OF SELBOENE. 223 



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 

 provident forefathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, 

 which, when once medicated, would maintain its 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 for- 

 gotten. As the ceremonies necessary for such a consecra- 

 tion are no longer understood, all succession is at an end, 

 and no such tree is known to subsist in the manor or 

 hundred. 



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



Dr. Plot relates that two workmen, on sawing the trunk of a solid 

 oak, cut through the body of " a Hardishrew or Nursrow (as they here 

 call them), i.e., a field-mouse" and that "the case remains an inexplic- 

 able riddle to all those about to this very day. But methinks, to any 

 one that considers the superstitious custom they have in this country of 

 making Nursrow-trees for the cure of unaccountable swellings in their 

 cattle, the thing should not seem strange. For to make any tree, 

 whether oak, ash, or elm, it being indifferent which, a Nursrow -tree, 

 they catch one or more of these mice (which they fancy bite their cattle, 

 and make them swell), and having bored a hole to the centre in the body 

 of the tree, they put the mice in, and then drive a peg in after them of 

 the same wood, where they, starving at last, communicate forsooth such 

 a virtue to the tree that the cattle thus swoln, being whipped with the 

 boughs of it, presently recover ; of which trees they have not so many, 

 thcugrh so easily made, but that at some places they go eight or ten 

 miles to procure this remedy. 1 ' ED. 



