the depths.’ [0x] It was surrounded by a copse of thorn bushes, [0y] and the mouth of the dingle fronted the east, [0z] while the highroad lay too far distant for the noise of traffic to reach Borrow’s ears. [0z1]
Professor Knapp has located the dingle in Monmer Lane, Willenhall, and a visit to the locality and references to old and new ordnance surveys support this view. Willenhall lies in the coal measures of Staffordshire, and the modern development of its coal and iron industries has transformed the ‘few huts and hedge public-houses’ into a thriving town of about 17,000 inhabitants. The name of ‘Mumpers’ Dingle’ did not seem to be locally recognised, and, indeed, was scornfully repudiated by the oldest inhabitant; but this may have been merely his revenge for my intrusion just about his dinner hour. But Monmer Lane, still pronounced and in the older ordnance surveys written ‘Mumber Lane,’ is known to all. At the top of this lane on the east side of the bridge lies the ‘Monmer Lane Ironworks,’ which Professor Knapp, a little carelessly, assumes to have been the site of the dingle; [0z2] and to the west a large flat, bare, uncultivated piece of land, Borrow’s ‘plain,’ cut in two by the Bentley Canal, which runs through it east and west. A walk of 500 yards along the tow-path brings us to a small bridge crossing the canal. This is known as ‘Dingle Bridge,’ the little hawthorn-girt lane leading to it is called ‘Dingle Lane,’ and a field opposite bears the name of ‘Dingle Piece.’ The dingle itself has disappeared, possibly as a consequence of levelling operations in the construction of the canal, and must not be hastily identified by the pilgrim with the adjoining marl-pit, which has been excavated still more recently. But we can hardly doubt that somewhere hereabouts is the historic spot where Borrow fought and vanquished the Flaming Tinman, that here he lived with Miss Berners ‘in an uncertificated manner,’ that under an adjoining thorn-bush he held his astounding conversation with Ursula, and that from here, wearied of her companion’s frigid regard and strange bantering, poor Isopel turned away with her little donkey-cart and a heavy heart.
The public-house kept by the landlord in the green Newmarket coat, who was ‘the wonder and glory of the neighbourhood,’ and who had fought and beaten ‘Tom of Hopton,’ is still standing, though it is no longer used as an inn, and the pious Borrovian must abandon any hopes he may have cherished of drinking to the Lavengro’s memory in ‘hard old ale.’ A quaint old ‘half-way house,’ it lies, as Borrow describes, about two miles east of the dingle—he saw the setting sun as he returned from his frequent visits there—on the right-hand side of the highroad to Walsall, along which the brewer proposed to establish ‘a stage-coach and three to run across the country’, and a little nearer Willenhall, on the north side of the road, is Bentley Hall, the ‘hall’ from which the postillion must have been returning when overtaken by the thunderstorm. The church attended by Borrow and his gypsy friends, when Mrs. Petulengro horrified the sexton by invading the nobleman’s vacant pew, may confidently be identified with Bushbury Church, which has all the features described by Borrow. It is rather over three miles’ distance from the dingle, has a peal of bells, a chancel entrance, and is surrounded by lofty beech-trees. The vicar in 1825 was a Mr. Clare, but whether of evangelical views and a widower with two daughters, the present vicar is unable to inform me. ‘The clergyman of M—, as they call him,’ probably took his name from Moseley Court or Moseley Hall, country seats in the parish of Bushbury.
It is as a contribution to philology, Borrow tells us in the Appendix, that he wishes ‘Lavengro’ and this book to be judged. Fortunately for himself, his fame rests upon surer foundations. A great but careless linguist, Borrow was assuredly no philologist. ‘Hair-erecting’ (haarsträubend) is the fitting epithet which an Oriental scholar, Professor Richard Pischel, of Berlin, finds to describe Borrow’s etymologies; while Pott, in quoting from the ‘Zincali,’ indicates his horror by notes of exclamation; or, when Borrow once in a way hits on the right etymon, confirms the statement with an ironical ‘Ganz recht!’ Though Borrow had read Borde, it was reserved for a Viennese scholar, Dr. Zupitza, to discover that the specimens of ‘Egipt speche,’ in our original Merry-Andrew’s ‘Boke of Knowledge,’ were in reality good Anglo-Romany. And whatever may have been Lavengro’s vaunted acquaintance with Armenian, it was apparently insufficient to enable him to identify any of the Armenian elements in the gypsy language.
