Komodromoi

What it was first directed my attention to the Komodromoi of Byzantine writers I cannot be positive, but I am pretty sure it was something somewhere in Pott. Not in any of the 1034 pages of his Zigeuner in Europa and Asien (2 vols.; Halle, 1844-45), for I have once more gone through that stupendous work, but perhaps in a letter, perhaps in a conversation, or perhaps in one of his contributions to the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. Anyhow, I am sure no work hitherto on the Gypsies has cited this extract from Du Cange's Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediæ et Infimæ Græcitatis (Paris, 1688):--

​

'κωμοδρόμοι, interdum κομοδρόμοι, Circulatores, atque adeò Fabri ærarij qui per pagos cursitant: ut hodie passim apud nos, quos Chaudroniers dicimus. Lexicon MS. ad Schedographiam:

Βαβαὶ, θαυμαστικόν ἐστι, Βάναυσος, ὁ χαλκεύς τε,
Καὶ χρυσοχόος, λέγεται, ἀλλὰ καὶ κωμοδρόμος.Glossæ Græcobarb. Ἀκμὼν, σίδηρον ἐφ᾽ ᾧ χαλκεὺς, χαλκεύει, ἤγουν ἀκμόνιν ὁπου κομοδρομεύει ὁ κομοδρόμος. Alibi, Ἀκροφύσια, τὰ ἄκρα τῶν ἀσκῶν, ἐν οἷς οἰ χαλκεῖς τὸ πῦρ ἐκφυσῶσιν· αἱ ἄκραι, ἤγουν ἡ ἄκρες τῶν ἀσκῶν ἤ ἀσκιῶν, μεθ᾽ αἷς ὁποίαις φυσοῦσιν οἱ κομοδρόμοι τὴν φωτίαν. Theophanes, an. 17 Justiniani: τὶς ἐκ τῶν Ἰταλῶν χῶρας κομοδρόμος,--ἔχων μεθ᾽ ἑαυτο̃υ κύνα ξανθὸν καὶ τυφλὸν, etc. Constantinus de Adm. Imp. c. 50, p. 182, καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦ θέματος τῶν Ἀρμενιακῶν εἰς τὸ τοῦ Χαρσιανοῦ θέμα μετέθησαν ταῦτα τὰ βάνδα, ἤτοι ἡ τοῦ κομοδρόμου τοποτηρεσία Ταβίας, καὶ εἰς τὴν τούρμαν τοῦ Χαρσιανοῦ τὴν εἰρημένην προςετέθησαν. Anonymus de Passione Domini:

καί ὅτε φθάσωσιν εἰς τὸυ τόπον, ἐλθὼν ὁ κομοδόμος ἀς σταυρώσει αὐτὸν, etc. Occurrit præterea in Annalib. Glycæ.'

​

Dictionaries are not as a rule lively reading; but every line almost in this extract has its interest. Komodromos, 'village-roamer,' is certainly a vague term, but no vaguer than landlooper, which does in Dutch stand for 'Gypsy,' as landlouper does for 'vagrant' in Lowland Scotch. Du Cange's own definition of komodromoi as roamers (circulatores) and coppersmiths who rove about the country, like those in our midst whom we call Chaudronniers, must have been meant by him to apply to Gypsies, and to Gypsies only. The modern Roumanian and Hungarian Gypsies are divided into certain classes--Caldarari (chaudronniers or caldron-smiths), Aurari (gold-workers), etc.; and Bataillard's note prefixed to most of his monographs runs--'L’auteur recevrait avec reconnaissance toute communication relative aux Bohémiens hongrois voyageant hors de leur pays (vrais nomades pourvus de tentes et de chariots, la plupart chaudronniers).' Next, the six passages quoted by Du Cange show that the komodromos was variously or conjointly a coppersmith (chalkeus) and a gold-worker (chrysochoos, defined by Du Cange as 'aurifer, aurarius'). The Gypsy Aurari have practised gold-washing in Wallachia and Transylvania from time immemorial (Grellmann, Die Zigeuner, 2nd ed. 1787, pp. 105-112); but we have also many indications of the Gypsies as actual goldsmiths. Captain Newbold says that the Persian Gypsies 'sometimes practise the art of the gold and silver smith, and are known to be forgers of the current coin of Persia. These are the zergars (lit. "workers in gold") of the tribe' (Jour. Roy. Asiatic Soc., vol. xvi. 1856, p. 310). The Egyptian Gypsies, he tells us, at Cairo 'carry on the business of tinkers and black-smiths, and vend ear-rings, amulets, bracelets, and instruments of iron and brass' (ib. p. 292). The Gypsy bronze and brass founders of Western Galicia and the Bukowina--the only Gypsy metallurgists of whom, thanks to Kopernicki, we possess really full information--are called Zlotars and Dzvonkars, Ruthenian words meaning 'gold-smiths' and 'bell-makers.' They are no longer workers in gold, but they do make rings, crosses, clasps, ear-rings, etc., of brass and German silver (Bataillard, Les Zlotars, 1878, 70 pages). Henri van Elven, in 'The Gypsies in Belgium' (Gypsy Lore Journal, ii. 139), says: 'The women wear bracelets and large earrings of gold, copper, or bronze, seldom of silver; while all the Gypsies wear earrings. It appears to me that the Gypsy jewels and the metal-work of their pipes have not yet been sufficiently studied. In the fabrication of these objects they

