OF 8ELB0RNE. 
223 
At the soutli corner of tlie Plestor, or area near the 
churcli, 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:^ — 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. 
^ 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 Jield-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, 
thoug-h so easily made, but that at some places they go eight or ten 
miles to procure this remedy." — Ed. 
