re they distributed themselves, and were
considered as very malevolent, because it was reported of them that
they reconnoitred the country probably for an enemy. They had in fact
become a great plague throughout the country, and the law thundered
against them with characteristic recklessness. Orders were issued
everywhere for their banishment; they were considered as spies of the
Turks, and as magicians, and were made outlaws; even after the year
1700, in a small Rhenish principality, a gipsy woman and her child were
brought in amongst other wild game which had been slain. A band again
broke into Thuringia in the eighteenth century, and a law in 1722
declared all the men outlawed. In Prussia, in 1710, an edict was
promulgated, commanding the alarm to be sounded, and the community to
be summoned together against them, whenever they should make their
appearance. On the frontiers, gallows were erected with this
inscription: "The punishment for thieves and gipsy rabble, both men and
women." As late as the year 1725 all the gipsies in the Prussian
states, over eighteen years of age, were to be hanged whether they had
a passport or not. Even in 1748 Frederick the Great renewed this strong
edict. The conduct of the civilized nineteenth century forms a pleasing
contrast to this. In 1830 at Friedrichslohra in Thuringia, a
philanthropic endeavour was made, and warmly promoted by the
government, to reform a band of about one hundred men, by the
maintenance of the adults and education of the children. The attempt
was continued for seven years, and completely failed.

The name of Stroller disappeared, and the occupation of these
possessionless rovers became to a certain degree free from the old
defect; but the great society of swindlers maintained a certain
organization. Their language also remained. The gibberish, of which
many specimens remain to us from the latter end of the middle ages,
shows already, before the demoralization of the people by the Hussite
war, a full development of old German rogues' idioms. It consists for
the greater part of Hebrew words as used by persons who were not
themselves Jews; together with these are mingled some of the honoured
treasures of the German language, beautiful old words, and again
significant inventions of figurative expressions, for the sake of
concealing the true sense of the speech by a deceptive figure: thus,
windgap for mantle, broadfoot for goose. Few of their words lead us to
expec