must have preserved something typical and antique, which would contribute to the comparative study of their ancient industries. I remember seeing some rings, cast in bronze, of which the setting was ornamented with a double or a single cross, and whose ornamentation recalled the motifs of the Middle Ages, the style being evidently Oriental. Their walking-sticks are topped with copper or bronze hatchets, but more frequently with round knobs, which are hollow, and which hold their money, the lid being screwed off and on. These Gypsies were tin-workers, repairing metal utensils, and also basket-makers.' The Gypsies, says Dr. R. W. Felkin, 'appear to be on friendly terms with the natives of the country, and curiously enough they are said to have introduced the art of filigree work and gold-beating into Darfûr' ('Central African Gypsies,' Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 221). Even the Brazilian Gypsies of 1816, as we have seen from Koster's Travels, sold gold and silver trinkets.

​

The reference to the anvil and to the bellows of skins with which the komodromoi blew up their furnace recalls the passage cited from Arnold von Harff on p. xx., where, about 1497, he described the anvil and the bellows of the Modone Gypsies. Gypsy bellows are figured in Bataillard's Les Zlotars, in Van Elven's article, and in Die Metalle bei den Naturvölkern of Richard Andree (Leip. 1884, p. 83). Arthur J. Patterson in The Magyars: their Country and Institutions (1869, ii. 198) writes: 'A curious consequence of their practising the art of the smith is that a Gypsy boy is in Hungary called purde, which is generally supposed to be the equivalent in the Gypsy language for "boy." It is really the imperative mood of the verb "to blow," for, while the Gypsy father is handling the hammer and the tongs, he makes his son manage the bellows.' Small points enough these, but they must be viewed in relation to the metallurgical monopoly still largely enjoyed by the Gypsies in south-east Europe and in Asia Minor. So exclusively was the smith's a Gypsy (and therefore a degrading) craft in Montenegro that, when in 1872 the Government established an arsenal at Rieka, no natives could be found to fill its well-paid posts. And in a very long letter of 21st January 1880, the late Mr. Hyde Clarke wrote to me that 'over more than one sanják of the Aidin viceroyalty the Gypsies have still a like monopoly of iron-working; the naalband, or shoeing-smith, being no smith in our sense at all. He is supplied with shoes of various sizes by the Gypsies, and only hammers them on.' It is most unlikely that, if recent comers to the Levant, the Gypsies should have acquired such a monopoly; it is obvious that, if they possessed that monopoly a thousand years ago, these komodromoi must have been Gypsies.

​

For Du Cange's first three quotations I can assign no dates, but Theophanes Isaurus was born in 758 and died in 818; the seventeenth year of Justinian would be 544 A.D.--a very early date at which to find a Gypsy from Italy, 'having with him a blind yellow dog.' The dates of the Emperor Constantinus Porphyrogenitus are 905-959; I own I can make little of this passage from his Liber de administrando Imperio, but thema, bandon, topoteresia, and tourma seem all to be words for administrative divisions.

​

Nails of Crucifixion

Du Cange's last passage is by far the most interesting:--'Anonymus de Passione Domini: "And when they arrive at the place, the komodromos coming to crucify him," etc.' 'Why so interesting? there does not seem much in that,' my readers may exclaim. Why? because there is a widely-spread superstition that a Gypsy forged the nails for the crucifixion, and that henceforth his race has been accursed of heaven. That superstition was first recorded in an article by Dr. B. Bogisic on 'Die slavisirten Zigeuner in Montenegro' (Das Ausland, 25th May 1874); and in Le Folklore de Lesbos, by G. Georgeakis and Léon Pineau (Paris, 1891, pp. 273-8), is this 'Chant du Vendredi Saint,' this plaint of Our Lady:

'Our Lady was in a grotto
And made her prayer.
She hears rolling of thunder,
She sees lightnings,
She hears a great noise.
She goes to the window:
She sees the heaven all black
And the stars veiled:
The bright moon was bathed in blood.
She looks to right, she looks to left:
She perceives St. John;
She sees John coming
In tears and dejection:
He holds a handkerchief spotted with blood.
"Good-day, John. Wherefore
These tears and this dejection?
Has thy Master beaten thee,
Or hast thou lost the Psalter?"
"The Master has not beaten me,
And I have not lost the Psalter.
I have no mouth to tell it thee,
Nor tongue to speak to thee:
And thine heart will be unable to hear me.
These miserable Jews have arrested my Master,
They have arrested him like a thief,
And they are leading him away like a murderer."
Our Lady, when she heard it,
Fell and swooned.
They sprinkle her from a pitcher of water,
From three bottles of musk,
And from four bottles of rose-water,
Until she comes to herself.
When she was come to herself, she says,
"All you who love Christ and adore him,
Come with me to find him,
Before they kill him,
And before they nail him,
And before they put him to death.
Let Martha, Magdalene, and Mary come,
And the mother of the Forerunner."
These words were still on her lips,
Lo! five thousand marching in front,
And four thousand following after.
They take the road, the path of the Jews.
No one went near the Jews except the unhappy mother.
The path led them in front of the door of a nail-maker.
She finds the nail-maker with his children,
The nail-maker with his wife.
"Good-day, workman, what art making there?"
"The Jews have ordered nails of me;
They have ordered four of me;
But I, I am making them five."
"Tell me, tell me, workman,
What they will do with them."
"They will put two nails in his feet,
Two others in his hands;
And the other, the sharpest,
Will pierce his lung."
Our Lady, when she heard it,
Fell and swooned.
They sprinkle her from a pitcher of water
From three bottles of musk,
And from four bottles of rose;
Until she comes to herself.
When she had come to herself, she says:
"Be accursed, O Tziganes!
May there never be a cinder in your forges,
May there never be bread on your bread-pans,
Nor buttons to your shirts!"
They take the road,' etc.

