The Selborne atmosphere--Unhealthy faces--Selborne Common--Character
of scenery--Wheatham Hill--Hampshire village churches--Gilbert
White's strictures--Churches big and little--The peasants' religious
feeling--Charm of old village churches--Seeking Priors Dean--Privett
church--Blackmoor church--Churchyards--Change in gravestones--Beauty
of old gravestones--Red alga on gravestones--Yew trees in
churchyards--British dragon-tree--Farringdon village and
yew--Crowhurst yew--Hurstbourne Priors yew--How yew trees are injured.
It is a pleasure to be at Selborne; nevertheless I find I always like
Selborne best when I am out of it, especially when I am rambling
about that bit of beautiful country on the border of which it lies.
The memory of Gilbert White; the old church with its low, square
tower and its famous yew tree; above all, the constant sight of the
Hanger clothed in its beechen woods--green, or bronze and red-gold,
or purple-brown in leafless winter--all these things do not prevent a
sense of lassitude, of ill-being, which I experience in the village
when I am too long in it, and which vanishes when I quit it, and seem
to breathe a better air. This is no mere fancy, nor something
peculiar to myself; the natives, too, are subject to this secret
trouble, and are, some of them, conscious of it. Round about
Selborne you will find those who were born and bred in the village,
who say they were never well until they quitted it; and some {182} of
these declare that they would not return even if some generous person
were to offer them a cottage rent free. The appearance of the
people, too, may be considered in this connection. Mary Russell
Mitford exclaims in one of her village sketches that there was not a
pretty face in the country-side. The want of comeliness which is so
noticeable in the southern parts of Berkshire is not confined to that
county. The people of Berkshire and Hampshire, of the blonde type,
are very much alike. But there are degrees; and if you want to see,
I will not say a handsome, nor a pretty, but a passably fresh and
pleasant face among the cottagers, you must go out of Selborne to
some neighbouring village to look for it.
[Sidenote: Selborne Common]
But this question does not now concern us. The best of Selborne is
the common on the hill--all the better for the steep hill which must
be climbed to get to it, since that difficult way prevents the people
from making too free use of it, and regarding it as a sort of
back-yard or waste place to throw their rubbish on. It is a
perpetual joy to the children. One morning in October I met there
some youngsters gathering kindling-wood, and feasting at the same
time on wild fruits--the sloes were just then at their best. They
told me that they had only recently come to live in Selborne from
Farringdon, their native village. "And which place do you like
best?" I asked. "Selborne!" they shouted in a breath, and indeed
appeared surprised that I had asked such a question. No wonder.
This hill-top common is the {183} most forest-like, the wildest in
England, and the most beautiful as well, both in its trees and
tangles of all kinds of wild plants that flourish in waste places,
and in the prospects which one gets of the surrounding country.
Here, seeing the happiness of the boys, I have wished to be a boy
again. But one does not think so much of this spot when one comes to
know the country round, and finds that Selborne Hill is but one of
many hills of the same singular and beautiful type, sloping away
gently on one side, and presenting a bold, almost precipitous front
on the other, in most cases clothed on the steep side with dense
beech woods. It is now eight years since I began to form an
acquaintance with this east corner of Hampshire, but not until last
October (1902) did I know how beautiful it was. From Selborne Hill
one sees something of it; a better sight is obtained from Noire Hill,
where one is able to get some idea of the peculiar character of the
scenery. It is all wildly irregular, high and low grounds thrown
together in a pretty confusion, and the soil everywhere fertile, so
that the general effect is of extreme richness. One sees, too, that
the human population is sparse, and that it has always been as it is
now, and man's work--his old irregular fields, and the unkept hedges
which, like the thickets on the waste places, are self-planted, and
have been self-planted for centuries, and the old deep-winding lanes
and by-roads--have come at last to seem one with nature's work. Out
of this broken, variegated, richly green surface, here and there, in
a sort of range, but {184} irregular like all else, the hills, or
hangers, lift their steep, bank-like fronts--splendid masses of red
and russet gold against the soft grey-blue autumnal sky. It is
delightful to walk through this bit of country from Nore Hill, and
from hill to hill, across green fields, for the farms here are like
wild lands that all are free to use, to Wheatham Hill, the highest
point, which rises 800 feet above the sea-level. From this elevation
one looks over a great part of that green variegated country of the
Hangers, and sees on one hand where it fades close by into the sand
and pine district beginning at Wolmer Forest, and on another side,
beyond the little town of Petersfield, the region of great rolling
downs stretching far away into Sussex.
