a fine of fifty livres.  Besides this, by a strange application of the laws of retaliation, those who had been robbed by these foreigners were permitted to rob them to the extent of the value of the things stolen.  In consequence of this, the Bolognians entered a stable in which several of the Egyptians’ horses were kept, and took out one of the finest of them.  In order to recover him the Egyptians agreed to restore what they had taken, and the restitution was made.  But perceiving that they could no longer do any good for themselves in this province, they struck their tents and started for Rome, to which city they said they were bound to go, not only in order to accomplish a pilgrimage imposed upon them by the Sultan, who had expelled them from their own land, but especially to obtain letters of absolution from the Holy Father.

[Illustration:  Fig. 370.—­Gipsies Fortune-telling.—­Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the “Cosmographie Universelle” of Munster:  in folio, Basle, 1552.]

In 1422 the band left Italy, and we find them at Basle and in Suabia.  Then, besides the imperial passports, of which they had up to that time alone boasted, they pretended to have in their possession bulls which they stated that they had obtained from the Pope.  They also modified their original tale, and stated that they were descendants of the Egyptians who refused hospitality to the Holy Virgin and to St. Joseph during their flight into Egypt:  they also declared that, in consequence of this crime, God had doomed their race to perpetual misery and exile.

Five years later we find them in the neighbourhood of Paris.  “The Sunday after the middle of August,” says “The Journal of a Bourgeois of Paris,” “there came to Paris twelve so-called pilgrims, that is to say, a duke, a count, and ten men, all on horseback; they said that they were very good Christians, and that they came from Lower Egypt; ... and on the 29th of August, the anniversary of the beheading of St. John, the rest of the band made their appearance.  These, however, were not allowed to enter Paris, but, by order of the provost, were lodged in the Chapel of St. Denis.  They did not number more than one hundred and twenty, including women and children.  They stated that, when they left their own country, they numbered from a thousand to twelve hundred, but that the rest had died on the road.....  Whilst they were at the chapel never was such a concourse of people collected, even at the blessing of the fair of Landit, as went from Paris, St. Denis, and elsewhere, to see these strangers.  Almost all of them had their ears pierced, and in each one or two silver rings, which in their country, they said, was a mark of nobility.  The men were very swarthy, with curly hair; the women were very ugly, and extremely dark, with long black hair, like a horse’s tail; their only garment being an old rug tied round the shoulder by a strip of cloth or a bit of rope (Fig. 371).  Amongst them were several