By that Gypsy fire the evening meal passed pleasantly enough, and when at a later hour I returned to the town, the darkened houses were framing the cobbled street, and through the open window of a tavern I caught a soft Romany phrase along with the clinking of glasses. And then from under the archway of the inn yard a dwarfish Gypsy, mounted on a lean horse, rode off with a great clatter into the dusk.
CHAPTER XVIII
A GYPSY SEPULCHRE—BURIAL LORE—THE PASSING OF JONATHAN
In Tetford churchyard, not far from my Rectory on the Lincolnshire Wolds, lies the grave of two celebrated Gypsies, Tyso Boswell and Edward, or “No Name,” Hearn (Heron), who were killed by lightning on 5th August 1831. The incident seems to have made a profound impression upon our Gypsies, and to this day it is everywhere remembered among the Anglo-Romany clans. A large company of the Boswells and Hearns (Herons) appear to have halted at Tetford on their way to Horncastle August Fair, at that time a horse-mart of great importance. Overtaken by a thunderstorm, Tyso and No Name were sheltering in a barn, whither they had gone for some straw, when a stroke of lightning descended fatally upon them.
An aged Gypsy, Lucy Brown (born in the year 1807), once informed me that she remembered the incident quite clearly. Said she, “We were camping atop of Tetford Hill, just above Ruckland Valley, when the lightning struck the poor fellows. We were on our way to Horncastle Fair. I mind it all, rashai, as if it had happened only yesterday.”
In Westarus Boswell’s autobiography, recorded (in his own words) by Smart and Crofton in their work The Dialect of the English Gypsies, are some references to this event—
“I was born at Dover. My father (Tyso) was a soldier, and I was born in the army. My father, when I was born, was in charge of the great gun (Queen Anne’s pocket-piece). After a while he came home, and left the army. He came down into Yorkshire, and there he stayed for many years, and all our family were brought up in that county, and there we all stayed after he was killed in Lincolnshire. He died when I was a lad. The lightning struck him and another, both together. They were cousins. Our people put them both in one grave. There I left them, poor fellows. I was much grieved at it. He (Tyso) always dressed well. When he was buried, I took a wife, and went all over the country. . . . His cousin’s name was called No Name, because he was not christened till he was an old man, and then they called him Edward.”
A curious story attaches to “No Name” Hearn. His parents took him to church to be christened, and when the parson said, “Name this child,” the Gypsy mother answered, “It’s Jehovah, sir.” “I cannot give your child that name,” protested the clergyman. Whereupon the Gypsies stalked out of the church muttering, “He shall be called ‘No Name,’” and by this fore-name he was known all through his life, although in his old age, as Westarus Boswell has told us, he was baptized in the name of Edward.
As might be expected, the funeral of Tyso and Edward was attended by many Gypsies from far and near, and for some years afterwards the grave was visited annually by relatives, who are said to have poured libations of ale upon it. A grandson of Tyso relates that he once found a hole “as big as a fire bucket” in the side of the grave. This he stuffed with hay, and to my own knowledge the hole is still there, the brickwork of the vault having fallen inward. Aged folk at Tetford tell how a witch formerly lived in a cottage near the churchyard. One of her cats kittened down the hole in the vault, and passers-by would shudder to see the kittens bolt like rabbits into the Gypsies’ grave.
If the Gypsies possess any religion at all, it may be summed up in one sentence—reverence for the dead. In bygone ages the Gypsies buried their dead in wild lonely spots, and though for many years the wanderers have been granted Christian burial, yet now and then an aged Romanitshel on his deathbed will express a desire to be laid to rest in the open and not in the churchyard. Moses Boswell, a Derbyshire Gypsy, requested that he might be buried “under the fireplace,” i.e. on the site of an encampment of his people. When dying, Isaac Heron said, “Bury me under a hedge,” a reminiscence of the earlier mode of sepulture. In his Lavengro, Borrow describes the burial of old Mrs. Herne: “The body was placed not in a coffin but on a bier, and carried not to the churchyard but to a deep dingle close by; and there it was buried beneath a rock, dressed just as I have told (in a red cloak and big bonnet of black beaver); and this was done at the bidding of Leonora, who had heard her bebee (aunt) say that she wished to be buried, not in gorgeous fashion, but like a Roman woman of the old blood.”
On the information of some East-Anglian Gypsies, my friend, Mr. T. W. Thompson, a good tsiganologue, writes: “It must have been somewhere about 1830 when Borrow’s friend, Ambrose Smith (Jasper Petulengro), found one of the Hernes burying his wife in a ditch near Gorleston, took the body away and gave it a Christian burial to prevent further trouble befalling the old man.”