The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

His footstool was the solid earth;
His court spread out in pomp before him,
The heath arrayed in summer’s smiles;
His empire broad the British isles;
His dome the heaven’s arched o’er him.

Antique and flowing was his dress;
And from his temples, bold and bare,
Fell back in many a dusky tress,
As liberal as the wilderness,
His ample growth of hair.

Like Cromwell’s was his hardy front,
Where thought but feeling none was shewn;
Where underneath a flitting grace,
Was firmly built up in his face,
A hardness as of stone.

They are not to be confounded with a tribe of wandering potters, who live in tents like them. The true gipsies are readily distinguished by their invariable jet-black hair, black sparkling eyes, Indian complexions, and their genuine oriental language. On the extensive heaths of Surrey, since my residence in that county, I have met with frequent camps of them. In the midland counties, although there is less waste land, they are not unfrequently to be seen. They are there chiefly the Lovell, Boswell, and Kemp gangs. They are great people still for kings and chiefs. Every district has its king. One of these died in the summer of 1835, in their camp in Bestwood Park, in Nottinghamshire; and thousands of people went to see him lie in state. They conveyed his body in a cart to Eastwood, a distance of nine miles, and would fain have stipulated with the clergyman for his interment in the church; not on account of any notion of the sanctity of the place, but for its security. This being refused, they chose a place in the churchyard, for which they paid a handsome sum, and ordered it to be fenced off with iron railings. An old beldame of the tribe said to me, that it was hard that he could not be buried in a church, as most of his ancestors had been before him.

This gang had no less than nine horses, which in the day time grazed in the bare lanes; but if they were not turned into the fields at night, they throve wonderfully on bad commons. The farmers complained dreadfully of their pulling up their hedges for fuel. The whole race seems to have no fear of man; they are troubled with no mauvaise honte. The men seldom condescend to solicit you, but the women are always anxious to lay hold of your money under pretence of telling your fortune; and the moment you approach their encampment, out comes a troop of little impudent, though not insolent, rogues, to beg every thing and any thing they can. The women, many of them, in their youth, are fine strapping figures, with handsome brown faces and most brilliant and speaking eyes,—they have a peculiar poco-curante air and jaunty gait, and are extremely fond of finery. Their costume is unique, and pretty uniform,—scarlet cloaks, black beaver hats with broad slouching brims, or black velvet bonnets with large wide pokes trimmed with lace; a handkerchief thrown over the head under the bonnet, and tied beneath the chin; long pendant ear-rings, black stockings, and ankle-boots. So far from shunning any intercourse or inquiries, they approach you with a ready smile and a style of flattery peculiar to them. “A good day to you, sir; your honour is born to fortune. I see that by the cast of your countenance. It was a right luckly planet that shone on your honour’s birth!” If you know any thing of their language, they are only too glad to talk to you in it. Accost a gipsy with “Shaushan, Palla?” “how do you do, brother?” and you will see the effect.

This singular race of people, of whom Grellman calculates there are not less than 700,000 in Europe, seemed to demand a more comprehensive account in the Rural Life of England, than has hitherto been given in any one work. Many of my readers, I am persuaded, will regard them for their antiquity, the mystery of their origin, the strangeness of their history and life, with deeper feelings than they have hitherto done; and it may be well for such as live in those parts of the country which the gipsies haunt, to ask themselves whether something may not be done by education, and other means, to reclaim those wild denizens of heaths and lanes, or to give them some greater portion of the knowledge and benefits of civilized life. A considerable number have sent their children to schools during the winters in London; and these children, though compared by one of their schoolmasters, at their first entrance, to wild birds suddenly put into a cage, and ready to beat themselves against the bars, having no sense of restraint, soon became not only perfectly orderly, amongst the very first for quickness and avidity in learning, but expressed the utmost regret when obliged to leave at spring. I once saw a woman in a gipsy tent, reading the Bible to a circle of nine children, all her own! and though, on coming near, her blue eyes and light hair shewed her to be an English woman, the daughter, as I found, of a gamekeeper, who had married one of the Boswell gang, yet the interest which the children took in her reading of the Bible, and the interest which she assured me the whole camp took in it, were sufficient evidence that it is only for want of being taught that they still remain in ignorance of the best knowledge. They have been so long treated with contempt and severity, that they naturally look on all men as their enemies. For my part, when I see a horde of them coming on some solitary way, with their dark Indian faces, their scarlet-cloaked women, their troops of little vivacious savages, their asses and horses laden with beds and tents, and, trudging after them, their guardian dogs,—I cannot help looking on them as an Eastern tribe, as fugitives of a most ancient family, as a living enigma in human history—and feeling that, with all their Arab-like propensities, they have great claims on our sympathies, and on the splendid privileges of a christian land.