Touching Borrow’s knowledge of Romani, it must be confessed that while he has been the means of attracting others to the study of that interesting tongue, his own command of it was of the slightest. He never mastered ‘deep’ (or inflected) Romani, and even his broken gypsy is a curious Borrovian variety, distinct from the idiom of the tents. No gypsy ever uses chal or engro as a separate word, or talks of the dukkering dook or of penning a dukkerin. His genders are perversely incorrect, as in the title of the present book; and his ‘Romano Lavo-Lil: Word Book of the Romany or English Gypsy Language’ probably contains more ‘howlers’ than any other vocabulary in the world. He is responsible for the creation of such ghost-words as asarlas, ‘at all, in no manner’ (mistaking helpasar les for help asarlas, pp 18, 110); cappi, ‘booty, gain’ (to lel cappi, pp 28, 176 = ‘to get blankets’); ebyok, ‘sea’ (? the gypsy questioned, mishearing ‘ebb-eye’ for ‘ebb-tide’); is, ‘if,’ p. 51; kokkodus, ‘uncle’ (perhaps mistaking some such phrase as ‘like my koko does’ for ‘like my kokkodus’); lutherum, ‘sleep’; medisin, ‘measure’ (perhaps because medicine is measured out); moskey, ‘a spy’ (? mistaking dikamaski for dik! a moskey); o, ‘he’ (mistaking kai jivela for kai jivvel o, p. 53); pahamengro, ‘turnip’ (probably mistaking pusamengro, ‘pitchfork,’ for the turnip it was used to uproot); pazorrhus, ‘indebted’ = ‘trust us’); pios, ‘drunken as a health’ (aukko tu [to] pios, p. 78 = ‘here’s fun’); sar, ‘with’; sherrafo, ‘religious, converted,’ pp. 89, 194 (really ‘chief, principal,’ from shero, ‘head’); sicovar, ‘eternally’ (si covar ajaw, p. 90 = ‘so the thing is’); sos, ‘who’ (= ‘what’s’); talleno, ‘woollen, flannel’ (mistaking talleno chofa, p. 93, ‘under-skirt’ for ‘flannel petticoat’), etc. Perhaps the most amusing instance of all is the word hinjiri in ‘Lavengro.’ When Mrs. Herne hanged herself, Petulengro says that she ‘had been her own hinjiri,’ [0z3] and the word is explained by Professor Knapp as the feminine of hinjiró, ‘executioner,’ from djandjir, ‘a chain.’ [0z4] But there is no such word as hinjero, and hinjiri is merely the English ‘injury’ with a superfluous aspirate.
On the Sunday evening after his conversation with Ursula, Borrow, moved by his discovery of the original meaning of the gypsy word patteran, falls into a strange train of thought. ‘No one at present,’ he says, ‘knew that but myself and Ursula, who had learnt it from Mrs. Herne, the last, it was said, of the old stock; and then I thought what strange people the gypsies must have been in the old time. They were sufficiently strange at present, but they must have been far stranger of old; they must have been a more peculiar people—their language must have been more perfect—and they must have had a greater stock of strange secrets. I almost wished that I had lived some two or three hundred years ago, that I might have observed these people when they were yet stranger than at present. I wondered whether I could have introduced myself to their company at that period, whether I should have been so fortunate as to meet such a strange, half-malicious, half good-humoured being as Jasper, who would have instructed me in the language, then more deserving of note than at present. What might I not have done with that language had I known it in its purity? Why, I might have written books in it! Yet those who spoke it would hardly have admitted me to their society at that period, when they kept more to themselves. Yet I thought that I might possibly have gained their confidence, and have wandered about with them, and learnt their language and all their strange ways, and then—and then—and a sigh rose from the depth of my breast; for I began to think, “Supposing I had accomplished all this, what would have been the profit of it? and in what would all this wild gypsy dream have terminated?” ’
It is one of the ironies of