And M. Georgeakis adds in a footnote, The Tziganes whom one sees in the island of Mitylene are all smiths.' It is a far cry from the Greek Archipelago to the Highlands of Scotland, but in th Gypsy Lore Journal (iii. 1892, p. 190), is this brief unsigned note: 'I should be pleased to know if you have the tradition in the South [of Scotland], that the tinkers are descendants of the one who made the nails for the Cross, and are condemned to wander continually without rest.' No answer appeared; and I know of no other hint of the currency of this belief in Western Europe, unless it be the couplet:

'A whistling maid and a crowing hen
Are hateful alike to God and men,'

'because,' according to Lieut.--Col. A. Fergusson (Notes and Queries, August 1879, p. 93), though he gives no authorities, 'a woman stood by and whistled while she watched the nails for the Cross being forged.'

​

On the other hand, the Gypsies of Alsace have a legend of their own, opposed to, and probably devised expressly to refute, the gaújo or Gentile version. How there were two Jew brothers, Schmul and Rom-Schmul. The first of them exulted at the Crucifixion; the other would gladly have saved Our Lord from death, and, finding that impossible, did what he could--pilfered one of the four nails. So it came about that Christ's feet must be placed one over the other, and fastened with a single nail. And Schmul remained a Jew, but Rom-Schmul turned Christian, and was the founder of the Rómani race ('Die Zigeuner in Elsass and in Deutschlothringen,' by Dr. G. Mühl, in Der Salon, 1874). In a letter of 16th December 1880, M. Bataillard wrote: 'An Alsatian Gypsy woman, one of the Reinhart family, has been at me for some time past to procure a remission of sentence for one of her relations who has been in gaol since ad October. "The Manousch" [Gypsies], she urges, "are not bad; they do not murder." And on my answering with a smile that unluckily they are only too prone to take what doesn't belong to them, and that the judges, knowing this, are extra severe towards them, her answer is, "It is true, it's in the blood. Besides, you surely know, you who know all about the Manousch, they have leave to steal once in seven years." "How so?" "It's a story you surely must know. They were just going to crucify Jesus. One of our women passed by, and she whipped up one of the nails they were going to use. She would have liked to steal all four nails, but couldn't. Anyhow, it was always one, and that's why Jesus was crucified with only three nails, a single one for the two feet. And that's why Jesus gave the Manousch leave to steal once every seven years."' The Lithuanian Gypsies say, likewise, that 'stealing has been permitted in their favour by the crucified Jesus, because the Gypsies, being present at the Crucifixion, stole one of the four nails. Hence when the hands had been nailed, there was but one nail left for the feet; and therefore God allowed them to steal, and it is not accounted a sin to them.' ('The Lithuanian Gypsies and their Language,' by Mieczyslaw Dowojno-Sylwestrowicz, in Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 1889, p. 253.)

​

This Gypsy counter-legend offers a possible explanation of the hitherto-unexplained transition from four nails to three in crucifixes during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The change must at first have been hardly less startling than a crucifix now would be in which both hands should be pierced with one nail. Dr. R. Morris discusses it in his Introduction to Legends of the Holy Rood (Early Eng. Text Soc., 1875). There it appears that while St. Gregory Nazianzen, Nonnus, and the author of the Ancren Riwle speak of three nails only, SS. Cyprian, Augustine, and Gregory of Tours, Pope Innocent 555., Rufinus, Theodoret, and Ælfric speak of four; and that the earliest known crucifix with three nails only is a copper one, of probably Byzantine workmanship, dating from the end of the twelfth century. Now, if the Byzantine Gypsies possessed at that date a metallurgical monopoly, this crucifix must of course have been fashioned by Gypsy hands, when the three nails would be an easily intelligible protest against the calumny that those nails were forged by the founder of the Gypsy race.