[Sidenote: Village churches]
In my rambles about this corner of Hampshire, during which I visited
all the villages nearest to Selborne--Empshott, Hawkley, Greatham,
East and West Tisted, Worldham, Priors Dean, Colemore, Privett,
Froxfield, Hartley Maudit, Blackmore, Oakhanger, Kingsley, Farringdon
and Newton Valence--I could not help thinking a good deal about
Hampshire village churches generally. It was a subject which had
often enough been in my mind before in other parts of the county, but
it now came back to me in connection with Gilbert White's strictures
on these sacred buildings. Their "meanness" produced a feeling in
him which is the nearest approach to indignation discoverable in his
pages. He is speaking of jackdaws breeding in rabbit holes, and
shrewdly conjectures that this habit has arisen on account of {185}
the absence of steeples and towers suitable as nesting-places. "Many
Hampshire places of worship," he remarks, "make no better appearance
than dovecotes." He envied Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, the
Fens of Lincolnshire, and other districts, the number of spires which
presented themselves in every point of view, and concludes: "As an
admirer of prospects I have reason to lament this want in my own
county, for such objects are very necessary ingredients in an elegant
landscape."
The honoured historian of the parish of Selborne makes me shudder in
this passage. But I am, perhaps, giving too much importance to his
words, since one may judge, from his mention of Norfolk in this
connection as being even worse off than his own county, that he was
not well informed on the subject. Norfolk, like Somerset, abounds in
grand old churches of the Perpendicular period. That smallness, or
"meanness" as he expresses it, of the Hampshire churches, is, to my
mind, one of their greatest merits. The Hampshire village would not
possess that charm which we find in it--its sweet rusticity and
homeliness, and its harmonious appearance in the midst of a nature
green and soft and beautiful--but for that essential feature and part
of it, the church which does not tower vast and conspicuous as a
gigantic asylum or manufactory from among lowly cottages dwarfed by
its proximity to the appearance of pigmy-built huts in the Aruwhimi
forest. These immense churches which in recent years have lifted
their tall spires and towers amidst lowly surroundings in many {186}
rural places, are, as a rule, the work of some zealot who has seared
his sense of beauty with a hot iron, or else of a new over-rich lord
of the manor, who must have all things new, including a big new
church to worship a new God in--his own peculiar Stock Exchange God,
who is a respecter of wealthy persons. Here in Hampshire we have
seen the old but well preserved village church pulled down--doubtless
with the consent of the ecclesiastical authorities--its ancient
monuments broken up and carted away, its brasses made into fire
ornaments by cottagers or sold as old metal, and the very gravestones
used in paving the scullery and offices of the grand new parsonage
built to match the grand new church.
[Sidenote: Peasants' religious feeling]
When coming upon one of these "necessary ingredients in an elegant
landscape" in some rural spot I have sometimes wondered what the
feeling of the people who have spent their lives there can be about
it. What effect has the new vast building, with its highly decorated
yet cold and vacant interior, on their dim minds--on their religion,
let us say? It may be a poor unspiritual sort of religion, based on
old traditions and associations, mostly local; but shall we scorn it
on that account? If we look a little closely into the matter, we see
that all men, even the most intellectual, the most spiritual, are
subject to this feeling in some degree, that it is in all religions.