GIPSIES OF NEW FOREST.

Since the former edition went to press, I have learned that the New Forest has long been a great haunt of gipsies, particularly of one remarkable family—the Stanleys. I hear with pleasure that the Home Missionary Society has likewise taken up the cause of the gipsies in various parts of the country with a good deal of spirit, and a volume has been put into my hands, entitled “The Gipsies’ Advocate.” This is edited by the Rev. James Crabbe, a worthy dissenting minister of Southampton, and has run into a third edition. Mr. Crabbe seems a most earnest and indefatigable apostle of this neglected people. Hoyland’s “Survey of the Gipsies,” together with some painfully interesting circumstances connected with the execution of one of them, turned his attention to their case so early as 1827. He soon fell in with one of the New Forest clan, William Stanley, who, having in his youth been a soldier, had become acquainted with the Bible through attending church, and eventually became so anxious to christianize his gipsy kinsmen, that he went to travel about amongst them, reading the Bible in their tents. Mr. Crabbe soon formed a committee in Southampton for the reclamation of the gipsies, visiting them in their camps, and persuading them to allow their children to be put to school, and to learn trades. He visited the camps in various places, and sought them out, and preached to them at Epsom Races, and in the hop-grounds at Farnham. Stanley served as his messenger and assistant. The committee seems to have met with great success. At the date of the edition which I quote, 1832, there were twenty-three reformed gipsies living in Southampton, and upwards of forty attending divine service there. The gipsies in almost all instances had evinced the most lively sense of the attention shewn them, and a desire to avail themselves of the privileges of learning to read and of hearing preaching. This little volume contains also some interesting accounts of the attempts to civilize the gipsies in Russia and Germany, and particularly of the zealous endeavours of the Countess von Reden of Buchwald in Silesia.

But from the gipsies of the continent we must return to those of the New Forest of England; of whom Miss Bowles, now Mrs. Southey, was kind enough to send me the following curious particulars:—

“The gipsies who mostly frequent this neighbourhood,—or did frequent it, for their visits are now ‘few and far between,’—are Lees and Stanleys; I should have said Stanleys and Lees—for the former tribe hold up their heads very high above the Lees, and call themselves ‘the better sort of travellers.’ Some years ago a party of these Stanleys came from a distant part of the country to attend a wedding at Newport, in the Isle of Wight. They stopped at the turnpike-gate near my house, being on friendly terms with the tollman and his family, who had often done them kind offices, and to the daughter who is now in my service (1838) they entrusted the important office of making up grey silk spencers and smart flowered chintz petticoats for each of the women; encamping in the neighbourhood while the work was in hand, and ‘very particular’ the ladies were about ‘good fits,’ etc. Then they went to the best hatters in the town, and ordered hats on purpose for them—of the long felt, wide-brimmed sort for the women. The tradesmen hesitated about giving credit, as they required, till their return from the island, at which they were highly indignant. ‘What!’ stormed one, whom they called Brother John—‘What! refuse credit to a gentleman ratcatcher!’ But they obtained it, and paid honourably on their return, and as honestly remunerated the sempstress for making their gay dresses.