214 SUPEESTITIONS OF SEIiBOENE. 



churcli, there stood, about twenty years ago, a very old, 

 grotesque, hollow pollard-ash, which for ages had beeu 

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

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

 shrew-ash was made thus :t — Into the body of the tree a 

 deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted 

 shrew-mouse was thrust in ahve, 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 exist in the manor or hundred. 

 As to that on the Plestor, 



" The late vicai- stubb'd and burnt it," 



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

 the by-standers, who interceded in vain for its preservation, 

 urging its power and efficacy, and alleging that it had been 



" Religione patrum multos servata per aunos." 

 With reverential awe preserved for years. 



* They "were supposed, also, to be particularly injurious to horses. '^When 

 a horse in the fields happened to be suddenly seized with anything lilce a 

 numbness in his legs, he was immediately judged by t!ie 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 as infallible, was to drag the 

 animal through a piece of bramble that grew at botli ends." — Bikgley's 

 Memoirs of Bntwh Quadiiipeds. — Cats will kill shrews, but will not eat 

 them. — W. J. 



•f" For a similar practice, see Plot's Staffordshire. 