​

I give the suggestion just for what it is worth; but the occurrence of the legend and the counter-legend in regions so far apart as Lesbos and Scotland, Alsace and Lithuania, strongly argues their antiquity, and corroborates the idea that the komodromos was a Gypsy who figures in 'Anonymus de Passione Domini.' One would like to know the date of that Greek manuscript; but Professor R. Bensly, in a long letter of 28th May 5879, could only conjecturally identify it with 'S. Joannis Theologi Commentarius Apocryphus MS. de J. C.' (? No. 929 or 5005, Colbert Coll. Paris Cat. MSS. 2). Probably there are many allusions to komodromoi in Byzantine writers, if one had leisure and scholarship to hunt them up; certainly it is strange that of Du Cange's six quotations for komodromoi four should seem unmistakably to point to Gypsies. I myself have little doubt of their identity. From which it would follow that more than a thousand years ago south-eastern Europe had its Gypsies, and that not as new-comers, but as recognised strollers, like the Boswells and Stanleys of our old grassy lanes. The verb kōmodromein occurs in Pollux Archæologus (flo. 583 A.D.); and the classic authors present many hints of the possible presence of Gypsies in their midst. Rómani Chals, or Gypsies, would often fit admirably for Chaldæi; and the fact that the water-wagtail is the 'Gypsy bird' of both German and English Gypsies reminds one that the Greeks had a saying, as old at least as the fifth century B.C., 'Poorer than a kinklos' (κίγκλος = water-wagtail), and that peasants in the third century A.D. called homeless wanderers kinkloi. One need not, with Erasmus and Pierius, derive Cingarus (Zingaro, Tchinghiané, Zigeuner, etc.) from kinklos; the words in all likelihood were as distinct originally as Gypsies (Egyptians) and vipseys or gipseys (eruptions of water in the East Riding of Yorkshire; cf. William of Newburgh's twelfth century Chronicle). But the Gypsies may have been led, by the resemblance of its name to theirs, to adopt the water-wagtail as their bird; and Theognis and Menander may have applied to the water-wagtail the epithets 'much-wandering' and 'poor,' because the bird was associated in their minds with some poor wandering race.

​

I do not build on this guesswork, as neither even on the ingenious theories of M. Bataillard, according to which prehistoric Europe gained from the Gypsies its knowledge of metallurgy, and which may be studied in his L’Ancienneté des Tsiganes (1877) and other monographs, or in my summaries of them in the articles 'Gipsies' (Encycl. Britannica, vol. x. 1879, p. 658), and 'Gypsies' (Chambers's Encycl., vol. v. 5890, p. 487). All that I hold for certain is our absolute uncertainty at present whether Gypsies first set foot in Europe a thousand years after or a thousand years before the Christian era. We have no certitude even for western Europe. In 1866 a large band of English ball-giving Gypsies paid a visit to Edinburgh; Scottish newspapers of that date wrote as though Gypsies had never till then been seen to the north of the Border. That was ridiculous: a similar mistake may have been made by the German, Swiss, Italian, and French chroniclers of 1417-34. As it is, M. Bataillard has established the presence, before 1400, of 'foreigners called Bemische' in the bishopric of Würzburg, who may have been Gypsies, as almost indubitably were certain Bemische at Frankfort-on-Main in 1495 (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 207-50).

​

Then 'A Charter of Edward III. confirming the Privileges of St. Giles' Fair, Winchester, A.D. 1349 (ed. by Dean Kitchin, 1886), contains this passage:--'And the Justiciaries and the Treasurer of the Bishop of Wolvesey for the time being, and the Clerk of the Pleas, shall yearly receive four basons and ewers, by way of fee (as they have received them of old time) from those traders from foreign parts, called Dynamitters, who sell brazen vessels in the fair.' On which passage Dean Kitchin has this note: 'These foreigners were sellers, we are told, of brazen vessels of all kinds. The word may be connected with Dinant near Namur, where there was a great manufacture of Dinanderie, i.e. metal-work (chiefly in copper). A friend suggests Dinant-batteurs as the origin. Batteur was the proper title of these workers in metal. See Commines, II. i., 'une marchandise de ces œuvres de cuivre, qu’on appelle Dinanderie, qui sont en effet pots et pesles."'

​

Gypsy Language

It is a relief to turn from the thousand and one appellations under which Gypsies have been known at different times and in different countries, to the sure and unerring light that their language throws on their history. Though never a chronicler or traveller had written, we yet could feel confident from Rómani that the forefathers of our English Gypsies must for a long period have sojourned in a Greek-speaking country. Among the Greek loan-words in the Anglo-Rómani dialect are drom, road, (δρόμος), chírus, time (καιρός), éfta, seven (ἑπτά), énnea, nine (ἐννέα), fóros, market-town (φόρος), fílisin, mansion (φυλακτήριον), kekávi, kettle (κακκάβη), kókalo, bone (κόκαλον), kóli, anger (χολή), kúriki, Sunday (κυριακή), misáli, table (μενσάλι), óchto, eight (ὀκτώ), pápin, goose (πάππια), pápus, grandfather (πάππος), sápin, soap (σαποῦνι), shámba, frog (ζάμπα), síma, to pawn (σημάδι), skámin, chair (σκαμνί), soliváris, reins (σολιβάρι), stádi, hat (σκιάδι), wagóra, fair (ἀγορά), wálin, bottle (ὑαλί), and zímin, soup (ζουμί). The total number of Greek loan-words in the different Gypsy dialects may be about one hundred; and the same loan-words occur in dialects as widely separate as those of Roumania, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, the Basque Country, Spain, and Brazil. This is important as indicating that the modern Gypsies of Europe are descended not from successive waves of Oriental immigration, but all from the self-same European-Gypsy stock, whenever that stock may have first been transplanted to Europe. It conclusively negatives the Kounavine theory that the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, and French Gypsies arrived at their present habitats by way of Africa, and the Scandinavian Gypsies by way of the Ural Mountains.