That which from use, from association, becomes symbolic of faith is
in itself sacred. At the present time the Church is torn with
dissensions because of this very question. Certain bodily {187}
positions and signs and gestures, and woven fabrics and garments of
many patterns and colours, and wood and stone and metal objects, and
lighted candles and perfumes--mere hay and stubble to others who have
different symbols--are things essential to worship in some. Touch
these things and you hurt their souls; you deprive them of their
means of communication with another world. So the poor peasant who
was born and lives in a thatched cottage, with his limited
intelligence, his animism, associates the idea of the unseen world
with the sacred objects he has seen and known and handled--the small
ancient building, the red-barked, dark-leafed yew, the green mounds
and lichened gravestones among which he played as a child, and the
dim, low-roofed interior of what was to him God's House. Whatever
there is in his mind that is least earthly, whatever thoughts he may
have of the unseen world and a life beyond this life, were
inseparably bound up with these visible things.
We need not follow this line any farther; those who believe with me
that the sense of the beautiful is God's best gift to the human soul
will see that I have put the matter on other and higher grounds. The
small village church with its low tower or grey-shingled spire among
the shade trees, is beautiful chiefly because man and nature with its
softening processes have combined to make it a fit part of the scene,
a building which looks as natural and harmonious as an old hedge
which man planted once and nature replanted many times, and as many
an old thatched {188} timbered cottage, and many an old grey ruin,
ivy-grown, with red valerian blooming on its walls.
To pull down one of these churches to put in its place a gigantic
Gothic structure in brick or stone, better suited in size (and
ugliness) for a London or Liverpool church than for a small rustic
village in Hampshire, is nothing less than a crime.
[Sidenote: Seeking Priors Dean]
When calling to mind the churches known to me in this part of
Hampshire, I always think with peculiar pleasure of the smaller ones,
and perhaps with the most pleasure of the smallest of all--Priors
Dean.
It happened that the maps which I use in my Hampshire rambles and
which I always considered the best--Bartholomew's two miles to the
inch--did not mark Priors Dean, so that I had to go and find it for
myself. I went with a friend one excessively hot day in July, by
Empshott and Hawkley through deep by-roads so deep and narrow and
roofed over with branches as to seem in places like tunnels. On that
hot day in the silent time of year it was strangely still, and gave
one the feeling of being in a country long deserted by man. Its only
inhabitants now appeared to be the bullfinches. In these deep shaded
lanes one constantly hears the faint plaintive little piping sound,
the almost inaudible alarm note of the concealed bird; and at
intervals, following the sound, he suddenly dashes out, showing his
sharp-winged shape and clear grey and black upper plumage marked with
white for a moment or two before vanishing once more in the
overhanging foliage.
We went a long way round, but at last coming to {189} an open spot we
saw two cottages and two women and a boy standing talking by a gate,
and of these people we asked the way to Priors Dean. They could not
tell us. They knew it was not far away--a mile perhaps; but they had
never been to it, nor seen it, and didn't well know the direction.
The boy when asked shook his head. A middle-aged man was digging
about thirty yards away, and to him one of the women now called, "Can
you tell them the way to Priors Dean?"
The man left off digging, straightened himself, and gazed steadily at
us for some moments. He was one of the usual type--nine in every ten
farm labourers in this corner of Hampshire are of it--thinnish, of
medium height, a pale, parchment face, rather large straightish nose,
pale eyes with little speculation in them, shaved mouth and chin, and
small side whiskers as our fathers wore them. The moustache has not
yet been adopted by these conservatives. The one change they have
made is, alas! in their dress--the rusty black coat for the smock
frock.
When he had had his long gaze, he said, "Priors Dean?"
"Yes, Priors Dean," repeated the woman, raising her voice.
He turned up two spadefuls of earth, then asked again, "Priors Dean?"
"Priors Dean!" shouted the woman. "Can't you tell 'em how to get to
it?" Then she laughed. She had perhaps come from some other part of
the country where minds are not quite so slow, and where the {190}
slow-minded person is treated as being deaf and shouted at.
Then, at last, he stuck his spade into the soil, and leaving it,
slowly advanced to the gate and told us to follow a path which he
pointed out, and when we got on the hill we would see Priors Dean
before us.
