A History of the Gipsies: with Specimens of the Gipsy LanguageSimson, Walter
History
A History of the Gipsies: with Specimens of the Gipsy Language
Simson, Walter
Romanies; Romanies -- Languages
On the bodies being taken down from the scaffold, an attempt was made to
restore them to life, by opening a vein, but without effect. It is said
they were buried in the moor near Linlithgow, by the Gipsies, and that
the magistrates of the town ordered them to be taken up, and interred in
the east end of the church-yard of Linlithgow. However that may be, the
bodies were buried in the church-yard of Linlithgow; but the populace,
delivered from the terror with which these daring Gipsies inspired them,
treated with ignominy the remains of those whom they dared scarcely look
in the face when alive. They dug them out of the place of Christian
sepulture, and interred them in a solitary field in the neighbourhood. A
clump of trees, I believe, marks the spot, and the gloomy pine now
waves, in the winds of heaven, over the silent and peaceful graves of
the restless and lawless Gipsies.
McDonald, it would appear, was married, first of all, to a daughter of a
Gipsy of the name of Eppie Lundie, with whom he lived unhappy, and was
divorced from her over a horse sacrificed for the occasion, a ceremony
which I will describe in another chapter.[94] He was more fortunate in
his second matrimonial alliance, for, in Ann Jamieson, he found a wife
after his own heart in every way. Previous to his own execution, she had
witnessed the violent deaths of at least six of her own nearest
relatives. But, if anything could have influenced, in the slightest
degree, a reformation in her own character, it would have been the
melancholy scene attending his miserable end; yet, we find it had not
the slightest effect upon her after career, for she continued, to the
last, to follow the practices of her race, as an anecdote told of her
will show.
[94] This Eppie Lundie lived to the advanced age of a hundred years,
and was a terror wherever she travelled. Without the least hesitation
or scruple, she frequently stripped defenceless individuals of their
wearing apparel, leaving them sometimes naked in the open fields.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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