​

Slavonic loan-words come next to the Greek: English Rómani has some thirty of the former, against fifty of the latter. There are also a few words of Persian, Armenian, Roumanian, Magyar, and German origin; but the question of the presence or the absence of Arabic words in European Rómani is hardly yet determined. According to Professor De Goeje (1875; trans. in MacRitchie's Gypsies of India, 1886, pp. 54-5), there are at least ten such words; according to Miklosich (Ueber die Mundarten, etc., part vi. 1876, pp. 63-64), there are none. Kótor, a piece, for instance, by De Goeje is derived from the Arabic kot’a, by Miklosich from the Armenian kotor. Neither, however, of the two scholars seems to have recognised the possible importance of the presence or the absence (especially the absence) of Arabic elements. Rómani contains Persian words, e.g. ambról, a pear; would it not have certainly contained also Arabic words if the ancestors of our modern European Gypsies had sojourned in Persia, or even passed through Persia, at a date later than the Arab conquest of Persia? If Miklosich is right in his contention that there are no Arabic words in European Rómani, it follows almost inevitably that the Gypsies must have passed through Persia on their way to Europe at some date prior to the middle of the seventh century A.D.

​

Important as are the borrowings of Rómani for helping us to trace the Gypsies' wanderings, they can barely amount to a twentieth of the total vocabulary (five thousand words rich, perhaps). The words of that vocabulary for 'water' and 'knife' are in Persia páni, cheri (1823); in Siberia, panji, tschuri (1878); in Armenia, pani, churi (1864); in Egypt, páni, chúri (1856); in Norway, pani, tjuri (1858); in England pani, churi (1830); in, probably, Belgium,

panin, chouri (1597); in Brazil, panin, churin (1886)--where spelling and dates are those of the works whence these words have been taken. Over and above the identity in every Rómani dialect of these two selected words--and there are hundreds more like them--they are also identical with the Hindustani pani and churl, familiar to all Anglo-Indians. And to cite but a few more instances, 'nose,' 'hair,' 'eye,' 'ear' are in Turkish Rómani nak, bal, akh, kann; in Hindustani, nak, bal, akh, kan: whilst 'Go, see who knocks at the door' in the one language is Jâ, dik kon chalavéla o vudár, and in the other Jâ, dekh kon chaláya dvár ko. This discovery was not made till long after specimens of Rómani had been published--by Andrew Boorde (1542), whose twenty-six words, jotted down seemingly in a Sussex alehouse, were intended to illustrate the 'speche of Egipt'; by Bonaventura Vulcanius (1597), whose vocabulary of seventy-one words, collected apparently in Belgium, fills up some blank pages in a Latin work on the Goths; and by Ludolphus (1691), whose thirty-eight words are embedded in his huge Commentarius ad Historian Æthiopicam. In 1777 Rüdiger first compared with Hindustani some specimens of Rómani got from a Gypsy woman at Halle, and in 1782 he published the result of the comparison in his Neuester Zuwachs der Sprachkunde. In 1783 Grellmann's Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner reaped all the fruits of Rüdiger's research; and William Marsden the same year was independently led to a like discovery (Archæologia, 1785, pp. 382-6). Grellmann, whose work has still a high value, leapt naturally enough to the conclusion that the Gypsies who showed themselves in western Europe in 1417 had, newly come also to south-eastern Europe, and were a low-caste Indian tribe expelled from their native country about 1409 by Tamerlane. In 1783 the older languages of India were a sealed book to Europeans; and Grellmann's opinion found almost universal approval for upwards of sixty years. Now, however, thanks to the linguistic labours of Pott, Ascoli, and Miklosich, combined with the historical researches of Bataillard and Hopf, the question has assumed a new aspect. For while on the one hand it has been demonstrated that south-east Europe had its Gypsies long before 1417, so on the other Rómani has been shown to be a sister, not a daughter--and it may be an elder sister--of the seven principal New Indian dialects. Not a few of its forms are more primitive than theirs, or even than those of Pali and the Prakrits--e.g. the Turkish Rómani vast, hand (Sansk. hasta, Pali hattha), and vusht, lip (Sansk. ostha, Pali ottha). In his Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Zigeunermundarten (iv. 1878, pages 45-54) Miklosich collected a number of such forms; but Miklosich it was who also pointed out there that many of the seeming archaisms of Rómani may be matched from the less-known dialects of India, especially north-west India--that we find, for example, in Dardu both hast and usht. I have not the faintest notion what was Professor Sayce's authority for his statement that 'the grammar and dictionary of the Romany prove that they started from their kindred, the Jats, on the north-western coast of India, near the mouth of the Indus, not earlier than the tenth century of the Christian era' (The Science of Language, ii. 325). So far as I know, the only attempted comparison between Rómani and Játáki was made by myself ('Gipsies,' Enc. Brit., x. 618); and its results seemed wholly unfavourable to the Jat theory of the Gypsies' origin.

​

Gypsies as Nomads

No; language, like history, has yielded important results, but on many points we still have almost everything to learn. We do not know within a thousand years when the Gypsies left India, or when they arrived in Persia, Armenia, Africa, Asia Minor, and South-eastern Europe. But we do know that India was their original home, that they must have sojourned long in a Greek-speaking region, and that in western and northern Europe their present dispersion dates mainly if not entirely from after the year 1417. These three facts will have to be borne in mind for understanding what follows; a fourth fact is that a portion, if a small portion, of the Gypsy race is still intensely nomadic. Nothing is commoner than for the English Gypsies of our novels and plays to speak familiarly of 'sunny Spain'; those of a little anonymous story, The Gipsies (1842), go backwards and forwards to Norway. But as a rule English Gypsies never stir out of Great Britain, or, if they do leave it, leave it only for another English-speaking country--Canada, the United States, or New Zealand. 1 So far, too, as we know, our present Gypsies are all descendants of early Gypsy immigrants; their surnames--Lee, Faa, Baillie, Stanley, Gray, Smith, Heron, Boswell, etc.--date back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And our sole hint, until a quite recent date, as to visits to England by Continental Gypsies is a Bartholomew Fair handbill of 1689 about some German Gypsies, rope-dancers.