[Sidenote: Churches old and new]
And that was how we found it. There is a satirical saying in the
other villages that if you want to find the church at Priors Dean you
must first cut down the nettles. There were no nettles nor weeds of
any kind, only the small ancient church with its little shingled
spire standing in the middle of a large green graveyard with about a
dozen or fifteen gravestones scattered about, three old tombs, and,
close to the building, an ancient yew tree. This is a big, and has
been a bigger, tree, as a large part of the trunk has perished on one
side, but as it stands it measures nearly twenty-four feet round a
yard from the earth. This, with a small farmhouse, in old times a
manor house, and its outbuildings and a cottage or two, make the
village. So quiet a spot is it that to see a human form or hear a
human voice comes almost as a surprise. The little antique church,
the few stones, the dark ancient tree--these are everything, and the
effect on the mind is strangely grateful--a sense of enduring peace,
with something of that solitariness and desolation which we find in
unspoilt wildernesses.
From these smallest churches, which appear like a natural growth
where they are seen, I turn to the large and new, and the largest of
all at this place--that of Privett. From its gorgeous yet vacant and
{191} cold interior, and from the whole vast structure, including
that necessary ingredient in an elegant landscape, the soaring spire
visible for many miles around, I turn away as from a jarring and
discordant thing--the feeling one experiences at the sight of those
brand-new big houses built by over-rich stock-jobbers on many hills
and open heaths in Surrey and, alas! in Hampshire.
I do not, however, say that all new and large churches raised in
small rustic centres appear as discordant things. Even in the group
of villages which I have named there is a new and comparatively large
one which moves one to admiration the church of Blackmoor. Here the
vegetation and surroundings are unlike those which accord best with
the small typical structures, the low tower and shingled spire. The
tall, square tower of Blackmoor, of white stone roofed with red
tiles, rises amid the pines of Wolmer Forest, simple and beautiful in
shape, and gives a touch of grace and grateful colour to that darker,
austere nature. From every point of view it is a pleasure to the
eye, and because of its enduring beauty the memory of the man who
raised it is like a perfume in the wilderness.
It is, however, time that bestows the best grace, the indescribable
charm to the village church--long centuries of time, which gives the
feeling, the expression, of immemorial peace to the weathered and
ivied building itself and the surrounding space, the churchyard, with
its green heaps, and scattered stones, and funeral yew.
{192}
[Sidenote: Change in gravestones]
The associated feeling, the _expression_, is undoubtedly the chief
thing in the general effect, but the constituents or objects which
compose the scene are in themselves pleasing; and one scarcely less
important than the building itself, the universal grass, the dark,
red-barked tree, is the gravestone. I mean the gravestone that is
attractive in shape, which may be seen in every old village
churchyard in Hampshire; for not all the stones are of this
character. The stone that is beautiful dates back half a century at
least, but very few are as old as a century and a half. When we get
that far and farther back the inscription is obliterated or
indecipherable. Only here and there we may by chance find some
stone, half buried in the soil, of an exceptional hardness, marking
the spot where lieth one who departed this life in the seventeenth or
early in the eighteenth century. There are many old stones, it is
true, with nothing legible on them, but one does not know how old
they are. It is not that these gravestones are beautiful only
because they are old, and have had their hard surface softened and
embroidered with green moss and lichen of many shades from pale-grey
to orange and red and brown. The form of the stone, the
stone-cutter's work, was beautiful before Nature began to work on it
with her sunshine, her rain, her invisible seed. I cannot think why
this old fashion, or rather, let us say, this tender, sacred custom,
of marking the last resting-place of the dead with a memorial
satisfying to the æsthetic sense, should have gone or died out. The
gravestones {193} used at the present time are, as a rule, twice as
big as the old ones, and are perfectly plain--immense stone slabs,
inscribed with big, fat, black letters differing in size, the whole
inscription curiously resembling the local auctioneer's bills to be
seen pasted up on barn-doors, fences, and other suitable places. So
big and hard, and bold, and ugly--I try not to see them!
