LXX.] 



OF SELBORNE. 



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 children, 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 opera- 

 tion 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 per- 

 formed with any adroitness at all, the party was cured ; but 

 where the cleft continued to gape, the operation, it was sup- 

 posed, 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 church, 

 there stood, about twenty years ago, a very old 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 provident 

 forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, when once 

 medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrew-ash 

 was made thus :* 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 

 1 For a similar practice, White refers us to Plot's " Staffordshire." 



