ioo NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



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 carefully 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 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 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 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. 1 Against this accident, to which they were continu- 

 ally liable, our provident 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 : 2 Into 



1 When a horse 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 pre- 

 scribed, and which they considered in all cases infallible, was to drag the animal 

 through a piece of bramble that grew at both ends." BINGLEY. [W. J.] 



a For a similar practice, see Plot's Staffordshire. [G. W.] 



