POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. 187 



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 enlight- 

 ened 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 cica- 

 trices 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 care- 

 fully 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 con- 

 tinued to gape, the operation, it was supposed, would prove in- 

 effectual. 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 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. Against this 



