Note 41 — Chapter XXXII

“Romances de Germanía,” 1609; reprinted, Madrid, 1789, 8vo. The words Germanía, Germano, etc., were applied to the jargon in which the rogues talked with one another. Hidalgo, who wrote only six of the ballads he published, gives at the end of his collection a vocabulary of this dialect, which is recognized as genuine by Mayans y Siscar, and reprinted in his “Orígenes”; so that the suggestion of Clemencin, which I have followed in the text, where I speak of Juan Hidalgo as a pseudonyme, may not be well founded;—a suggestion further discountenanced by the fact, that, in Tom. XXXVIII. of the Comedias Escogidas, 1672, the play of “Los Mozárabes de Toledo” is attributed to a Juan Hidalgo. That this had nothing to do with the Gypsies, though supposed, in the last edition, to have been connected with them, is shown in Borrow’s “Zincali,” London, 1841, 8vo, Tom. II. p. 143. Sandoval (Carlos V., Lib. III. § 38) more than once calls the rebellious Comuneros of Valencia a Germanía, or combination, which can leave little doubt about the origin of the word from Hermandad, Hermano,—brotherhood and brother,—though Covarrubias does not seem sure about it, in verb. Alemania.