​

Mutatis mutandis, the same seems to hold good of the Gypsies of Germany, Poland, Norway, etc.; they are apparently the descendants of early immigrants into those different countries.

​

Caldarari

But the case is quite otherwise with the Caldarari, or coppersmiths, of Hungary, for they will wander forth north, south, east, west, and sometimes stay away a whole seven years. Myself I have met with Caldarari but once, at Halle, in 1875; I described that brief meeting thus in my Gypsy Tents (1880, pp. 43-44):--

​

'I had been paying my first call to Professor Pott, who had told me that only once had he spoken with living Gypsies, somewhere near London. So I asked him did they never come to Halle, and he answered, No; and presently I came away. I was not two hundred yards from his doorstep, when I saw a curious sort of skeleton waggon, drawn. by two little horses, with their forelegs shackled together. On the top of this waggon sat a woman smoking a big black pipe; and round it three or four children were playing, stark-naked. The waggon was standing outside an inn; and entering the inn, I found two Gypsy men seated at the table, eating soup and drinking beer. I greeted them with "Látcho dívvus" (Good-day), and they seemed not the least bit surprised, for these were travelled gentlemen. Three years they had been away from Hungary, in France and Germany; and they could both speak French and German fluently. We talked of many things, and compared, I remember, passports: mine they pronounced an exceeding shúkar lil (fine document), the lion and unicorn seeming to take their fancy. Every place they came to, they had to go first thing to the head policeman and show their passes, and then he told them where they were to stop. They were allowed three days in every place, and no one could meddle with them all that time. . . . The women came in, two of them, and some of the children. There was one, a little fellow of nine or ten, as brown and pretty a thing as ever I saw, but wild as a fox-cub. His father gave him a plate of soup to finish, and he lapped it up just as a fox-cub would, looking out at me now and again from behind his mother. Then they paid their reckoning, the women climbed up on the waggon, the children shouted, and the men cracked their whips. "God go with thee, brother"; and so we parted.'

​

There is not much in that, but one cannot learn much in half an hour's chance interview. Nor, indeed, is there very much in all the scattered notes that I have been able thus far to collect respecting the Caldarari; some of those notes relate to them only conjecturally. Du Cange's definition of komodromoi proves that coppersmiths roamed through France in 1688; and it is at least highly probable that to this caste belonged the band of forty Gypsies with whom, in the spring of 1604, Jacques Callot, a boy of twelve, wandered from Nancy to Florence. Of the journey itself we know nothing, but he has left an imperishable record of it in his three matchless engravings of the 'Bohémiens,' which show them on the march, in their bivouac, and spoiling the Gentiles. Charles Reade worked a clever description of Callot's engravings into his Cloister and the Hearth, and they were admirably reproduced in the Gypsy Lore Journal for January 1890, with a long article on them by Mr. David MacRitchie.

​

In his Travels (1763, ü. 157-8), under the date 1721, John Bell of Antermony has the following passage:--'During our stay at Tobolsky, I was informed, that a large troop of gipsies had been lately at that place, to the number of sixty and upwards, consisting of men, women, and children. The Russians call these vagabonds tziggany. Their sorry baggage was carried on horses and asses. The arrival of so many strangers being reported to Mr. Petroff Solovoy, the vice-governor, he sent for some of the chief of the gang, and demanded whither they were going? they answered him, to China; upon which he told them he could not permit them to proceed any farther eastward, as they had no passport; and ordered them to return to the place whence they came. It seems these people had roamed, in small parties, during the summer season, cross the vast countries between Poland and this place; subsisting themselves on what they could find, and on selling trinkets, and telling fortunes to the country people. But Tobolsky, being the place of rendezvous, was the end of their long journey eastwards; and they, with no small regret, were obliged to turn their faces to the west again.' I fancy these Gypsies also must have been Caldarari. But whether they were or no, the passage remains one of the most curious that we have relating to Gypsy migrations. Taken in its most limited sense, it shows that the band had wandered in small detachments from Poland to Tobolsk, a distance of two thousand miles or upwards. But it suggests a great deal more than this. There seems no reason to question the statement that China was really the ultimate goal of their wanderings. If so, it is probable that they were following in the track of former migrations, that Gypsies had been in the habit of passing backwards and forwards between Europe and China, which opens up a vista of a possible connection between the West and the farthest East undreamed of by all our geographers. But without further evidence this must be mere conjecture. Of Gypsies in China I know nothing whatever, except that a Russian noble, Prince Galitzin, whom I met three years since in Edinburgh; assured me he had seen a number of them there. Physique, outward appearance, seemed his only test; and his statement, though interesting, needs corroboration.

