THE DESTINY OF THE ENGLISH GIPSIES. 



Mr. Borrow does not venture to 

 tell us who these Irish Hindity-men- 

 gre are, but he says : 



" The Chorodies are the legitimate 

 [why the legitimate ?~\ descendants of 

 the rogues and outcasts who roamed 

 about England long [how long ?] before 

 its soil was trodden by a Gipsy foot " (p. 

 267) ; and that \ho.Kora-inengre " seem 

 to be of much the same origin as the 

 Chorodies " (p. 268). 



It would be interesting to know 

 why he so arbitrarily pitched upon 

 their descent from people having an 

 existence long before the Gipsies en- 

 tered the country. He describes 

 them as 



" Strange, wild guests .... who, 

 without being Gipsies, have much of 

 Gipsyism in their habits, and who far 

 exceed the Gipsies in number " (p. 266) ; 

 " Gipsies, or gentry whose habits very 

 much resemble those of Gipsies " (p. 

 278) ; and "vagrant people, less of Gip- 

 sies than those who call themselves trav- 

 ellers [the cant phrase for Gipsies in- 

 cog.], and are denominated by the Gip- 

 sies Chorodies" (p. 280). 



Here we have nothing but asser- 

 tion, or rather mere supposition, 

 and no trace of any investigation 

 into the subject. As for English 

 mixed Gipsies, whether settled or 

 itinerant, he says nothing about them, 

 as if they had no existence. He 

 indeed incidentally alludes to two 

 mixed marriages, that of the parents 

 of Thomas Herne the father being 

 a Gipsy, and the mother a " Gen- 

 tile of Oxford" (p. 157); and one 

 of the Hernes married to at least a 

 so-called " thorough-bred English- 

 man," whose " caravan, a rather 

 stately affair, is splendidly furnished 

 within" (p. 282). Nor does he ac- 

 count for the people mentioned liv- 

 ing so exactly like Gipsies, and as 

 being outwardly Gipsies in every- 

 thing but their physical appearance. 



We have seen that Mr. Borrow 

 expressed his inability to account 

 for what became of the Spanish Gip- 

 sies, when he alluded to the subject 

 in the Gipsies in Spain, published in 



1841. In the present work he re- 

 fers to the same aspect of the ques- 

 tion as it applies to the race in Eng- 

 land. Thus he says : 



" The Gipsies call each other brother 

 and sister, and are not in the habit of 

 admitting to their fellowship people of 

 a different blood, and with whom they 

 have no sympathy" (p. 214). "The 

 highly exclusive race of the Gipsies" 

 (p. 216). " They have a double nomen- 

 clature, each tribe or family having a 

 public and a private name ; one by which 

 they are known to the Gentiles, and an- 

 other to themselves alone " (p. 225). 



And yet he says of this very pecu- 

 liar and exclusive people so self- 

 contained and so prolific in their 

 nature, and so separated from the 

 rest of the population by such a 

 strong prejudice of caste as exists 

 against them that, by the mere 

 change of life, brought about by the 

 rural police preventing them camp- 

 ing out, and following the original 

 Gipsy habits, " there is every reason 

 to suppose that within a few years 

 the English Gipsy caste will have 

 disappeared, merged in the dregs 

 of the English population " (p. 

 222). In point of fact, they can- 

 not avoid being Gipsies, settled or un- 

 settled, honest or dishonest, and will 

 " merge " part of the common Eng- 

 lish blood among them, as the tribe in 

 the British Islands and Western Eu- 

 rope have to a very great extent 

 done already, as illustrated by what 

 Mr. Borrow himself found at Yet- 

 holm. " Gipsyism is declining, and 

 its days are numbered" (p. 220). 

 He said that more than thirty years 

 ago. As for the Gipsies "declin- 

 ing," " becoming extinct," or " ceas- 

 ing to be Gipsies," by a change of 

 habits, there is as much discrimina- 

 tion and reason in the assertion or 

 supposition, as would be implied in 

 the opinion of the farmers' chick- 

 ens, that there are few or no Gipsies 

 in the country for the reason that 

 the hen-roosts have not been trou- 

 bled as of old. 



" True Gipsyism consists in wan- 



