“I am further inclined to think that it would be about this period, and chiefly in consequence of these bloody enactments, the Gipsies would, in general, assume the ordinary Christian and surnames common at that time in Scotland. And their usual sagacity pointed out to them the advantages arising from taking the cognomens of the most powerful families in the kingdom, whose influence would afford them ample protection as adopted members of their respective clans. In support of my opinion of the origin of the surnames of the Gipsies of the present day, we find that the most prevailing names among them are those of the most influential of our noble families of Scotland, such as Stewart, Gordon, Douglas, Graham, Ruthven, Hamilton, Drummond, Kennedy, Cunningham, Montgomery, Kerr, Campbell, Maxwell, Johnstone, Ogilvie, McDonald, Robertson, Grant, Baillie, Shaw, Burnet, Brown, Keith, etc.” To that I added that “the English Gipsies say that native names were assumed by their race in consequence of the proscription to which it was subjected.”—(p. 117.)
[19] Perhaps I admitted too much when I said that “William Bonyon and his wife were apparently ordinary English people,” for they need not necessarily have been that, as I have shown. Had they been such, the tradition of it would soon have died out in their Gipsy descendants of mixed blood but for the little property that remained in the family; for the associations of descent from the native race are not pleasant to the tribe when they consider the hard feelings which it has entertained for their Gipsy blood.
James IV. of Scotland, when introducing “Anthonius Gawino, Earl of Little Egypt, and the other afflicted and lamentable tribe of his retinue,” to his uncle, the King of Denmark, in 1506, said that they “had lately arrived on the frontiers of our kingdom”; so that it is uncertain at what time before 1506 some of the tribe had made their appearance without being recorded in a public document. The Scottish king believed that as “Denmark was nearer to Egypt than Scotland,” a greater number of the Gipsies sojourned in it; and that his uncle would know more about them than he did. If this style of reasoning was correct, England must have received Gipsies before Scotland, for it was “nearer to Egypt than Scotland.”—History of the Gipsies, p. 99.
Speaking of the “standing” of the leading Gipsies in Scotland between 1506 and 1579, the author of the History wrote as follows:—
“It is evident that the Gipsies in Scotland at that time were allowed to punish the criminal members of their own tribe according to their own peculiar laws, customs and usages, without molestation. And it cannot be supposed that the ministers of three or four succeeding monarchs would have suffered their sovereigns to be so much imposed on as to allow them to put their names to public documents, styling poor and miserable wretches, as we at the present day imagine them to have been, ‘Lords and Earls of Little Egypt.’ . . . I am disposed to believe that Anthonius Gawino in 1506, and John Faw in 1540, would personally as individuals, that is, as Gipsy ‘Rajahs,’ have a very respectable and imposing appearance in the eyes of the officers of the Crown” (p. 107).
Although he says that “the English government had not been so easily nor so long imposed on as the kings of Scotland, and the authorities of Europe generally” (p. 91), we can easily imagine that the principal Gipsies at least occupied a pretty good position among the English people generally. If Bailyow in 1540 represented the native name of Baillie (as it is believed to have done), we could have William Bonyon, who died in 1542, one of the original Gipsies, most likely of mixed blood; and we certainly had “John Brown and George Brown, Egyptians,” before 1554.