174 The Natural History 



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 over- 

 whelmed 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 cicatrices 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 per- 

 suasion 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, wliere 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 shrewd-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 



