About a century ago a number of gipsies were brought before the magistrates at Northampton; upon what charge has not been stated. This so enraged the gipsies upon Boughton Green and other parts of Northamptonshire, that they threatened to set fire to the town of Northampton. The end of it was that several of the gipsies, for their riotous conduct, forfeited their lives upon the gallows. See “Gipsy Life,” p. 154.
To come back to Boughton Green fair. After having wandered about “Spectacle Lane” I called upon a gentleman, Mr. Jeys, who has resided for many years close to the green, and he told me that he has seen as many as forty to fifty tents and vans of gipsies camping in the lanes near to his house. It was down this lane that small-pox raged among the gipsies. Righteous Smith, with his two wives, Constant and Comfort, and a number of their twenty children, died of small-pox. Births, deaths, and murders have taken place upon the green. How many nobody knows, nor can any idea be formed of the number. Mr. Jeys told me of one case, being a gipsy row, ending in murder. Who had done it no one could tell, and where the gipsy was buried was a mystery. They hunted and searched, but, like the body of the Earl of Crauford and Balcarres, it could not be found, until Mr. Jeys’ gardener came across it in the garden. When the body of the gipsy was found it was laid straight out between two flag stones reared edgewise, and a large flagstone as a covering. The arms were folded, and upon the breast of the gipsy there was a pair of scissors, which had been carefully placed there by those who had buried the gipsy in the dark; for what purpose I cannot make out. Gipsies have queer notions about the death and burial of those belonging to them. The old-fashioned gipsies of bygone days, more than they do now, paid special regard to the dead, and on this account they carried the dead body of the gipsy nearly half a mile to bury it in a gentleman’s garden. The murdered gipsy in his lifetime was, no doubt, a scissor-grinder, and the placing of the scissors upon his breast was to remind them when he got to the other country of what trade the gipsy was—_i.e._, if skulking about the country with an old barrow grinding a few knives and scissors can be called a trade.