POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. 
187 
Such a preamble seems to be necessary before we enter on 
the superstitions of this district, lest we should be suspected of 
exaggeration in a recital of practices too gross for this enlight- 
ened age. 
But the people of Tring, in Hertfordshire, would do well to 
remember, that no longer ago than the year 1751, and within 
twenty miles of the capital, they seized on two superannuated 
wretches, crazed with age, and overwhelmed with infirmities, on 
a suspicion of witchcraft ; and, by trying experiments, drowned 
them in a horse-pond. 
In a farm-yard near the middle of this village stands, at this 
day, a row of pollard-ashes, which, by the seams and long cica- 
trices down their sides, manifestly show that, in former times, 
they have been cleft asunder. 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 operation was over, 
the tree, in the suffering part, was plastered with loam, and care- 
fully swathed up. If the parts coalesced and soldered together, 
as usually fell out, where the feat was performed with any 
adroitness at all, the party v/as cured ; but, where the cleft con- 
tinued to gape, the operation, it was supposed, would prove in- 
efifectual. 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 livings in the village, who, in 
their childhood, were supposed to be healed by tiiis 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 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 sufiPers from 
the running of a shrew-mouse over the part aflfected : 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 
stieep, the suffering animal is afiSicted with cruel anguish, and 
threatened with the loss of the use of the limb. Against this 
