Margaret Finch: the hundred-year-old queen of the Gypsies
Henry Roberts (d.1790)
after Ing Srach (active in the 18th cent.)
London 1742
Copperplate engraving and etching, 280 x 225

She lived 108 years!

The Norwood gypsies lived in the area now known as Gypsy Hill. So famous were they that a pantomime called 'The Norwood Gypsies' was staged in Covent Garden in 1777. The most famous of the gypsies was Margaret Finch [d.1740]. A report published a few years after her death states that the 'oddness of her figure and ye fame of her fortune-telling drew a vast concourse of spectators from ye highest rank of quality, even to those of ye lower class of life'. She lived in a conical hut built of branches, at the base of an ancient tree, and it was there that great numbers of people visited her.