​

The Weserzeitung of 25th April 1851 announced that one hundred Gypsies had passed through Frankfort, on their way from Hungary to Algeria; and in the Revue de l’Orient for 29th January 1889 Madame Marlet thus described her meeting with a Hungarian Gypsy in North Africa:--'I shall ever remember a scene which I witnessed in Africa. It was one evening at the base of the superb mountains of Mustapha Supérieur, just as the setting sun flooded the plain with his last rays of golden and crimson light--the gold and purple of the incomparable majesty of the Eastern sky. I observed a caravan of nomads encamped in the plain beneath their tents. I drew near, and saw that they were Gypsies, but Gypsies who had dwelt under other skies. Some were Spanish Gitanos, with garments of many hues, their shears hanging by their sides, at the end of a silvered chain wound around their blades; the others came from Morocco, and wore the simple white attire of the Children of the Desert. They received me with indifference. By means of my knowledge of Italian I managed at length to make the Gitanos understand that I came from Hungary. They were at once alive with interest. "Hungaria!" I heard them whisper into one another's ears; and finally an old Gypsy man informed me, "There is one of us who comes straight from that very country." They ran all at once to seek him out. But the young Gypsy--a superb, swarthy figure--quite unmoved, maintained a proud and gloomy silence. Did he suspect me of untruth in telling him that I knew that Hungary, so far away beyond the wide stretch of sea? He may have thought so. However, I saw that the old Gitano had told the truth. The dress of the young nomad was entirely Hungarian, from his shining boots up to his little Magyar calpate. His attire generally was rather rich than poor. Had I conversed with him in Hungarian, perhaps his heart would have softened. But he remained thus, sombre and mistrustful, and only the Gitanos, who, in their fantastic rags, stood around us, repeated vivaciously in Spanish, as they pointed towards him, "Patria Hungaria!"'

​

Ciboure

Ciboure, a suburb of St. Jean de Luz, is a sort of Basque Yetholm. Like Yetholm it has largely lost its Gypsy character. Its 'Cascarrotac' are supposed to be the descendants of Gypsies who came from Spain two centuries ago, but they are now quite mixed up with the Basques of the neighbourhood, and have lost the last remnants of Rómani, though at the beginning of the century they retained a few words, as debla, the sun, mambrun, bread, and puro, old man. But Ciboure is still a regular halting-place of Hungarian Gypsies, as appears from this passage in a very valuable article on 'The Cascarrots of Ciboure,' by the Rev. Wentworth Webster (Gypsy Lore Journal, October 1888, pp. 76-84):--'My own observations are that the passage of the Hungarian Gypsies, or Gypsies from Eastern Europe, alluded to in 1868 and 1874 by the former mayor of Ciboure, M. Darramboure, is a recurring fact every two or three years. I left St. Jean de Luz in 1881, but for some time before that I had been ill, and a band may easily have passed without my being aware of it; but there were at least two other bands between 1870 and 1880--one, I believe, in 1872. 1 Their route seems to be, as far as I have been able to trace it, viâ Paris, Bordeaux, Bayonne, St. Jean de Luz, Hendaye, through Spain quite to the south, and returning by the eastern extremity of the Pyrenees, by Barcelona and Perpignan. M. de Rochas appears to have met one of these bands at Perpignan in July 1875 (Les Parias de France et d’Espagne, by V. de Rochas; Hachette, Paris, 1876, p. 259). These bands follow always the same route, and encamp on the same spots. When at St. Jean de Luz they make an apparently useless visit to Ascain, a village about five miles off their road, returning to St. Jean de Luz. They are evidently well-off, with good carts, wagons, horses, and utensils; many of them wear silver ear-rings and ornaments. Their trade, mending the copper vessels in the neighbourhood, seems to me to be a mere pretence; it cannot pay the expenses of the journey. What is the reason of this migration? Once I was standing with a Basque fisherman, watching their arrival, when the chief of the band addressed him in Basque, and the conversation went on between them in that language. When it had ceased, I asked the fisherman, whom I knew well, how the man spoke Basque. The reply was curt:--"He speaks it as well as I do." Afterwards I tried to draw out the Gypsy, but he evaded my questions. "We pick up languages along the road. I was never in the neighbourhood before," etc. These I believe to have been falsehoods. I must, however, add, that I have known Basque scholars learn Magyar, and Hungarians Basque, with unusual facility. Still the question remains: What is the object of these journeys?--a question for your Society to answer.'

​

Alas! the Gypsy Lore Society is dead; after four years' most excellent work it died of want of support in 1892. And that question remains still unanswered. In the passage itself, however, there is a good deal to be noticed. Ciboure at present has little or nothing to draw foreign Gypsies to it; but a hundred, two hundred years ago, it was probably a genuine Gypsy quarter: then there would be every reason why Caldarari should make it a regular halting-place. This conjecture, if valid, suggests the antiquity of these strange peregrinations; and Gypsies assuredly are the very staunchest conservatives. Another guess is that at Ascain Gypsies very likely are buried; that would fully account for their descendants turning aside thus. Mr. Webster's remark as to the ease with which Basque scholars acquire Magyar, and Hungarians Basque, was well worth making; still the fact remains--and it is an important one for our theory--that the unlettered Gypsies as a race are marvellous linguists. The immigrants of 1417-34 must, to tell fortunes as they did, have been able to speak German, French, and Italian; and I could, if necessary, adduce many testimonies as to the Gypsies' faculty for picking up foreign languages. I have myself known an English Gypsy family remove (for family reasons) into Wales, and in three years' time become thoroughly Cymricised.

