Norwood Gipsies
Two centures ago, Norwood, in Surrey, was celebrated as the haunt of many of the gipsy-tribe, who in the summertime pitched their blanket-tents beneath its shady trees. Thus we find Pepys recording a visit to the place, under the date of August 11th, 1688:—“This afternoon my wife, and Mercer, and Deb. went with Pelling to the gipsies at Lambeth, and had their fortunes told; but what they did I did not inquire.” [Norwood is in the southern part of Lambeth parish.]
From their reputed knowledge of futurity, the Norwood gipsies were often consulted by the young and credulous. This was particularly the case some sixty or seventy years ago, when it was customary among the working class and servants of London to walk to Norwood on the Sunday afternoon to have their fortunes told, and also to take refreshment at the Gipsy House, said to have been first licensed in the reign of James the First. The house long bore on its sign-post a painting of the deformed figure of Margaret Finch, the Queen of the gipsies.
The register of Beckenham, under the date of October 24th, 1740, records the burial of Margaret Finch, who lived to the age of 109 years. After travelling over various parts of the kingdom (during the greater part of a century), she settled at Norwood, whither her great age and the fame of her fortune-telling attracted numerous visitors. From a habit of sitting on the ground, with her chin resting on her knees, the sinews became so contracted that she could not rise from that posture. After her death they were obliged to enclose her body in a deep square box. Her funeral was attended by two mourning-coaches, a sermon was preached on the occasion, and a great concourse of people attended the ceremony. There is an engraved portrait of this gipsy queen, from a drawing made in 1739.
In the summer of 1815, the gipsies of Norwood were “apprehended as vagrants, and sent in three coaches to prison,” and this magisterial interference, and the increase of houses and population, have long since driven the gipsies from their haunts; but the association is preserved in the Gipsy Hill station of the Crystal Palace Railway.