162 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



soldered together, as usually fell out, where the feat was per- 

 formed 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 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 pro- 

 vident fore-fathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, 

 when once medicated, would maintain it's virtue for ever. A 

 shrew -ash was made thus 1 : Into the body of the tree a deep 

 hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrew-mouse 

 was thrust in alive, and plugged in, no doubt, with several 

 quaint incantations long since forgotten. As the ceremonies 

 necessary for such a consecration are no longer understood, all 

 succession is at an end, and no such tree is known to subsist in 

 the manor, or hundred. 



As to that on the Plestor, 



" The late vicar stubb'd and burnt it," 



when he was way-warden, regardless of the remonstrances of 

 the by-standers, who interceded in vain for it's preservation, 

 urging it's power and efficacy, and alledging that it had been 



" Religione patrum multos servata per annos". 2 



I am, &c. 



1 For a similar practice, see Plot's Staffordshire. 

 2[Virg., ^.,i 



