LXX.] 
OF SELBORNE. 
1S9 
In a farm-yard near tlie 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 asimder. 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 persuasion that, by such a process, the poor 
babes would be cured of their infirmity. As soon as the opera- 
tion was over, the tree, in the suffering part, was plastered with 
loam, and carefully swathed u]). If the parts coalesced and 
soldered together, as usually fell out where tlie feat was per- 
formed with any adroitness at all, the party was cured ; but 
where the cleft continued to gape, the operation, it was sup- 
posed, 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 churcli, 
there stood, about twenty years ago, a very old grotesque hollow 
pollard-ash, which for ages liad been looked on with no small 
veneration as a shrew-ash. Now a shrew-ash is an ash Avliose 
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 :^ — 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 
1 For a similar practice, White refers us to Plot's " Staffordshire." 
