"ElizabethGaskell-AnAccursedRace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskell Elizabeth C)

AN ACCURSED RACE




We have our prejudices in England. Or, if that assertion offends any
of my readers, I will modify it: we have had our prejudices in
England. We have tortured Jews; we have burnt Catholics and
Protestants, to say nothing of a few witches and wizards. We have
satirized Puritans, and we have dressed-up Guys. But, after all, I
do not think we have been so bad as our Continental friends. To be
sure, our insular position has kept us free, to a certain degree,
from the inroads of alien races; who, driven from one land of refuge,
steal into another equally unwilling to receive them; and where, for
long centuries, their presence is barely endured, and no pains is
taken to conceal the repugnance which the natives of "pure blood"
experience towards them.

There yet remains a remnant of the miserable people called Cagots in
the valleys of the Pyrenees; in the Landes near Bourdeaux; and,
stretching up on the west side of France, their numbers become larger
in Lower Brittany. Even now, the origin of these families is a word
of shame to them among their neighbours; although they are protected
by the law, which confirmed them in the equal rights of citizens
about the end of the last century. Before then they had lived, for
hundreds of years, isolated from all those who boasted of pure blood,
and they had been, all this time, oppressed by cruel local edicts.
They were truly what they were popularly called, The Accursed Race.

All distinct traces of their origin are lost. Even at the close of
that period which we call the Middle Ages, this was a problem which
no one could solve; and as the traces, which even then were faint and
uncertain, have vanished away one by one, it is a complete mystery at
the present day. Why they were accursed in the first instance, why
isolated from their kind, no one knows. From the earliest accounts
of their state that are yet remaining to us, it seems that the names
which they gave each other were ignored by the population they lived
amongst, who spoke of them as Crestiaa, or Cagots, just as we speak
of animals by their generic names. Their houses or huts were always
placed at some distance out of the villages of the country-folk, who
unwillingly called in the services of the Cagots as carpenters, or
tilers, or slaters--trades which seemed appropriated by this
unfortunate race--who were forbidden to occupy land, or to bear arms,
the usual occupations of those times. They had some small right of
pasturage on the common lands, and in the forests: but the number of
their cattle and live-stock was strictly limited by the earliest laws
relating to the Cagots. They were forbidden by one act to have more
than twenty sheep, a pig, a ram, and six geese. The pig was to be
fattened and killed for winter food; the fleece of the sheep was to
clothe them; but if the said sheep had lambs, they were forbidden to