In hordes like these they spread themselves, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, over the whole of Europe. In spite of their frivolous finery and cunning lies, there were very few places in which they succeeded in deceiving men. They proved, indeed, everywhere to be wicked heathens, magicians, fortune-tellers, and most shameless thieves. They split themselves into small bands during their distant travels; their leaders, whom they had honoured with all the feudal titles, in order to give themselves consideration, disappeared. They themselves were thoroughly decimated by their wandering lives, and the persecutions of the local inhabitants.
Their language gives the best explanation of their past. The original homogeneousness of the gipsy language is distinctly visible amidst the various changes which it has gone through in many countries. It appears to be the mode of speech of a single and special Indian race. The gipsy is apparently not the descendant of a mixed Indian people, or of a single low caste of Indians, but of a distinct race of people. The men call themselves everywhere, rom; and in contradiction to the western nations, also calo, black: their wives, romni, and their language romany-tschib. The names which their race have had in different countries are numerous and various.
Their language is in its origin and internal structure a genuine daughter of the distinguished Sanscrit, but it has become for many centuries like a beggar and thief; it has lost much of its beauty, its elegance, and its resemblance to its mother and sisters; instead of which it has appropriated something to itself from every country in which these people have tarried in their wanderings, and its dress appears covered with the tatters of all nations, so that it is only here and there that the genuine gold threads are still visible. The race have lost a great portion of their own words, more especially those, that express ideas which they could not preserve in their paltry miserable life in foreign countries. They have lost the Indian expression for parrot, elephant, and lion, also for the tiger and buffalo snake, but sugar--gûlo, silk--pahr, and grapes--drakh, they call by their Indian, and wine--mohl, by its Persian name. Nay, they have also lost the Indian words for many current terms: they no longer call the sparrow by its Indian name: no fish, and hardly any plants; but undoubtedly they retain those of many large and small animals, amongst others dschu, the louse. But in all countries, new representations, images, and ideas offered themselves, and too lazy and careless to form words of their own, they took those of every foreign language and adapted them to the necessities of their own tongue. The result was, that even the gipsies who were in bands, being without firm union, were split in pieces among the various people, so that what they still possessed did not remain common to all, and there arose in every country a peculiar gipsy idiom, in which old recollections were mixed up with the language of the country, in an original way. Finally the rom appropriated to himself almost everywhere, besides the common language of the country that of the rogues, the thieves' dialect, to which he imparted, in friendly exchange, words from his own language. In Germany he understood gibberish, or Jenisch; in Bohemia, Hantyrka; in French, Argôt; in England, Slang; and in Spain, Germania.
It is instructive to observe how their hereditary language became corrupted; for the decadence of one language, through the overpowering influence of another, proceeds according to fixed laws. First, foreign words penetrate in a mass, because foreign cultivation has an imposing effect; next the formation of sentences is taken from the foreign language, because the mind of the people accustoms itself to think after the method of the foreigners; and thirdly, they forget their own inflections; then the language becomes a heap of ruins, a weather-beaten organism, like a corroded mass of rock which crumbles away into sand or gravel. The gipsy language has gone through the first and second stages of decadence, and the third also in Spain.
The life of this race in Germany was far from comfortable. As their hands were against the property of every one, so did the popular hatred work against their lives. Charles V. commanded them to be banished, and the new police ordinances of the Princes allowed them no indulgence. Yet they were able to gain money from the country people by soothsaying and secret arts, by doctoring man and beast, or as horse-dealers and pedlers. Often, united with bands of robbers, they carried on a new service during the long war, as camp followers. Wallenstein made use of them as spies, as did the Swedes also later. The women made themselves agreeable to the officers and common soldiers. The cunning men of the band sold amulets and shod horses.
After the war they went about through the country audaciously, the terror of the countryman. In 1663 a band of more than two hundred of them invaded Thuringia, where they distributed themselves, and were considered as very malevolent, because it was reported of them that they reconnoitred the country probably for an enemy. They had in fact become a great plague throughout the country, and the law thundered against them with characteristic recklessness. Orders were issued everywhere for their banishment; they were considered as spies of the Turks, and as magicians, and were made outlaws; even after the year 1700, in a small Rhenish principality, a gipsy woman and her child were brought in amongst other wild game which had been slain. A band again broke into Thuringia in the eighteenth century, and a law in 1722 declared all the men outlawed. In Prussia, in 1710, an edict was promulgated, commanding the alarm to be sounded, and the community to be summoned together against them, whenever they should make their appearance. On the frontiers, gallows were erected with this inscription: "The punishment for thieves and gipsy rabble, both men and women." As late as the year 1725 all the gipsies in the Prussian states, over eighteen years of age, were to be hanged whether they had a passport or not. Even in 1748 Frederick the Great renewed this strong edict. The conduct of the civilized nineteenth century forms a pleasing contrast to this. In 1830 at Friedrichslohra in Thuringia, a philanthropic endeavour was made, and warmly promoted by the government, to reform a band of about one hundred men, by the maintenance of the adults and education of the children. The attempt was continued for seven years, and completely failed.
