72 THE FRUITS OF THE COUNTRY-SIDE 



no just foundation — that to the Druids the yew-trees were 

 a symbol of immortality, there would be little or no reason 

 to destroy them. The teachers of the new beliefs would 

 naturally find it well to avoid drastic and unnecessary changes 

 in matters not essentials, which could be retained without 

 sacrifice of principle, and they might not unreasonably 

 decide that where the old teaching could be engrafted into 

 the new, its symbols need suffer no molestation. All this, 

 however, is the merest theory, the vaguest surmise. In some 

 churchyards one finds more than one yew-tree, though 

 for any symbolic purpose one would appear sufficient. 

 In Cudham churchyard, for instance, there are two noble 

 old trees, at Hemelsfield three, at Aberystwith eleven. 

 While many of these venerable trees are clearly of immense 

 age, and known, from reference in Domesday Book and 

 other ancient records, to date long prior to the Norman 

 Conquest, one must not too hastily assume Druidic origin 

 all round. In several churchyards are to be seen noble- 

 looking trees of which the actual date of planting is known. 

 The yew really grows somewhat rapidly in its earlier days, 

 these earlier days being an odd century or two. 



The poets seem to have entered into a conspiracy 

 to vilify the yew, not apparently having seen it growing 

 wild and free on some mountain slope, but only as a 

 churchyard tree. That the tree should be found amidst 

 the tombs is clearly not the fault of the yew at all, yet 



' 111 Lowe's altogether excellent monograph on the Yew-trees of Great 

 Britain and Ireland is a very striking illustration of this, a tree that was 

 planted in the churchyard of Boughton, near Faversham, on the authority 

 of the parish Register, in the year 1695, having now a girth of trunk at three 

 feet from the ground of nearly ten feet, or, to be absolutely accurate, nine 

 feet and nine inches, in 1897. 



