The men have been punished as robbers and murderers,
with the gallows and the galleys; the women, as thieves and
sorceresses, with imprisonment, flagellation, and sometimes death;
but as a rabble, living without fear of God, and, by so doing,
affording an evil example to the nation at large, few people gave
themselves much trouble about them, though they may have
occasionally been designated as such in a royal edict, intended to
check their robberies, or by some priest from the pulpit, from
whose stable they had perhaps contrived to extract the mule which
previously had the honour of ambling beneath his portly person.
The Inquisition, which burnt so many Jews and Moors, and
conscientious Christians, at Seville and Madrid, and in other parts
of Spain, seems to have exhibited the greatest clemency and
forbearance to the Gitanos. Indeed, we cannot find one instance of
its having interfered with them. The charge of restraining the
excesses of the Gitanos was abandoned entirely to the secular
authorities, and more particularly to the Santa Hermandad, a kind
of police instituted for the purpose of clearing the roads of
robbers. Whilst I resided at Cordova, I was acquainted with an
aged ecclesiastic, who was priest of a village called Puente, at
about two leagues' distance from the city.
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