Billy Marshall

Billy Marshall was born in Ayrshire around 1672 and accumulated a cluster of titles: King of the Gypsies, King of the Randies, and the Caird of Barullion — "caird" being the Romani word for a craftsman, and Barullion his home territory in Galloway. His trade was that of tinker and horner, working horn into useful goods, but his authority extended far beyond a single craft. He led the Romani and travelling communities of south-west Scotland with a force of personality and reputation that earned him the kingship — partly hereditary within the Scottish Gypsy tradition, partly the result of being manifestly ungovernable by anyone else.

The legends attached to Marshall are openly extravagant. He is said to have fought with William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and later with the Duke of Marlborough in Flanders during the Nine Years' War — but to have deserted from the army seven times, and from the navy three times, always contriving to return for Keltonhill Fair near Castle Douglas, two miles from his heartland. He married seventeen wives and fathered sixty-eight children; tradition insists four were born after his hundredth birthday. His recorded accounts are prefaced with words like "allegedly" and "it is reported that" — the legend acknowledged its own improbability while continuing to grow.

Walter Scott drew on Marshall's reputation when writing the Romani characters in Guy Mannering (1815), particularly the character of Meg Merrilies, and Galloway's Romani identity in the novel is inseparable from Marshall's shadow. Francis Hindes Groome called Galloway "Billy Marshall's old kingdom" in Gypsy Folk-Tales (1899), cementing the legend in Scottish Romani scholarship. Marshall died on 28 November 1792 and was buried in Kirkcudbright Kirkyard; the Parish Register entry recording his burial at the approximate age of one hundred and twenty provides the nearest documentary anchor to a life that had otherwise long since departed into myth. His restored grave is still visited.