Quotation from: Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period

Written by: Paul Lacroix


After having forbidden them, with a threat of six years at the galleys, to
sojourn in Spain, Charles V. ordered them to leave Flanders under penalty
of death. In 1545, a gipsy who had infringed the sentence of banishment
was condemned by the Court of Utrecht to be flogged till the blood
appeared, to have his nostrils slit, his hair removed, his beard shaved
off, and to be banished for life. "We can form some idea," says the German
historian Grellman, "of the miserable condition of the gipsies from the
following facts: many of them, and especially the women, have been burned
by their own request, in order to end their miserable state of existence;
and we can give the case of a gipsy who, having been arrested, flogged,
and conducted to the frontier, with the threat that if he reappeared in
the country he would be hanged, resolutely returned after three successive
and similar threats, at three different places, and implored that the
capital sentence might be carried out, in order that he might be released
from a life of such misery. These unfortunate people," continues the
historian, "were not even looked upon as human beings, for, during a
hunting party, consisting of members of a small German court, the huntsmen
had no scruple whatever in killing a gipsy woman who was suckling her
child, just as they would have done any wild beast which came in their
way."

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