NA TURA L HIS TOR Y OF SELBORNE. 1 97 



wx/ald 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 cere- 

 mony, derived down perhaps from our Saxon ancestors, who 

 practised it before their conversion to Christianity. 



At the fourth 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 



SHREW-MOUSE. 



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 accident, to which they were continually liable, 

 our provident forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, 

 when once medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrew- 



* "When ahorse in the fields happened to be suddenly seized with anything like a 

 numbness in his legs, he was immediately judged by the old persons to be either planet- 

 struck, or shrew-struck. The mode of cure which they prescribed, and which they con- 

 sidered in all cases infallible, was to drag the animal through a piece of bramble that grew 

 at both ends." BINGLEY. 



