SrPExISTlTIONS OF SELBORNE. 213 



pected of exaggeration in a recital of practices too gross for 

 this enlightened age. 



Bnt the people of Tring, in Hertfordshire, would do well 

 to remember, that no longer ago than the y^ar 1751, and 

 within twenty miles of the capital, they seized on two super- 

 annuated wi'etches, crazed with age, and overwhelmed with 

 infirmities, on a suspicion of witchcraft ; and, by trying 

 experiments, drowned them in a horse-pond. 



In a farm-yard, near the middle of this village, stands at 

 this day, a row of pollard-ashes, which, by the seams and 

 long cicatrices down their sides, manifestly show that in 

 former times they have been cleft asunder. These trees, 

 when young and flexible, were severed and held open by 

 wedges, while ruptured childi'en stripped naked were pushed 

 through the apertures, under a persuasion that by such a 

 process, the poor babes would be cured of their infirmity. 

 As soon as the operation was over, the tree in the suffering 

 part was plastered with loam, and carefully swathed up. If 

 the parts coalesced and soldered together, as usually fell out 

 where the feat was performed with any adroitness at all, the 

 party was cured ; but where the cleft continued to gape, the 

 operation, it was supposed, would prove ineffectual. Having 

 occasion to enlarge my garden not long since, I cut down 

 two or three such trees, one of which did not grow together. 



We have several persons now living in the village, who, 

 in their childhood, were supposed to be healed by this 

 superstitious ceremony, derived down, perhaps, from our 

 Saxon ancestors, who practised it before their conversion to 

 Christianity.* 



At the south corner of the Plestor, or area, near the 



• The popular superstitions extend even to insects. A woman in my 

 neighbourhootl told me that she had lost all her hives of bees, because she 

 had not tapped at each of the hives when her poor dear husband died, to 

 announce his death to the bees. It is also a common custom to attach a small 

 piece of black cloth or crape in a split stick and to fasten it on a hive 

 when the owner has died. The author of a Tour in Brittany says, that, " if 

 bees are kept at a house where a marriage feast is celebrated, care is always 

 taken to dress up their hives in red, which is done by placing upon them pieces 

 of scarlet cloth ; the Bretons imagining that the bees would forsake their 

 dwellings if they were not made to participate in the rejoicings of their owners. 

 In the like manner they are all put into mourning when a il*uith occurs in 

 the family." — £o. 



