266 The Natural History of Selborne 



Such a preamble seems to be necessary before we enter on the 

 superstitions of this district, lest we should be suspected of exaggera- 

 tion 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 superannuated wretches, 

 crazed with age, and overwhelmed with infirmities, on a suspicion 

 of witchcraft ; and, by trying experiments, 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 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 

 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 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 



