86 FAMILIAR TREES 



trees, one of which has a girth of more than thirty 

 feet. 



Man is apt in all ages to be utilitarian, and if the 

 shade of the " dismal Yew " had once been a rendez- 

 vous for the clan where the Druid, as chief medicine- 

 man, dispensed justice and wisdom, it was, no doubt, 

 soon found desirable that the material for the chief 

 weapons of the day should be enclosed, that it 

 might not be browsed, with results possibly fatal, by 

 the cattle. It is probably to this use of it for making 

 bows that the tree owes its Latin name of Taxus. 

 Thus, in his earliest botanical work, " Libellus de re 

 herbaria " (1538), William Turner writes : " Taxus an, 

 uhe tre uncle hoclie apud nos fiwnt circus " ; and the 

 poet Spenser, in 1590, speaks of it as 



" The engh, obedient to the bender's will." 



It was to bows of Yew that we mainly owed 

 the victories of Crecy and Poictiers ; and Edward IV. 

 enacted that every Englishman should have a bow of 

 his own height. English Yew-wood, however, for this 

 purpose, only fetched one-third the price of that 

 which was imported. 



The position of the Yew to the south, or more 

 strictly south-west, of the church, must probably be 

 accounted for by some such belief as that referred to 

 by Robert Turner, in his " Botanologia " (1664), as 

 follows : 



" The Yew is hot and dry, having such attraction that if planted 

 near a place subject to poysonous vapours, its very branches will 

 draw and imbibe them. For this reason it was planted in church- 

 yards, and commonly on the west side, which was at one time 

 considered full of putrefaction and gross oleaginous gasses exhaled 