Look from these at the old stone which the earthworms have been busy
trying to bury for a century, until the lower half of the inscription
is underground; the stone which the lichen has embossed and richly
coloured; round which the grass grows so close and lovingly, and the
small creeping ivy tries to cover. This which has been added to it
is but a part of its beauty: you see that its lines are graceful,
that they were made so; that the inscription--"Here lyeth the body,"
etc.--is not cut in letters in use in newspapers and advertising
placards, and have therefore no common nor degrading associations,
but are letters of other forms, graceful, too, in their lines; and
that above the inscription there are sculptured and symbolic figures
and lines--emblems of mortality, eternal hope, and a future
life--heads of cherubs, winged and blowing on horns, and the sun and
wings; skulls and crossbones, and hour-glass and scythe; the funeral
urn and weeping-willow; the lighted torch; the heart in flames, or
bleeding, or transfixed with arrows; the angel's trumpet, the crown
of glory, the palm and the lily, the laurel leaf, and many more.
{194}
Did we think this art, or this custom, too little a thing to cherish
any longer? I cannot find any person with a word to say about it. I
have tried and the result was curious. I have invited persons of my
acquaintance into an old churchyard and begged them to look on this
stone and on this--the hard ugliness of one, an insult to the dead,
and the beauty, the pathos, of the other. And they have immediately
fallen into a melancholy silence, or else they have suddenly become
angry, apparently for no cause. But the reason probably was that
they had never given a thought to the subject, that when they had
buried someone dear to them--a mother or wife or daughter--they
simply went to the stonemason and ordered a gravestone, leaving him
to fashion it in his own way. The reason of the reason--the full
explanation of the singular fact that they, in these house-beautiful
and generally art-worshipping times, had given no thought to the
matter until it was unexpectedly sprung upon them; and that if they
had lived, say, a hundred years ago, they would have given it some
thought--this the reader will easily find out for himself.
[Sidenote: Beauty of old gravestones]
It is comforting to reflect that gravestones do not last for ever,
nor for very long; and in the meantime Nature is doing what she can
with our ugly modern memorials, touching, softening, and tingeing
them with her mosses, lichens, and with algæ--her beautiful
_iolithus_. In most churchyards in southern England we see many
stones stained a {195} peculiar colour, a bright rust-red, darkest in
dry weather, and brightest in wet summers, often varying to pink and
purple and orange; but whatever the hue or shade the effect on the
grey stone, lichened or not, is always beautiful. It is not a
lichen; when the staining is looked closely at nothing is seen but a
roughness, a powdery appearance, on the stone's surface. It is an
aerial alga of the genus _Croöleptus_, confined to the southern half
of England, and most common in Hampshire, where its beautifying blush
may sometimes be seen on old stone walls of churches, and old houses
and ruins; but it flourishes most on gravestones, especially in moist
situations. The stone must not be too hard, and must, moreover, be
acted on by the weather for well-nigh half a century before the alga
begins to show on it; but you will sometimes see it on an
exceptionally soft stone dating no more than thirty or forty years
back. On old stones it is very common, and peculiarly beautiful in
wet summers. In June 1902, after many days of rain, I stood one
evening at the little gate at Brockenhurst churchyard, and counted
between me and the church twenty gravestones stained with the red
alga, showing a richness and variety of colouring never seen before,
the result of so much wet weather. For this alga, which plays so
important a part in nature's softening and beautifying effect on
man's work--which is mentioned in no book unless it be some purely
technical treatise dealing with the lower vegetable forms--this alga,
despite its aerial habit, is still in essence a water-plant: the sun
and dry {196} wind burn its life out and darken it to the colour of
ironstone, so that to anyone who may notice the dark stain it seems a
colour of the stone itself; but when rain falls the colour freshens
and brightens as if the old grey stone had miraculously been made to
live.
