2 1 2 Yew- Trees of Great Britain and Ireland 



inquiries, he cannot find any one who knows of 

 there ever having been a yew-tree here. Jesse 1 

 makes it appear as if there had been one of 

 immense size, but this is a curious instance of 

 the way in which one mistake leads to another. 

 He says: 'Those of Fotheringay had in 1770 a 

 diameter of 2558 lines. Consequently we must 

 reckon them at from twenty- five to twenty-six 

 centuries/ This statement clearly arises from a 

 clerical error of De Candolle, who makes exactly 

 the above assertion regarding the tree at Fortingal, 

 which he spells ' Fotheringall ' a word compounded 

 apparently of Fortingal and Fotheringay. Jesse 

 takes the latter as being the place in question- 

 hence the erroneous statement. 



Fountain's Abbey. The Fountain's Abbey yews 

 are of great age, and are supposed by Burton to 

 have existed and to have been of no mean 

 dimensions at the time the Abbey was founded 

 by Thurston, Archbishop of York, in A.D. 1132, for 

 the reception of certain monks who had separated 

 themselves from the Benedictine Abbey of St. 

 Mary's, York, in order to adopt the more severe 

 discipline of St. Bernard, who had just founded 

 the Cistercian Order at Clairvaux. The narrative 

 of Hugh, a monk of Kirkstall, which is said to 

 be preserved in the Library of the Royal Society, 

 gives the history of the founding of Fountain's 



1 Gentleman! s Magazine, June 1836. 



