No man knew who they were or whence they came. Their swarthy complexions, long black hair, sharp eyes, high cheek-bones, narrow mouths and fine white teeth, were marks of an eastern origin. They spoke a language which had never been heard in Europe before, and followed a strange way of life, which savored more of the rude nomadic habits of primitive Asia, than the comparatively civilized customs of the country into which they had come. They travelled about in bands or tribes, each under the command of a leader, slept at night in tents or abandoned out-houses, and occupied themselves by day in a simple sort of smith work, basket-weaving, tinkering, fortune-telling, juggling, and stealing. Vagabonds as they were, filthy in their habits, and addicted to the eating of carrion and other disgusting things, they were fond of wearing gay dresses, whenever they could beg, buy, or steal them, and many of the women, with their lithe and agile figures, were not without a certain dark sort of beauty which found many admirers.
Whether they knew anything about their own origin or not, is doubtful; but if they did, they kept it so carefully' secret, that the knowledge has been completely lost. At all events they made their first appearance in France in 1427, with a great lie in their months, and a forged confirmation of it in their pockets. They called themselves Christian pilgrims from Lower Egypt, who had been expelled by the Saracens. They had unfortunately committed a few sins on the way, and having confessed to Pope Martin V., his holiness had enjoined upon them as a penance to traverse the world for seven years without sleeping in beds. In support of this story they exhibited documents purporting to be issued by the holy see, but they had probably manufactured these testimonials themselves. However, the world was not very wise in those days, and the mysterious strangers were accepted for what they professed to be; and for some years the wandering penitents pursued a brilliant career of theft and imposture, while their leaders galloped over the continent with the high-sounding titles of dukes, counts, and lords of Little Egypt. When they first came to Paris they had among them a duke, a count, and ten lords. The authorities would not let them enter the city, but assigned them quarters at La Chapelle near St. Denis, where they were consulted on occult matters by great numbers of the citizens. But our Egyptian pilgrims were soon found to be such incorrigible rascals that the bishop of Paris caused them to be removed, and excommunicated those who had consulted them. Similar treatment was shown them in other parts of Europe. For a time their forged credentials had enabled them to obtain passports and letters of [{703}] security from various European potentates; but the wanderers everywhere made themselves nuisances, and were banished under threats of the severest punishments. Fortunately for them, however, these edicts were not published simultaneously all over Europe, so that they were not exactly driven into the ocean, but only exiled from one part of the continent to another. In Germany they were called Zigeuner, or wanderers; in Holland, Haydens, or heathens, in Spain, Gitanos; in Italy, Zingari; in France, Bohemians, because they entered that country from Bohemia. The name of gipsy, by which they were known in England and Scotland, is evidently a corruption of their self-chosen appellation Egyptians.
More than four hundred years have passed since these swarthy penitents made their seven years' pilgrimage of cheating and pilfering through Europe, and they are still a people as distinct from all other races in their essential characteristics as they were on the day they first humbugged our ancestors. The general improvement of society all over the world has compelled them to abandon many of their vagabond ways. They have no longer that complete organization in tribes and companies which they used to preserve; they no longer claim the privilege of governing themselves in all things by their own laws, and their earls and captains no longer exercise the authority of life and death over their subjects. A large gipsy encampment is a rare sight nowadays, and even the gipsy features, owing to frequent intermarriages between the tribes and the European race, are in a fair way of being obliterated. But there are still many thousands of gipsies roaming about Europe in small companies; they still preserve their ancient customs in secret; and under all the restraints of civilization, even the most orderly of them cherish their old vagabond propensities. The Gipsy physiognomy is quite as marked as the Jewish, and the gipsy race is far more distinctly separated from the rest of the world than are the children of Abraham. Their speech, which is not, as some people suppose, a mere farago of slang or thieves' latin, but a genuine language, has been handed down from mother to child, and is still a living tongue--a fact which is not a little remarkable, because the language has no literature, and can only be perpetrated by tradition. The gipsies have no written characters. And yet it would be hard to find a gipsy who cannot speak the language, though few of them are willing to acknowledge it.
The problem of the origin of this strange people has exercised learned brains ever since the civilized world became civilized enough to perceive that there was a mystery about their presence in the midst of Christendom. It seems to be pretty well agreed that they came into Europe from Hindostan; but why they came, and why they called themselves Egyptians are matters of dispute. Grellman in Germany, and Hoyland and Borrow in England have hitherto been the most esteemed authorities on the subject of gipsies; but we have now a new work, by Walter and James Simson, which promises to shove the older books aside. It is a rather outlandish production, but on that very account perhaps more appropriate to its subject, Mr. Walter having spent some seventeen years poking about gipsy encampments, peeping into their huts, studying their cookery, scraping up odds and ends of their language, learning how they picked pockets, told fortunes, robbed hen-roosts, stole horses, married their wives and divorced them, fought with each other, protected their friends, and pursued their enemies with unrelenting vengeance; having gathered up a great store of interesting anecdotes and historical notes, and got to know, in fine, more about the gipsies of Scotland than any other man, probably, who ever lived--having done all this, Mr. Walter Simson died one day and left an ill-digested manuscript [{704}] book on his pet subject, which Mr. James Simson took up, annotated, enlarged, and published. Mr. Walter's book, if it was not a model of literary neatness, was unpretentious, entertaining, and full of valuable information. Mr. James, however, must needs add to it, first an advertisement, then a preface, then an introduction, and lastly a long-drawn disquisition, all of which are tiresome to the last degree, and not worth a tenth of the space they fill. Besides, Mr. James Simson has a bad temper, and it is not pleasant to read his arguments, even when he argues against an imaginary adversary. He has a theory of his own about the origin of the gipsies, to which we do not purpose to commit ourselves; but it is curious enough to be stated, so that our readers may judge of it for themselves.
