Down this pretty country lane there was a pleasant recess, a little higher than the road, under the trees, evidently formed by the gipsies on purpose to have their “tents high and dry.” Several tents could be nicely sheltered and partly secluded under the trees in each recess. Water and game would be plentiful in these lanes a century ago; in fact, I should imagine such was the case now.
At the bottom of “Spectacle Lane” stood a large, fine, old Gothic archway, called by the inhabitants in the neighbourhood “Spectacle Tower.” The object and purpose for which it was built has never been clearly made out. Judging from all the surrounding circumstances, it appeared to me that it had at one time been intended as a gateway to a mansion, abbey, or nunnery which has not been built; or, what is still more probable, it may have been erected as a flag-tower for Fairfax’s army on its way from Oxford through Northampton to the battle of Naseby, and from thence to Leicester. Prince Rupert had gone as far as Daventry to meet General Fairfax and his army, expecting, of course, that they would come by Daventry; instead of which Fairfax left Daventry to the left, and pushed on his way through Northampton and to Boughton Green, hoping to arrive in Leicester before Prince Rupert and the King. Fairfax may have expected that the memorable battle would have been fought in the neighbourhood of Boughton; if so, he, at any rate, reckoned without his host, as both armies came together at Naseby, and with what result any schoolboy knows.
Report says that Boughton Green church was razed to the ground by Cromwell’s army.
The fact of gipsies flocking to this, which was once a fine old Roman Catholic church, and nestling in tents under its shadows, together with the fact that old, monastic-looking farm-houses are to be seen in the neighbourhood, confirms the idea I set forth in my “Gipsy Life,” p. 146, viz., that on the gipsies landing in Scotland, about the year 1514, from the continent, some of them hypocritically professed the Roman Catholic faith in order to inveigle themselves into the good graces of the nobility, so that their pockets and pouches might be filled with as little trouble as possible; in fact, righteous gipsy Smith having come from India, he knew well, and does so still, how to turn religious sentiment to advantage, and hence he landed in Scotland from France as above instead of Dover and London, and wended his way through the Midland counties and southward; and hence we find Northamptonshire, in times later on, a central camping ground for these lawless tribes of aimless vagabonds.
About a century ago a number of gipsies were brought before the magistrates at Northampton; upon what charge has not been stated. This so enraged the gipsies upon Boughton Green and other parts of Northamptonshire, that they threatened to set fire to the town of Northampton. The end of it was that several of the gipsies, for their riotous conduct, forfeited their lives upon the gallows. See “Gipsy Life,” p. 154.
To come back to Boughton Green fair. After having wandered about “Spectacle Lane” I called upon a gentleman, Mr. Jeys, who has resided for many years close to the green, and he told me that he has seen as many as forty to fifty tents and vans of gipsies camping in the lanes near to his house. It was down this lane that small-pox raged among the gipsies. Righteous Smith, with his two wives, Constant and Comfort, and a number of their twenty children, died of small-pox. Births, deaths, and murders have taken place upon the green. How many nobody knows, nor can any idea be formed of the number. Mr. Jeys told me of one case, being a gipsy row, ending in murder. Who had done it no one could tell, and where the gipsy was buried was a mystery. They hunted and searched, but, like the body of the Earl of Crauford and Balcarres, it could not be found, until Mr. Jeys’ gardener came across it in the garden. When the body of the gipsy was found it was laid straight out between two flag stones reared edgewise, and a large flagstone as a covering. The arms were folded, and upon the breast of the gipsy there was a pair of scissors, which had been carefully placed there by those who had buried the gipsy in the dark; for what purpose I cannot make out. Gipsies have queer notions about the death and burial of those belonging to them. The old-fashioned gipsies of bygone days, more than they do now, paid special regard to the dead, and on this account they carried the dead body of the gipsy nearly half a mile to bury it in a gentleman’s garden. The murdered gipsy in his lifetime was, no doubt, a scissor-grinder, and the placing of the scissors upon his breast was to remind them when he got to the other country of what trade the gipsy was—i.e., if skulking about the country with an old barrow grinding a few knives and scissors can be called a trade.
A few years since a gentleman farmer belonging to the neighbourhood was murdered upon the green, by whom it has never been found out. All sorts of conjectures, suspicions, and surmises have taken place upon the matter. Some say the gipsies did it; others say that some of the unfortunate class had a hand in the sad affair. At any rate he was found early next morning with his mouth crammed full of dust; his pockets were empty, and his soul had gone into the unknown world. His name is engraved upon the trunk of a tree close to the spot, which, owing to the growth of the tree and the hand of time, is fast disappearing. The greensward of Boughton Green is not a bed of roses; but, on the contrary, I am afraid, those who have met their last enemy upon this battleground of scamps have found it full of thorns—for such it has been to those who have been murdered or met with death in doubtful company.
