214 SUPEESTITIOKS OF SELBOEIS^E. 



cliurcli, tliere stood, about twenty years ago, a very Oid, 

 grotesque, hollow pollard-ash, which for ages had been 

 looked on with no small veneration as a shrew-ash. Now, a 

 shrew-ash is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently 

 applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the 

 pains which a beast suffers from the running of a shrew- 

 mouse over the part affected;* for it is supposed that a 

 shrew-mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a nature, that 

 wherever it creeps over a beast, be it horse, cow, or sheep, 

 the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel anguish, and 

 threatened with the loss of the use of the limb. Against 

 this accident, to which they were continually liable, our pro 

 vident forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, 

 when once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A 

 shrew-ash was made thus :t — Into the body of the tree a 

 deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted 

 shrew-mouse was thrust in alive, and plugged in, no doubt, 

 with several quaint incantations, long since forgotten. As 

 the ceremonies necessary for such a consecration are no 

 longer understood, all succession is at an end, and no such 

 tree is known to exist in the manor or hundred. 

 As to that on the Plestor, 



** The late vicar stubb'd and burnt it," 



when he was way- warden, regardless of the remonstrances ol 

 the by-standers, who interceded in vain for its preservation, 

 urging its power and efficacy, and alleging that it had been 



" Religione patrum multos servata per annos." 

 With reverential awe preserved for years. 



* They were supposed, also, to he particularly injurious to horses. *' When 

 % horse in the fields happened to be suddenly seized with anything like a 

 numbness in his legs, he was immediately judged by the old persons to be 

 either planet-struck, or shrew-struck. The mode of cure which they pre- 

 scribed, and which they considered in all cases as infallible, was to drag the 

 animal through a piece of bramble that grew at both ends." — Binqley's 

 Memoirs of British Quadrupeds. — Cats will kill shrews, but will not cat 

 them.— W. J. 



t For a similar practice, see Plot's Staffordshire. 