The name of Stroller disappeared, and the occupation of these possessionless rovers became to a certain degree free from the old defect; but the great society of swindlers maintained a certain organization. Their language also remained. The gibberish, of which many specimens remain to us from the latter end of the middle ages, shows already, before the demoralization of the people by the Hussite war, a full development of old German rogues' idioms. It consists for the greater part of Hebrew words as used by persons who were not themselves Jews; together with these are mingled some of the honoured treasures of the German language, beautiful old words, and again significant inventions of figurative expressions, for the sake of concealing the true sense of the speech by a deceptive figure: thus, windgap for mantle, broadfoot for goose. Few of their words lead us to expect an elevated disposition; the rough humour of desperadoes breaks out from many of them. The practice, like the language of these rogues, developed itself in greater refinement. The usual form in which the resident inhabitants were plundered was begging. The works of holiness of the old Church--an irrational alms-giving--had spread throughout Christendom an unwieldy mass of mendicancy. In the first century of German Christendom it is the subject of complaint of pious ecclesiastics. In churchyards and in public places lay the beggars, exposing horrible wounds, which were often artistically inflicted; they sometimes went naked through the country with a club, afterwards clothed, and with many weapons, and begged at every homestead for their children, or for the honour of their saints, or as slaves escaped from the Turkish galleys, for a vow, or for only a pound of wax, a silver cross, or a mass vestment. They begged also towards the erection of a church, producing letters and seals; they had much at heart to obtain special napkins for the priest, linen for the altar cloth, and broken plate for the chalice; they rolled about as epileptics, holding soap lather in their mouths. In like manner did the women wander about, some pretending to give birth to monsters (as for example a toad) which lived in solitude as miraculous creatures, and daily required a pound of meat. When a great festival was held they flocked together in troops. They formed a dangerous company, and even iron severity could scarcely keep them under restraint. Basle appears to have been one of their secret meeting-places; they had there their own special place of justice, and the famed "Liber Vagatorum" also, seems to have originated in that neighbourhood. This book, written by an unknown hand about 1500, contains, in rogues' language, a careful enumeration of the rogue classes and their tricks, and at the end a vocabulary of jargon. It was often printed; and Pamphilus Gengenbach of Basle rendered it into rhyme. It pleased Luther so well that he also reprinted the clever little book, after one of the oldest impressions.
To the order of beggars belong also the travelling scholars, who, as treasure diggers and exorcists, made successful attacks on the savings of the peasants and on the provisions in their chimneys. "They desired to become priests," then they came from Rome with shaven crowns and collected for a surplice; or they were necromancers, then they wore a yellow train to their coats and came from the Frau Venusberg; when they entered a house they exclaimed, "Here comes a travelling scholar, a master of seven liberal sciences, an exorciser of the devil, and from hail storms, fire, and monsters;" and thereupon they made "experiments." Together with them came disbanded Landsknechte, often associated with the dark race of outlaws, who worked with armed hand against the life and property of the resident inhabitants.
Throughout the whole of the middle ages it was impossible to eradicate the robbers. After the time of Luther they became incendiaries, more particularly from 1540 to 1542. A foreign rabble appeared suddenly in middle Germany, especially in the domains of the Protestant chiefs, the Elector of Saxony and Landgrave of Hesse. They burned Cassel, Nordheim, Göttingen, Goslor, Brunswick, and Magdeburg. Eimbech was burned to the ground with three hundred and fifty men, and a portion of Nordhausen; villages and barns were everywhere set on fire; bold incendiary letters stirred up the people, and at last also the princes. The report became general that the Roman Catholic party had hired more than three hundred incendiaries, and the Pope, Paul III., had counselled Duke Henry the younger, of Brunswick, to send the rabble to Saxony and Hesse. Undoubtedly much wickedness was laid to the credit of the unscrupulous Duke; but it was then the interest of Pope Paul III. to treat the Protestants with forbearance, for earnest endeavours were being made on both sides for a great reconciliation, and preparation was made for it at Rome, by sending the Cardinal Contarini to the great religious conference at Ratisbon. The terror, however, and anger of the Germans was great and enduring. Everywhere the incendiaries were tracked, everywhere their traces were found, crowds of rabble were imprisoned, tried for their lives, and executed. Luther publicly denounced Duke Henry as guilty of these reckless outrages; the Elector and Landgrave accused him of incendiarism at the Diet before the Emperor; and in vain did he, in his most vehement manner, defend himself and his adherents. It is true that his guilt was pronounced by the Emperor as unproved; but then he was desirous, above all, of internal peace and help against the Turks. In the public opinion, however, the stain on the prince's reputation remained. It is impossible to discover how far the strollers of that time were the guilty parties. The depositions of those arrested are inaccurately given, and it cannot be decided how much of it was dictated by torture. One thing is quite clear, they did not form into any fixed bands, and their secret intercourse was carried on through the medium of signs, which were scratched or cut on striking places, such as inns, walls, doors, &c. These signs were partly primitive German personal tokens, which, as house-marks, may still be found on the gables of old buildings, but partly also in rogues' marks. Above all, there was the characteristic sign of the Strollers, the arrow, once the signal announcing enmity; the direction of his arrow shows the way which the marker has taken; small perpendicular strokes on it, often with ciphers above, give probably the number of persons. These signs are to be found sometimes still on the trees and walls of the high-roads, and it betokens now, as it did then, to the members of the band, that the initiated has passed that way with his followers.
In addition to the indigenous rovers came also foreign ones; as in the middle ages, a stream of Italian adventurers again flowed through Germany. Together with the German player rose the cry of the Italian orvietan (Venice treacle) vendor, and side by side with the Bohemian bear were the camels of Pisa. The marvellous Venetian remedies and the harlequin jacket, mask, and felt cap of the Italian fool wandered over the Alps, and were added as new fooleries to our old stock.