THE ASH. 59 



ineffectual. Having occasion to enlarge my garden not long 

 since, I cat 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." The same custom was 

 known to Evelyn, who half believes in the efficacy of the 

 ceremony. 1 If we may credit Phillips, the present en- 

 lightened age is not exempt from the same silly belief. 

 He says : "In the south-east part of the kingdom, the 

 country people split young Ash-trees, and make their 

 distempered children pass through the chasm in hopes of 

 a cure. 2 They have also a superstitious custom of boring 

 a hole in an Ash, and fastening in a shrew-mouse ; a few 

 strokes with a branch of this tree is then accounted a 

 sovereign remedy against cramp and lameness in cattle, 

 which are ignorantly supposed to proceed from this harm- 

 less animal." 3 Such a tree was named from the unfortunate 

 victim "a shrew-ash." White thus describes one which 

 about the middle of the last century stood in the village 

 of Selborne : " 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 baleful 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. 



1 Hunter's Evelyn's Sylva, vol. i. p. 151. 



2 A writer in the Gardener's Chronicle for April, 1846, states 

 that there was then living in Sussex a man who, when an infant, 

 about fifty years ago, was passed through an Ash-tree, at Todhurst, 

 as a remedy for hernia. 3 Sylva Florifera, vol. i. p. 8. 



