OF SELBOKNE. 101 



In a farm-yard near the middle of tins 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 

 operation was over, the tree, in the suffering part, was plas- 

 tered 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 super- 

 stitious ceremony, derived down perhaps from our Saxon an- 

 cestors, 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 110 

 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 fore -fathers always kept a shrew-ash at 

 hand, which, when once medicated, would maintain it's virtue 

 for ever. A shrew-ash was made thus : m 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 

 m For a similar practice, see Plot's Staffordshire. 