At the fair held in 1826, George Catherall, of Bolton, who was known as Captain Slash, formed a large gang of about a hundred roughs—of whom it was composed, young or old, it has not been stated, or whether any, and how many of them, were gipsies—to rob and murder all upon the green on the night of June 28th who would not “turn it up.” They formed themselves, after being well primed with beer, into lines like soldiers, and on they went to do their murderous, Satanic work, calling cut, “Blood or money!” While they were carrying out their murderous designs, Captain Slash would frequently cry out, “Now, my lads, form yourselves into line soldier-like. Blood or money is what we want and what we shall have.” Many of those who had retired for the night under canvas, or under their stalls, were beaten, kicked, and not a few were rendered insensible. There were no policemen in those days, and it was fortunate that a body of shoemakers from Moulton were close at hand, or there would have been a larger number of the hawkers and stall-keepers murdered, there is no doubt. The Moulton shoemakers gave Slash and his gang what they did not expect. Daybreak showed what a murderous night had been spent upon the green. Blood, bludgeons, sticks, broken glass, tables, stools, were to be seen lying in all directions. The money taken at the fair was hid in all sorts of ways. The wife of a publican ran with her money all the way to Northampton in her night-dress. A hawker of scythe-stones and whetstones told me that he helped his father to put the money they had taken during the fair under their cart-wheels. Others dug holes into the turf with their knives; others hid their money in the hedge-bottom. Scores were scampering about in their night-dresses in all directions, with their hair on end, and almost frightened out of their senses, like stark mad folks. The children nestling for the night under the carts, tents, and in the booths, screeched and screamed about in the dark upon the grass half naked, like a lot of young rabbits when the weasels have been at their heels, horrible enough to frighten devils wild. The few old folks visiting the fair every year who can remember the sad scene talk of it at the present time with almost breathless silence. Some of them said to me, “If we were to live a thousand years we should never forget it.” Captain Slash was taken the next day to Northampton, and in the end he was hung upon the new drop. Accounts differ as to how he met his end. Some say that he died in sorrow and penitence. One gentleman named F— told me that he was not far from him when he was hanged, and walked close beside him on his way to the gallows. While jogging along on the top of a cart Slash seemed quite jovial, and as merry as if going to a wedding. He remarked that his mother had said to him more than once that “he would die with his boots on,” but he would make her a liar for once; and just before the fatal bolt was drawn he kicked his boots off among the crowd, and one of them hit a woman who stood next to my friend in the face and disfigured it. After this startling scene his nerves gave way, and he dropped tremblingly into eternity. To-day the skeleton of Captain Slash is to be seen in an asylum at Northampton as a warning to all wrongdoers. One or two of his gang were transported, some cleared out of the country, and the others got off “scot-free.”
The associations of bygone days of Boughton Green being disposed of, I now began to ramble among the gipsies and others upon the green. I had not gone far before I saw at the back of one of the vans a dirty, greasy-looking tramp of a fellow, with an apron on that might have been washed in boiling tallow and dried in smoke. In a large kettle before him there was a quantity of thick yellow stuff—what it was composed of, or how and by what means it was coloured, I could not tell—and by his side, in an old basket, there were pieces of almost rotten fish casting forth a sickly odour; and over a fire upon the ground there was an old frying-pan partly full of hot grease. I was puzzled to know what this was for, and what it all meant. I had not been puzzling long before I saw the greasy tramp taking pieces of the fish out of his basket and dip them into the thick yellow liquid; he then threw them into the pan upon the fire, whereupon a crackling noise commenced. After turning and twisting the pieces of fish about in the pan for some time, sometimes with his fingers and at other times with a stick, they were “browned” in order to be palatable to “greenhorns;” and as they were “cooked” he took them out of the pan and put them into a basket, and sallied forth among the throng and crush of “Johnnies,” calling out “Fine fish, fried and all hot! Fried fish, all hot.” A crowd soon gathered round him, and with a plentiful supply of pepper and vinegar he began business in earnest. Well-dressed farmers, shoemakers, men, youths, girls, and maidens of almost every grade clustered round him, and the eagerness with which they clutched and enjoyed the fried fish, bones, and vinegar would have formed a subject worthy of my friend Herbert Johnson, or W. H. Overend, the artists of the “Graphic” and “Illustrated London News.” “Smack” went their lips, and I turned away disgusted at the thought and sight at having found so many simple, gullible beings in the world, standing ready with open mouths to swallow the greasy morsels of dirty tramps. It is pleasing to note that all those who live by frying fish, and also those who live by eating it, are not of this stamp.
After strolling about for some time I turned among some of my old friends, Jack, Jim, Bill, Sal, Righteous, Piety, and Zachriali, gipsies of the cocoa-nut tribes engaged at cocoa-nut shying. All did not profess to be so low down in the social scale as the gipsies. Poor “Pea-soup Sal,” with a reddish face, who had imbibed a little too much from the beer barrel, and whose legs were not over-strong, particularly objected to being classed with the gipsies; in fact, as she propped herself up by the side of her box of cocoa-nut balls, she turned up her nose, curled her lip, and staggered at the idea of such “respectable people as they wer-wer-wer-were being rec-rec-rec-reckoned with the gip-gip-gip-gipsies. They are a ba-ba-ba-ba-bad lot.” Poor Sal was now overcome, and fell to the ground. For once in her life she was at any rate level with those gipsies who were squatting upon the floor. Her husband, who seemed to be a common-sense sort of a man, and apparently fairly educated, came to her relief. If he had not done so, I would not have given much for the cocoa-nuts, and less still for poor unfortunate Sal.