​

M. Paul Bataillard was for years collecting materials about the Caldarari, but

he died without publishing his promised monograph on the subject, so we must content ourselves with these stray notes from his writings:--'The Gypsy Caldarari (as they are called in the districts of Roumania where they are accustomed to journey), have recommenced in our own days, throughout the whole of the west, circuits which have led them sometimes as far as England, as far as Norway, and sometimes, by way of France and Spain, as far as Corsica and Algeria. France was during a certain time "infested" by them, to quote the newspapers of the day, whilst I was rejoicing in the good luck which had thrown them in my way. . . . These exotic Gypsy blacksmiths generally return to the country whence they came. . . . They travel sometimes in rather large numbers in waggons which have no resemblance to the houses upon wheels of our Gypsies; and wherever they stop they set up large tents, where each waggon finds its place. The men have generally long hair, and clothes more or less foreign, often ornamented with very large silver buttons; and the chiefs carry a large stick with a silver head. It is easy to recognise them at a glance by these signs, and by their trade. . . . The journeys of these Gypsy blacksmiths had already been noticed in Germany and Italy  long before 1866. On

the other hand, the edict of Ferdinand and Isabella, published at Medina del Campo in 1499, mentions the "Calderos estrangeros," who might well be Gypsies ("Immigration of the Gypsies into Western Europe," Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 202-3). . . . The Caldarari, if I am rightly informed, form a corporation, strictly organised, and having its hierarchical chiefs, They always travel in groups, commanded by chiefs of different degrees; and the work is done always in common. They even say it is the head chief who procures at Temesvar all the copper used by the corporation, and supplies the wandering bands with it. . . . There was certainly an intermission in the circular journeys pushed as far as France and farther, since I know of none that date from earlier than 1866; but they may have gone back to a long way beyond that date; and, as a matter of fact, before 1866 the Caldarari made excursions in Germany and Italy' (Les Zlotars, p. 549). . . . 'A fact still stranger is that Algeria has recently received a visit from Hungarian Gypsies, forming part of the numerous bands of Danubian Tsigans (for the most part chaudronniers), who, for some years (especially since 1866) have been traversing the West. I know for a fact that at Algiers a band of twenty to twenty-five persons was seen towards the middle of 1871, and that the same persons, or others like them, reappeared six months later. I have myself seen at Paris Hungarian Gypsies who had a vague idea of visiting Algeria' (Les Bohémiens en Algerie, 1874, p. 3, note). Cf. also his L’origine des Tsiganes, pp. 54-58.

​

In an article on the Lithuanian Gypsies (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 252) M. Mieczyslaw Dowojno-Sylwestrowicz says: 'Sometimes we are visited also by Hungarian, Servian, and Roumanian Gypsies. These last consider themselves to belong to the Orthodox (i.e. the Russian) Church. They are mostly tinkers, repairing copper cooking utensils; but of these they are very apt to steal the copper bottoms, substituting an imitation of papier-mâché. They differ greatly from our own Gypsies, whom they excel in an incredible amount of obtrusiveness; moreover, they attack and rob wayfarers, and when asked what they are, they say, "We are not Gypsies, sir, we are Magyars."'

​

In an article, already quoted, on the Gypsies of Belgium (ib. 138) Professor Henri van Elven writes of the Caldarari:--'They usually travelled in little two-wheeled carts covered over with tilts of grey cloth, and containing straw, baggage, and tinworkers' tools. They have a great love for their horses, who are far from being in the miserable condition of horses of wandering mountebanks. I have seen the children share their bread with the horses. They buy and sell--sometimes steal--their horses. They have also dogs, large and well set-up. Their clothes are -for the most part of Hungarian style, but also often like ours notably, of gaudy colours, red and blue. All have long, black, curly hair, well furnished with inhabitants, which renders scratching a habit.  The complexion is swarthy; the features are fine and strongly accentuated, both among the men and the women. The nose is fairly long, and aquiline; the teeth are yellow, through the use of tobacco in all forms among women as well as men, unless in the case of some young girls. . . . These Gypsies were tin-workers, repairing metal utensils, and also basket-makers. The women went from door to door, asking work and begging. The women and children usually go barefoot and bare-headed, even in bad weather, displaying an astonishing endurance. We have not observed any smelters among the Gypsies, but many exhibitors of animals, jugglers, and female fortune-tellers. With regard to the young girls given over to vice, they are better attired, wearing clothes of the Italian and Hungarian modes of bright colours. They go about in the evening especially, looking about them, or carrying playing-cards, or again with small articles of basket-work for sale.'

​

In 1879 Sir Henry Howorth encountered in Sweden fez-wearing Gypsies, natives presumably of the Balkan peninsula; and in July 1881 a band of Gypsy blacksmiths from Corfu landed in Corsica, after having travelled over Italy (Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 204, note). Late in the sixties a company of Caldarari visited England, and en-camped at several points round London. I know no mention of this visit in print, and I never met them myself, but I have talked with English Gypsies who did, and who were full of their little horses, their big copper vessels, and curious Rómani. Some of the Taylors on Rushmere Heath in 1873 told me these foreign Gypsies came from the Langári country, and were called Langarians.'