John Bunyan and the Gipsies

by James Simson

I.

Your letter of the 14th April reached me after some delay. When you wrote it I presume you had not given your fullest consideration to the question raised by you. For when John Bunyan said that his “father’s house was of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land,” and that they were “not of the Israelites,” that is, “not Jews,” he could not possibly have meant that they were what are generally called “natives of England.” Who in Bunyan’s time were the “meanest and most despised of all the families in the land”? No one can doubt that they were the Gipsies, who were numerous and well known to Bunyan. Does it not then follow that this particular Bunyan family were Gipsies, in whatever ways and at whatever times its blood may have got mixed with native, and whatever its social development? And who then living in England—when Jews were excluded from it—would have taken so much trouble as Bunyan did—that is, exhausted every means at his command—to ascertain whether their family were Jews but Gipsies? This Bunyan did, and recorded the fact of his having done it after he had become an old man. Here we have no alternative but to conclude that John Bunyan’s family were of the Gipsy race; whatever natives of a similar surname there might have been in the county or neighbourhood before the Gipsies arrived there. It is even possible in this case, as it has taken place in others, that a native family had been changed into a Gipsy one by the male representative of it marrying a Gipsy, but not necessarily one following an outdoor life, and having the issue passed into the Gipsy tribe in the ordinary way of society. There is neither proof to show nor reason for holding that John Bunyan’s family, in the face of what he told us, were not Gipsies, but of the ordinary race of Englishmen; for which reason I think that an honourable minded man should not maintain it, nor allow it to be asserted in his presence.

You say that the “rank” Bunyan spoke of was “the rank of tinkers, not the race of Gipsies.” But tinkering was his calling, while the word rank was only applicable to “his father’s house,” who probably did not all follow tinkering for a living. I do not think that Bunyan used the word tinker anywhere in his writings; the only allusion to it apparently being at the scene before Justice Hale, when his wife said, “Yes, and because he is a tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot have justice.” In my Disquisition on the Gipsies and elsewhere I attached weight to the fact of Bunyan having been a tinker, as illustrative and confirmatory proof of his having been a Gipsy, when the name of Gipsy was so severely proscribed by law; in consequence of which the Gipsies would call themselves tinkers, to evade the legal and social responsibility. At the present day it is exceedingly difficult to ascertain who English tinkers are or were originally. They will all deny that they are or were ever related to the Gipsies; and the Gipsies proper will do the same. I attach no weight to the loose assertions either way made by people promiscuously, who know little or nothing of the subject, or merely have a theory to maintain. All this I have already very fully put in print.

In your letter is a phrase that sounds a little unpleasantly to my ear. You say, “However, whatever may have been Bunyan’s pedigree, he merits honour as a man;” which seems to imply that his memory would have been disgraced if he had been of the Gipsy race. Why should that have been a disparagement? This is the entire question at issue. How could we have expected Bunyan to have said plainly that he was a member of the Gipsy race in the face of the legal and social responsibility attaching to the name, as I have illustrated at great length on various occasions?

I may exaggerate the feeling in question when I say that no publication will admit the subject into its columns, nor any one allude to it publicly, or even privately, without something like losing social caste. As a consequence, no member of the race that can help it will own the blood unless he wants it to be known for his benefit. The rest of it, in its various mixtures of blood, characters, and positions in life, are born and live and die incognito so far as the rest of the world are concerned. This is a state of things that should not exist in England; but there seems no remedy for it unless the question can meet with discussion, and be taken up by persons of influence in whom the public has confidence. As I have said on another occasion, “The question at issue is really not one of evidence, but of an unfortunate feeling of caste,” that bars the way against all investigation and proof. John Bunyan’s nationality forms only a part of the subject of the “Social Emancipation of the Gipsies,” but a very important part of it; but all that might be said of it has no meaning to such as, looking neither to the right nor the left, will listen to no representation of any kind of Gipsy but such as they have been accustomed to see in the open air in England.

It would be uncandid on my part if I refrained from saying that Bedford and its people have been cited before the bar of the world to show reason why John Bunyan should not be admitted to have been “the first (that is known to the world) of eminent Gipsies, the prince of allegorists, and one of the most remarkable of men and Christians.” They have an opportunity of receiving, first or last, the illustrious pilgrim, not as the progeny of (as some have thought) native English vagabonds, but as a Great Original in whatever light he might be looked at.

In opposition to this view of the great dreamer, we have the ferocious prejudice of caste against the name of Gipsy, that leads a person to feel, if not to say, “May I lose my right hand and may I be struck dumb if I admit that he was one of the race.” To him the subject of the Gipsies, in the development of the race from the tent upwards, and in its complex ramifications through society, has no interest. To comprehend it might even be beyond his capacity. To have it investigated and understood, and the people acknowledged, if it implied that John Bunyan was to be included as one of them, is what he will never countenance; on which account his wish is that the subject may remain in perpetual darkness. Proof is not what he wants, nor will he say what it should consist of. As regards John Bunyan personally, we have never had an explanation of what he told us he and his father’s family were and were not; but we may yet see it treated with fanciful interpretations and comments. Then it has been said at random that he was “not a Gipsy, but a tinker,” without considering who the tinkers really were, and forgetting that a person could have been both a tinker and a Gipsy; tinkering having been the Gipsy’s representative calling. Then we have the assertion that he could not have been a Gipsy because of his fairish appearance, and because his surname existed in England before the race arrived in it; and consequently that no one having a fairish appearance and bearing a British name can or could have been a Gipsy! Then we are told that people following, more or less, the established ways of English life during 120 years before the birth of Bunyan could not possibly have been related in any way to the Gipsies! And finally, certificates of marriages, births and deaths of people bearing British names, taken from a parish register, settle the question that people bearing them were not and could not have been others than ordinary natives of the British Isles, in no way related to the Gipsies! In that respect I wrote in the Appendix to the Reminiscences as follows:—

“The whole trouble or mystery in regard to Bunyan is solved by the simple idea of a Gipsy family settling in the neighbourhood of native families of influence, whose surname they assumed, and making Elstow their headquarters or residence, as was the uniform custom of the tribe all over Great Britain. This circumstance makes it a difficult matter, in some instances, to distinguish, by the Christian and surnames in county parish registers, ‘which was which,’ so far back as the early part of the seventeenth century” (p. 82).

The pamphlet addressed to the “University Men of England” explains itself. I think that ministers of the Church of England should do more for the subject of the Gipsies, in the light in which I have presented it, than could be expected from those of other denominations.

With the hope that I have written nothing that can be considered in any way personally offensive, I remain, etc.