[Sidenote: Churchyard yews]
If never a word has been written about that red colour with which
Nature touches the old stones to make them beautiful, a thousand or
ten thousand things have been said about the yew, the chief feature
and ornament of the village churchyard, and many conjectures have we
seen as to the reason of the very ancient custom of planting this
tree where the dead are laid. The tree itself gives a better reason
than any contained in books. It says something to the soul in man
which the talking or chattering yew omitted to tell the modern poet;
but very long ago someone said, in the _Death of Fergus_, "Patriarch
of long-lasting woods is the yew; sacred to forests as is well
known." That ancient sacred character, which survived the
introduction of Christianity, lives still in every mind that has kept
any vestige of animism, the root and essence of all that is wonderful
and sacred in nature. That red and purple bark is the very colour of
life, and this tree's life, compared with other things, is
everlasting. The stones we set up as memorials grow worn and seamed
and hoary with age, even like men, and crumble to dust at last; in
time new stones are put in their place, and these, too, grow old and
perish, and {197} are succeeded by others; and through all changes,
through the ages, the tree lives on unchanged. With its huge, tough,
red trunk; its vast, knotted arms outstretched; its rich, dark mantle
of undying foliage, it stands like a protecting god on the earth,
patriarch and monarch of woods; and indeed it seems but right and
natural that not to oak nor holly, nor any other reverenced tree, but
to the yew it was given to keep guard over the bodies and souls of
those who have been laid in the earth.
The yew is sometimes called the "Hampshire weed," on account of its
abundance in the county; if it must have a second name, I suggest
that the Hampshire or British dragon-tree would be a better and more
worthy one. It would admirably fit some ancient churchyard yews in
the neighbourhood of Selborne, especially that of Farringdon.
In the great mass of literature concerning Gilbert White, there is
curiously little said about this village; yet it has one of the most
interesting old churches in the county--the church in which White
officiated for over a quarter of a century, during all the best years
of his life, in fact; for when he resigned the curacy at Farringdon
to take that of Selborne, for which he had waited so long, he was
within two years of bidding a formal farewell to natural history, and
within eight of his death. The church register from 1760 to 1785 is
written in his clear, beautiful hand, and in the rectory garden there
is a large Spanish chestnut-tree planted by him. Although not so
fortunate in its surroundings as Selborne, with {198} its Lyth and
flowery Bourne and wooded Hanger, Farringdon village, with its noble
church and fine old farm-buildings and old cottages, is the better
village of the two. At the side of the churchyard there is an old
oast-house, now used as a barn, which for quaintness and beauty has
hardly its match in England. The churchyard itself is a pretty,
peaceful wilderness, deep in grass, with ivy and bramble hanging to
the trees, and spreading over tombs and mounds. Long may it be kept
sacred from the gardener, with his abhorred pruning-hook, his basket
of geranium cuttings--inharmonious flower!--and his brushwood broom
to make it all tidy. Finally, there is the wonderful old yew.
[Sidenote: Farringdon yew]
A great deal has been written first and last about the Selborne yew,
which appears to rank as one of the half-dozen biggest yew trees in
the country. Its age is doubtless very great, and may greatly exceed
the "thousand years" usually given to a very large churchyard yew.
The yews planted two hundred years ago by Gilbert White's grandfather
in the parsonage garden close by, are but saplings in comparison. A
black poplar would grow a bigger trunk in less than ten years. The
Selborne yew was indeed one of the antiquities of the village when
White described it a century and a quarter ago. It is, moreover, the
best-grown, healthiest, and most vigorous-looking yew of its size in
Britain. The Farringdon yew, the bigger tree, has a far more aged
aspect--the appearance of a tree which has been decaying for an
exceedingly long period.
{199}
Trees, like men, have their middle period, when their increase slowly
lessens until it ceases altogether; their long stationary period, and
their long decline: each of these periods may, in the case of the
yew, extend to centuries; and we know that behind them all there may
have been centuries of slow growth. The Selborne yew has added
something to its girth since it was measured by White, and is now
twenty-seven feet round in its biggest part, and exceeds by at least
three feet the big yew at Priors Dean, and the biggest of the three
churchyard yews at Hawkley. The Farringdon yew in its biggest part,
about five feet from the ground, measures thirty feet, and to judge
by its ruinous condition it must have ceased adding to its bulk more
than a century ago. One regrets that White gave no account of its
size and appearance in his day. It has, in the usual manner, decayed
above and below, the upper branches dying down while the trunk rots
away beneath, the tree meanwhile keeping itself alive and renewing
its youth, as it were, by means of that power which the yew possesses
of saving portions of its trunk from complete decay by covering them
inside and out with new bark.
