276 The Natural History of Se I borne 



are not invigorated by a liberal education, and therefore not 

 enabled to make any efforts adequate to the occasion. 



Such a preamble seems to be necessary before we enter on 

 the superstitions of this district, lest we should be suspected 

 of exaggeration in a recital of practices too gross for this 

 enlightened age. 



But the people of Tring, in Hertfordshire, would do well 

 to remember, that no longer ago than the year 1751, and 

 within twenty miles of the capital, they seized on two super- 

 annuated wretches, crazed with age, and overwhelmed with 

 infirmities, on a suspicion of witchcraft; and, by trying ex- 

 periments, drowned them in a horse-pond. 



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 for- 

 mer 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 

 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 

 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 





