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Updated: May 1, 2025
To the great eye of history, which sees everything collectively, the Comprachicos belong to the colossal fact of slavery. Joseph sold by his brethren is a chapter in their story. The Comprachicos have left their traces in the penal laws of Spain and England.
The law acting against the Comprachicos determined, not only the Comprachicos, but vagabonds of all sorts, on a general flight. It was the devil take the hindmost. The greater number of the Comprachicos returned to Spain many of them, as we have said, being Basques. The law for the protection of children had at first this strange result: it caused many children to be abandoned.
Hence arrest and inquiry. People simply unfortunate, reduced to wander and to beg, were seized with a terror of being taken for Comprachicos although they were nothing of the kind. But the weak have grave misgivings of possible errors in justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other people's children.
Aguardate niño, que voy a llamar al Comprachicos Take care, child, or I'll call the Comprachicos is the cry with which mothers frighten their children in that country. The Comprachicos, like the Zigeuner and the Gipsies, had appointed places for periodical meetings. From time to time their leaders conferred together.
The chiefs, "supposed to be rich, although beggars in appearance," were to be punished in the collistrigium that is, the pillory and branded on the forehead with a P, besides having their goods confiscated, and the trees in their woods rooted up. Those who did not inform against the Comprachicos were to be punished by confiscation and imprisonment for life, as for the crime of misprision.
The Comprachicos bought little human beings and disfigured their features, distorted their bodies, fashioned them into ludicrous, grotesque, or hideous monstrosities for king and populace to laugh at, and then resold them.
James II. went away to die in exile, miracles were performed on his tomb, and his relics cured the Bishop of Autun of fistula a worthy recompense of the Christian virtues of the prince. William, having neither the same ideas nor the same practices as James, was severe to the Comprachicos. He did his best to crush out the vermin.
What kind of band was it which had left the child behind in its flight? Were those fugitives Comprachicos? We have already seen the account of the measures taken by William III. and passed by Parliament against the malefactors, male and female, called Comprachicos, otherwise Comprapequeños, otherwise Cheylas. There are laws which disperse.
They encamped here and there, but they were grave and religious, bearing no affinity to other nomads, and incapable of theft. The people for a long time wrongly confounded them with the Moors of Spain and the Moors of China. The Moors of Spain were coiners, the Moors of China were thieves. There was nothing of the sort about the Comprachicos; they were honest folk.
The Comprachicos were poor. They might have said what the lean and ragged witch observed, when she saw them setting fire to the stake, "Le jeu n'en vaut pas la chandelle." After the lapse of two centuries, it would be difficult to throw any light on this point. It was, as we have said, a fellowship. It had its laws, its oaths, its formulæ it had almost its cabala.
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