In the churchyard yew at Crowhurst, Surrey, we see that the upper
part of the tree has decayed until nothing but the low trunk, crowned
with a poor fringe of late branches, has been left; in this case the
trunk remains outwardly almost entire--an empty shell or cylinder,
large enough to accommodate fourteen persons on the circular bench
placed within the cavity. In other cases we see that the trunk has
{200} been eaten through and through, and split up into strips; that
the strips, covered inside with new bark, have become separate
trunks, in some instances united above, as in that of the yew in
South Hayling churchyard. The Farringdon tree has decayed below in
this way; long strips from the top to the roots have rotted and
turned to dust; and the sound portions, covered in and out with bark,
form a group of half a dozen flattened boles, placed in a circle, all
but one, which springs from the middle, and forms a fantastically
twisted column in the centre of the edifice. Between this central
strangely shaped bole, now dead, and the surrounding ring there is
space for a man to walk round in.
It is a wonderful tree, which White looked at every day for
five-and-twenty years, yet never mentioned, and which Loe says
nothing about in his _Yew Trees of Great Britain and Ireland_. The
title of this work is misleading: _Famous Yew Trees_ it should have
been, since it is nothing but a collection of facts as to size,
supposed age, etc., of trees that have often been measured and
described, and are accordingly well known. It is well, to my way of
thinking, that he attempted nothing more. It is always a depressing
thought, when one has discovered a wonderful or a beautiful thing,
that a very full and very exact account of it is and must be
contained in some musty monograph by some industrious, dreary person.
At all events, I can say that the yew trees which have most attracted
me, which come up when I think of the yew as a wonderful and a sacred
tree, are not {201} in the book. Of my Hampshire favourites I will,
for a special reason, speak of but one more--the yew in the
churchyard of Hurstbourne Priors, a small village on the upper Test,
near Andover.
[Sidenote: Hurstbourne Priors yew]
This tree, which is doubtless very aged, has not grown an enormous
trunk, nor is it high for an old yew, but its appearance is
nevertheless strangely impressive, owing to the length of its lower
horizontal branches, which extend to a distance of thirty to
thirty-five feet from the trunk, and would lie on the ground if not
kept up by props. Another thing which make one wonder is the number
of graves that are crowded together beneath these vast sheltering
arms. One may count over thirty stones, some very old; many more
have probably perished, and there are besides many green mounds. I
have watched in a churchyard in the Midlands a grave being dug under
a yew, at about three yards' distance from the trunk: a barrowful of
roots was taken out during the process. It seemed to me that a very
serious injury was being inflicted on the tree, and it is probable
that many of our very old churchyard yews have been dwarfed in their
growth by such cutting of the roots. But what shall we say of the
Hurstbourne Priors yew, from which not one but thirty or forty
barrow-loads of living roots must have been taken at various times to
make room for so many coffins! And what is the secret of the custom
in this, and probably other villages, of putting the dead so close to
or under the shelter of the tree?
Compare this Hurstbourne Priors yew, and many {202} other ancient
churchyard yews in Hampshire, with that of Selborne, which albeit
probably no older is double their size: is it not probable that the
Selborne tree is the largest, best grown, and most vigorous of the
old yews because it has not been mutilated at its roots as the others
have been?
There is but one grave beneath or near this tree; not the grave of
any important person, but a nameless green mound of some obscure
peasant. I had often looked with a feeling almost of astonishment at
that solitary conspicuous mound in such a place, midway between the
trunk of the tree and the church door, wondering who it was whose
poor remains had been so honoured, and why it was. Then by chance I
found out the whole story; but it came to me in scraps, at different
times and places, and that is how I will give it to the reader, in
fragments, in the course of the following chapter.
{203}