On Whit Monday, 30 May 1898, some 10,000 people gathered in the Borders village of Kirk Yetholm for the coronation of Scotland’s Romanes King.
It was a huge number of people for the time and the elaborate ceremony, attended by lords and ladies, was reported in newspapers across Britain. But who were the Romanes Kings of Scotland and where are they now?
Despite the size of the congregation and the pomp surrounding the coronation, the Romanes Kings of Scotland have passed out of living memory – or perhaps these mysterious people have decided to retreat once more into their own ways and refuse to tell the gorgies (the Romany word for non-gypsies) the truth about the current Romanes King.
Romanes were first recorded in Scotland in 1492, the same year that Columbus landed in the West Indies, in the reign of James IV. The word ‘gypsy’ is derived from ‘Egyptian’, but the people themselves are more likely to have been nomadic Roma from northern India. Indeed, by 1492 they had already been travelling in Europe for hundreds of years and were an accepted part of society.
One gypsy in particular found favour with King James V. In 1539 the Stuart monarch granted John Faa the right to call himself King of the Romanes. Historical records show that there was a writ of the Privy Council recognising the right of a ‘John Faw’, the ‘Lord of Litill Egypt’ to rule and enforce laws over his ‘people’. There was another writ, dated February 1540, also signed by James V, which records the granting of protection to ‘our lovit Johnnie Faa, Lord and Erle of Littil Egipt’.
Link: https://www.scottishfield.co.uk/culture/charles-faa-blythe-the-last-king-of-scotlands-gypsies/