An intelligent gipsy once told Mr. Simson that his race sprang from a body of men-a cross between the Arabs and Egyptians--who left Egypt in the train of the Jews. Now we read in Exodus xii. 38, that "a mixed multitude went up also with them," [i.e., with the Jews out of Egypt;] and from the fact stated in Numbers xi. 4, that "the mixed multitude that was among them fell a lusting" for flesh, it would appear that these refugees had not amalgamated with the Jews, but only journeyed in company with them. Since this multitude were not children of the promise, and had no call from God to go out from among the Egyptians and journey to a land of peace and plenty, their condition in Egypt must have been a hard one, or they would not have entered upon a long and painful wandering to escape from it. No doubt, says Mr. Simson, they were slaves, like the Jews; probably descendants of the Hyksos, or "Shepherd Kings," who possessed the land before its conquest by the Pharaohs; perhaps descendents of these Hyksos by Egyptian women. God had promised Canaan, however, only to the Israelites; the "mixed multitudes" could have no share in the inheritance; so they probably separated from the Jews in the wilderness, and wandered eastward into Hindostan. Coming into that country from a long servitude, they would naturally have been timid of mixing with the native inhabitants, disposed to cling together for mutual protection, loose in their notions of right and wrong and the laws of property. Every man's hand would have been against them, and they would have been no man's friend. The lawless and migratory habits engendered by their isolation would soon have become fixed and hereditary; and so, to hasten to a conclusion, the mixed multitude of Egyptians would have grown to be, in the course of a few hundreds of generations, more or less, a race of horse-thieves and fortune-tellers.
This theory accounts for the fact that the gipsies call themselves Egyptians, while their language and many other peculiarities are strongly redolent of Hindostan. It is true that no Egyptian words have been detected in their speech, while its resemblance to Hindostance dialects is very strong; but then just think what an unconscionably long time it is since they came away from Egypt, and how easy it would have been for them, in the absence of an alphabet and a literature, to forget the language of captivity and acquire that of freedom.
Why they came out of Hindostan into Europe, or why they waited to come until the fifteenth century, is purely matter of conjecture. But that Hindostan was their last abiding place before their appearance in Germany, about 1417, there is, for various reasons which we need not here enumerate, no reasonable doubt.
Of their history and character in continental Europe, Mr. Simson tells us but little, and that little is not new. We pass at once therefore to the portion of his book which is devoted to the Scottish gipsies; and when we have read that, we shall have a pretty clear idea of the peculiarities of the race all over the world.
It is not certain when they first appeared in Great Britain; but they were in Scotland at least as early as 1506 in which year they so far imposed upon King James IV., that his majesty addressed a letter of commendation to the King of Denmark, in favor of "Anthonius Gawino, Earl of Little Egypt, and the other afflicted and lamentable tribe of his retinue," who, having been "pilgriming" by command of the pope, over the Christian world, were now anxious to cross the ocean into Denmark. "But," concluded the Scottish monarch, with beautiful simplicity, "we believe that the fates, manners, and race of the wandering Egyptians are better known to thee than to us, because Egypt is nearer thy kingdom." We see from this that the vagabonds still kept up the fiction of a penitential pilgrimage, though it must have seemed a long seven years' wandering which, beginning about 1417, was not finished in 1506. In 1540 a still more remarkable document appears on record, being nothing less than a sort of league or treaty between James V. and his "loved John Faw, Lord and Earl of Little Egypt," whereby the officers of the realm were commanded to assist the said John Faw "in execution of justice upon his company and folk, conform to the laws of Egypt, and in punishing of all them that rebel against him." But this state of things did not last long. James, as we all know, liked to go a masquerading now and then, in the character of "the Gaberlunzie Man," [Footnote 175] or "the Guid Man of Ballangiegh," and on one occasion, while in this dignified disguise, he fell in with a gang of gipsies carousing in a cave, near Wemyss, in Fifeshire. His majesty heartily joined in the revels; but before long a scuffle ensued, in the course of which one of the men "came crack over the royal head with a bottle." Nor was this indignity enough, for suspecting that the "guid man" was a spy, the trampers treated him with the utmost harshness, and when they resumed their march compelled him to go along with them, loaded with their budgets and wallets, and leading an ass. The king passed several days in this disgusting captivity, but at length found an opportunity to send a boy with a written message to some of his nobles at Falkland. He was then rescued. Two of the gipsies he caused to be hanged at once; a third, who had treated him with some kindness, he let go free; and he caused an edict to be published banishing the whole race from the kingdom under penalty of death. James died the next year, however, and the edict was never enforced; nor were subsequent laws, of equal severity, able either to got the gipsies out of the country or to check their wandering and thievish propensities. A great many of the race attached themselves, nominally as clansmen, to chieftains and noblemen, who were willing and able to afford them protection. But a great many were nevertheless hanged merely for being "by habit and repute Egyptians." So they got to look upon themselves as a persecuted race. They learned to deny their origin, to keep their language a secret, and to resent with all the savage fierceness of their fiery natures, the slightest attempt on the part of the "gorgios," (as they called the Europeans among whom they had cast their lot) to pry into the hidden mysteries of gipsy life.