[122] The Gipsies were not spared of braxy, of which they were fond. I have known natives of Tweed-dale and Ettrick Forest, who preferred braxy to the best meat killed by the hand of man. It has a particular sharp relish, which made them so fond of it.
[Braxy is the flesh of sheep which have died of a certain disease. When the Gipsies are taunted with eating what some call carrion, they very wittily reply: “The flesh of a beast which God kills must be better than that of one killed by the hand of man.” Such flesh, “killed by the hand of God,” is often killed in this manner: They will administer to swine a drug affecting the brain only, which will cause speedy death; when they will call and obtain the carcass, without suspicion, and feast on the flesh, which has been in no way injured.—Borrow. They will also stuff wool down a sheep’s throat, and direct the farmer’s attention to it when near its last gasp, and obtain the carcass after being skinned.—Ed.]
[123] It is interesting to notice that the Doctor calls this Gipsy a “bold and proper fellow.” He was, in all probability, a fine specimen of physical manhood.—Ed.
[124] The Scottish Gipsies, as I have already said, have a tradition that their ancestors came into Scotland by way of Ireland.
[The allusion to that circumstance by the Gipsies, on this occasion, was evidently to throw dust into the eyes of the Scottish authorities, by whom the whole tribe in Scotland were proscribed.—Ed.]
[125] This seems a favourite title among the Tinklers. One, of the name of Young, bears it at the present time. But the Gipsies are not singular in these terrible titles. In the late Burmese war, we find his Burmese majesty creating one of his generals “King of Hell, Prince of Darkness.”—See Constable’s Miscellany.
[126] A friend, in writing me, says: “I still think I see him, (Muckle Wull,) bruising the charred peat over the flame of his furnace, with hands equal to two pair of hands of the modern day; while his withered and hairy shackle-bones were more like the postern joints of a sorrel cart-horse than anything else.”
[127] This Gipsy battle is alluded to by Sir Walter Scott, in a postscript to a letter to Captain Adam Ferguson, 16th April, 1819.
“By the by, old Kennedy the tinker swam for his life at Jedburgh, and was only, by the sophisticated and timed evidence of a seceding doctor, who differed from all his brethren, saved from a well-deserved gibbet. He goes to botanize for fourteen years. Pray tell this to the Duke (of Buccleuch,) for he was an old soldier of the Duke, and the Duke’s old soldier. Six of his brethren were, I am told, in the court, and kith and kin without end. I am sorry so many of the clan are left. The cause of the quarrel with the murdered man, was an old feud between two Gipsy clans, the Kennedys and Irvings, which, about forty years since, gave rise to a desperate quarrel and battle at Hawick-green, in which the grandfather of both Kennedy and the man whom he murdered were engaged.”—Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott. Alexander Kennedy was tried for murdering Irving, at Yarrowford.
[This Gipsy fray at Hawick is known among the English Gipsies as “the Battle of the Bridge.”—Ed.]