THE YEW. 345 



import ten bow-staves with every butt of wine, and by an 

 Act passed in the reign of Edward IV. every Englishman 

 residing in Ireland was expressly ordered to have an 

 English bow of his own height, made of Yew, or some 

 other wood. The best bows, however, were not made of 

 native Wood, foreign Yew being thought so much superior 

 that a bow of it sold for six shillings and eight pence, 

 when the bow of English wood cost only two shillings. 

 It does not appear, therefore, that the English Yew-tree 

 was sufficiently prized for its wood to need the protection 

 of a churchyard ; and if it had been highly valued, we 

 should rather expect to find traces of extensive plantations 

 than solitary trees in churchyards, which, after all, were 

 very inappropriate places to plant trees intended to be 

 applied to warlike purposes. 



Mr. Bowman has written an article in the "Magazine of 

 Natural History/' in which he states it as his opinion that 

 the Ancient Britons, before the introduction of Christianity, 

 planted Yew-trees near their temples from the same super- 

 stitious motives that actuated the Canaanites, who, we are 

 told, were in the habit of performing their idolatrous rites in 

 groves. When Augustine was sent by Gregory the Great 

 to preach Christianity in Britain, he was particularly en^ 

 joined not to destroy the heathen temples, but only to 

 remove the images, to wash the walls with holy water, to 

 erect altars. &c. and so convert them into Christian churches. 

 The Yew-trees, consequently, were allowed to remain, as 

 not necessarily conveying any erroneous impression. There 

 are still in existence Yews which, in all probability, were 

 venerable trees before the introduction of Christianity. 



Mr. Bree, too, is of opinion, that churches were frequently 

 built in Yew-groves or near old Yew-trees, rather than 

 that the trees were planted in the churchyards after the 

 churches were built. Such, probably, was often the case ; 

 but whether the church or the tree were the first to 

 occupy the site, our Christian forefathers cannot with pro- 

 priety be said to have sanctioned the custom either from 

 Q 3 



