SELBORNE, _Jan._ 8_th_, 1776.
Dear Sir,--It is the hardest thing in the world to shake off
superstitious prejudices: they are sucked in, as it were, with our
mother's milk; and growing up with us at a time when they take the
fastest hold and make the most lasting impressions, become so interwoven
into our very constitutions, that the strongest good sense is required to
disengage ourselves from them. No wonder, therefore, that the lower
people retain them their whole lives through, since their minds are not
invigorated by a liberal education, and therefore not enabled to make any
efforts adequate to the occasion.
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 enlightened
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 cicatrices 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 carefully
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 was cured; but, where the cleft continued to gape, the operation it
was supposed, 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 fourth 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 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 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 subsist in the manor, or hundred.