faith they abused, whose purses they lightened, whose barns they emptied, and on whose credulity they lived in ease and comfort' (MacRitchie). We have many cases of pogroms and of judicial murders: from c. 1500 onwards many countries found it advisable to pronounce sentence of exile against the Egyptians, in Scotland under pain of death (which was actually inflicted on four 'Faas' in 1611). At Haddington in 1636 men were hanged and women drowned, and women with children were only whipped through the borough and burnt in the cheeks—a curious parallel to the tatuing reported by Friar Simeon from Alexandria. Weissenbruch (Ausführliche Relation von der Zigeuner-Diebes-Mord, Frankfort and Leipzig 1727) tells a horrible story of wholesale murder, five being broken on the wheel, nine hung, and eleven beheaded (1726). Thirty years before the Inquisition had caught four gipsies suspected of cannibalism; they owned to have eaten a friar and a pilgrim as well as a woman of their own tribe (1686 in Estremadura). As late as 1782 forty-five Hungarian gipsies were charged with murder, and when the bodies could not be found, confessed candidly 'we ate them.' Joseph H., author of the first favourable imperial edict since Sigismund's charter 350 years before, inquired into the matter, and found that the confession extorted from the victims was worthless and no murder had been committed at all.
Treatment in Rumania; still vendible Serfs.
14. Only in Rumania (perhaps their original home?) was their treatment exceptional from the first.[1] They fell into two classes, robi, i.e. serfs ascript to the glebe, and
- ↑ In M. Caster's view their long and peaceful sojourn there was a happy episode in 'long-drawn agony of suspicion and hatred' (Rum. Bird and Beast Stories, Lond. 1915). But gipsies were not the colporteurs or purveyors of popular tales; in his view they are 'unlikely carriers of folk-tales.'
