A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs

by W. H. Hudson

It amused me to find, from an incident related to me by a workman in a village where I was staying lately, that this simple, ancient device is still practised by the gipsies. My informant said that on going out at about four o'clock one morning during the late summer he was surprised at seeing two gipsies with a pony and cart at the spot where a party of them had been encamped a fortnight before. He watched them, himself unseen, and saw that they were digging a pit on the spot where they had had their fire. They took out several objects from the ground, but he was too far away to make out what they were. They put them in the cart and covered them over, then filled up the pit, trampled the earth well down, and put the ashes and burnt sticks back in the same place, after which they got into the cart and drove off.

Of course a man, even a nomad, must have some place to conceal his treasures or belongings in, and the gipsy has no cellar nor attic nor secret cupboard, and as for his van it is about the last place in which he would bestow anything of value or incriminating, for though he is always on the move, he is, moving or sitting still, always under a cloud. The ground is therefore the safest place to hide things in, especially in a country like the Wiltshire Downs, though he may use rocks and hollow trees in other districts. His habit is that of the jay and magpie, and of the dog with a bone to put by till it is wanted. Possibly the rural police have not yet discovered this habit of the gipsy. Indeed, the contrast in mind and locomotive powers between the gipsy and the village policeman has often amused me; the former most like the thievish jay, ever on mischief bent; the other, who has his eye on him, is more like the portly Cochin-China fowl of the farmyard, or the Muscovy duck, or stately gobbler.

To go back. When the buried sheep had to be kept too long buried and was found "gone bad" when disinterred, I fancy it made little difference to the diners. One remembers Thoreau's pleasure at the spectacle of a crowd of vultures feasting on the carrion of a dead horse; the fine healthy appetite and boundless vigour of nature filled him with delight. But it is not only some of the lower animals—dogs and vultures, for instance—which possess this power and immunity from the effects of poisons developed in putrid meat; the Greenlanders and African savages, and many other peoples in various parts of the world, have it as well.

Sometimes when sitting with gipsies at their wild hearth, I have felt curious as to the contents of that black pot simmering over the fire. No doubt it often contains strange meats, but it would not have been etiquette to speak of such a matter. It is like the pot on the fire of the Venezuela savage into which he throws whatever he kills with his little poisoned arrows or fishes out of the river. Probably my only quarrel with them would be about the little fledgelings: it angers me to see them beating the bushes in spring in search of small nesties and the callow young that are in them. After all, the gipsies could retort that my friends the jays and magpies are at the same business in April and May.

It is just these habits of the gipsy which I have described, shocking to the moralist and sanitarian and disgusting to the person of delicate stomach, it may be, which please me, rather than the romance and poetry which the scholar-gipsy enthusiasts are fond of reading into him. He is to me a wild, untameable animal of curious habits, and interests me as a naturalist accordingly. It may be objected that being a naturalist occupied with the appearance of things, I must inevitably miss the one thing which others find.

In a talk I had with a gipsy a short time ago, he said to me: "You know what the books say, and we don't. But we know other things that are not in the books, and that's what we have. It's ours, our own, and you can't know it."

It was well put; but I was not perhaps so entirely ignorant as he imagined of the nature of that special knowledge, or shall we say faculty, which he claimed. I take it to be cunning—the cunning of a wild animal with a man's brain—and a small, an infinitesimal, dose of something else which eludes us. But that something else is not of a spiritual nature: the gipsy has no such thing in him; the soul growths are rooted in the social instinct, and are developed in those in whom that instinct is strong. I think that if we analyse that dose of something else, we will find that it is still the animal's cunning, a special, a sublimated cunning, the fine flower of his whole nature, and that it has nothing mysterious in it. He is a parasite, but free and as well able to exist free as the fox or jackal; but the parasitism pays him well, and he has followed it so long in his intercourse with social man that it has come to be like an instinct, or secret knowledge, and is nothing more than a marvellously keen penetration which reveals to him the character and degree of credulity and other mental weaknesses of his subject.

It is not so much the wind on the heath, brother, as the fascination of lawlessness, which makes his life an everlasting joy to him; to pit himself against gamekeeper, farmer, policeman, and everybody else, and defeat them all, to flourish like the parasitic fly on the honey in the hive and escape the wrath of the bees.

I must now return from this long digression to my conversation with the shepherd about the dark people of the village.

There were, I continued, other black-eyed and black-haired people in the villages who had no gipsy blood in their veins. So far as I could make out there were dark people of three originally distinct and widely different races in the Wiltshire Downs. There was a good deal of mixed blood, no doubt, and many dark persons could not be identified as belonging to any particular race. Nevertheless three distinct types could be traced among the dark people, and I took them to be, first, the gipsy, rather short of stature, brown-skinned, with broad face and high cheek-bones, like the men we had just been speaking of. Secondly, the men and women of white skins and good features, who had rather broad faces and round heads, and were physically and mentally just as good as the best blue-eyed people; these were probably the descendants of the dark, broad-faced Wilsetas, who came over at the time when the country was being overrun with the English and other nations or tribes, and who colonized in Wiltshire and gave it their name. The third type differed widely from both the others. They were smallest in size and had narrow heads and long or oval faces, and were very dark, with brown skins; they also differed mentally from the others, being of a more lively disposition and hotter temper. The characters which distinguish the ancient British or Iberian race appeared to predominate in persons of this type.