NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 165 



poor babes would be cured of their infirmity. As soon as 

 the operation 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 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 

 ancestors, who practised it before their conversion to Chris- 

 tianity. 



At the fourth 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 bane- 

 ful 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 Against this accident, to which they were continu- 

 ally liable, our provident forefathers always kept a shrew-ash 

 at hand, which, when once medicated, would maintain its 

 virtue forever. 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 quaint incantations long since forgotten. 

 As the ceremonies necessary for such a consecration are no 

 longer understood, all succession is at an end, and no such tree 

 is known to subsist in the manor, or hundred. 



As to that on the Plestor 



" The late Vicar stubbed and burnt it," 

 when he was way-warden, regardless of the remonstrances of 



