doe att this day ramble uppe and downe the North Highlands, the cheifest of which are one Hause and Browne: they are of the same nature with the English Gypsies, and doe after the same manner cheate and cosen the country’ (C. H. Firth’s Scotland and the Commonwealth, Edinb., Scottish Hist. Society, 1895, p. 29).
In North America.
As to America it was till recently supposed that there were not, had never been, any Gypsies there. In ‘The Fortune-teller,’ a story reprinted in Chambers’s Journal for November 25, 1843, from The Lady’s Book, an American publication, a Mrs. Somers is made to exclaim, ‘An English gipsy! Alice, you must be deceived. There never has been a gipsy in America.’ And, sure enough, the fortune-teller turns out to be no Gypsy. Nay, in a work so well-informed as Appleton’s [[xvi]]American Cyclopædia (1874), the writer of the article ‘Gipsies’ pronounces it ‘questionable whether a band of genuine Gipsies has ever been in America.’ Yet in 1665 at Edinburgh the Privy Council gave warrant and power to George Hutcheson, merchant, and his co-partners to transport to Jamaica and Barbadoes Egyptians and other loose and dissolute persons; and on 1st January 1715 nine Border Gypsies, men and women, of the names of Faa, Stirling, Yorstoun, Finnick (Fenwick), Lindsey, Ross, and Robertson, were transported by the magistrates of Glasgow to the Virginia plantations at a cost of thirteen pounds sterling (Gypsy Lore Journal, ii. 60–62). That is all, or practically all, we know of the coming of the Gypsies to North America, where, at New York, there were house-dwelling Gypsies as far back as 1850, and where to-day there must be hundreds or thousands of the race from England, Scotland, Hungary, Spain, one knows not whence else besides. Some day somebody will study them and write about them; meanwhile we have merely stray jottings by Simson and Leland.
In South America.
For South America our information was, quite recently, even more meagre. Twenty years ago I just knew from Henry Koster’s Travels in Brazil (Lond. 1816, p. 399) of the presence of Ciganos there, whom he described as ‘a people of a brownish cast, with features which resemble those of white persons, and tall and handsome. They wander from place to place in parties of men, women, and children, exchanging, buying, and selling horses, and gold and silver trinkets.… They are said to be unmindful of all religious observances, and never to hear Mass or confess their sins. It is likewise said that they never marry out of their own nation.’ Since then, however, Mello Moraes has published Os Ciganos no Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1886), which, besides a Rómani glossary, gives a good historical and statistical account of the Brazilian Gypsies. They seem to be the descendants of Ciganos transported from Portugal towards the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Thus, by a decree of 27th August 1685, the Gypsies were henceforth to be transported to Maranhão, instead of to Africa; and in 1718, by a decree of 11th April, the Gypsies were banished from the kingdom to the city of Bahia, special orders being given to the governor to be diligent in the prohibition of the language and ‘cant’ (giria), not permitting them to teach it to their children, that so it might die out. It was about this time, according to ‘Sr. Pinto Noites, an estimable and venerable Gypsy of eighty-nine years,’ that his ancestors and kinsfolk arrived at Rio de Janeiro—nine families transported hither by reason of a robbery imputed to the Gypsies. [[xvii]]The heads of these nine families were João da Costa Ramos, called João do Reino, with his son, Fernando da Costa Ramos, and his wife, Dona Eugenia; Luis Rabello de Aragão; one Ricardo Frago, who went to Minas; Antonio Laço, with his wife, Jacintha Laço; the Count of Cantanhede; Manoel Cabral and Antonio Curto, who settled in Bahia, accompanied by daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, as well as by wife and sons. They applied themselves to metallurgy—were tinkers, farriers, braziers, and goldsmiths; the women told fortunes and gave charms to avert the evil eye. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Brazilian Gypsies seem to have been great slave-dealers, just as their brethren on this side of the Atlantic have always been great dealers in horses and asses. We read on p. 40 of ‘M …, afterwards Marquis of B …, belonging to the Bohemian race, whose immense fortune proceeded from his acting as middleman in the purchase of slaves for Minas.’ And there are several more indications, scattered through the book, that the Brazilian nation, from highest to lowest, must be strongly tinctured with Rómani blood. We know far too little about the Chinganéros or Montanéros, wandering minstrels of Venezuela, to identify them more or less vaguely with Gypsies (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 306, 373); and a like remark applies, even more strongly, to the Lowbeys of Gambia, who have been described as the ‘Gypsies of North-West Africa,’ who never intermarry with another race, and who confine themselves almost exclusively to the making of the various wooden utensils in use by natives generally (ib. i. 54). Still, these Lowbeys may be the descendants of Gypsies transported from Portugal, or of the Basque Gypsies, whole bands of whom so lately as 1802 were caught by night as in a net, huddled on shipboard, and landed on the coast of Africa (Michel’s Pays Basque, p. 137).