86 FAMILIAR TREES 
trees, one of which has a girth of more than thirty 
feet. 
Man is apt in all ages to be utilitarian, and if the 
shade of the “ dismal Yew” had once been a rendez- 
vous for the clan where the Druid, as chief medicine- 
man, dispensed justice and wisdom, it was, no doubt, 
soon found desirable that the material for the chief 
weapons of the day should be enclosed, that it 
might not be browsed, with results possibly fatal, by 
the cattle. It is probably to this use of it for making 
bows that the tree owes its Latin name of Taxus. 
Thus, in his earliest botanical work, “ Libellus de re 
herbaria ” (1538), William Turner writes: “ Taxus an, 
uhe tre wnde hodie apud nos fiunt arcus” ; and the 
poet Spenser, in 1590, speaks of it as— 
“The eugh, obedient to the bender’s will.” 
It was to bows of Yew that we mainly owed 
the victories of Crecy and Poictiers; and Edward IV. 
enacted that every Englishman should have a bow of 
his own height. English Yew-wood, however, for this 
‘purpose, only fetched one-third the price of that 
which was imported. 
The position of the Yew to the south, or more 
strictly south-west, of the church, must probably be 
accounted for by some such belief as that referred to 
by Robert Turner, in his “ Botanologia” (1664), as 
follows : 
“The Yew is hot and dry, having such attraction that if planted 
near a place subject to poysonous vapours, its very branches will, 
draw and imbibe them. For this reason it was planted in church- 
yards, and commonly on the west side, which was at one time 
considered full of putrefaction and gross oleaginous gasses exhaled 
