No popular error is more absolutely destitute of foundation than that
regarding the shrew. This little quadruped, very common in meadows
and pastures in all parts of Britain, and generally known as the
shrew-mouse, is as harmless as any creature that lives. Its food
consists of insects and their larvæ; and its teeth are very small, so
that it is scarcely able to bite through the human skin. Yet according
to a popular belief, very widely prevalent, its bite is most venomous,
and in many districts in England the viper is less feared. Nor is it
only its bite that is supposed to be deadly to man or beast. Contact
with it in any way is accounted extremely dangerous; and cattle seized
with any malady, especially if shewing any appearance of numbness in
the legs, are apt to be reputed ‘shrew-struck.’ Horses in particular
are accounted very liable to suffer from this cause. An infallible
cure, however, was to be found in dragging the shrew-struck animal
through a bramble rooted at both ends, or in the application of
a twig of a shrew-ash. ‘A shrew-ash,’ says White, in his _Natural
History of Selborne_, ‘is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently
applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the pain
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 whenever it creeps over a beast, whether
it be horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with
cruel anguish, and threatened with the loss of the use of its limbs.
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.’ This tree, whose
every branch possessed such a potent charm, was an ash in the trunk of
which an auger-hole had been bored, and a living shrew put into the
hole, which was then closed with a wooden plug. The incantations used
when this was done have now been forgotten; the shrew-ash has lost
its old repute; but the belief in its virtues still lingers in some
quarters, and the belief in the dangerous bite and maleficent touch of
the shrew is strong among the country-people in many parts of England.
How confidently this belief was entertained even by the best educated
in former times appears from many allusions to it by old authors. It
was received as an unquestionable fact of natural history. In Topsel’s
_History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents_, published in 1658, it is
said of the shrew, that ‘it is a ravening beast, feigning itself gentle
and tame; but being touched, it biteth deep and poisoneth deadly; it
beareth a cruel mind, desiring to hurt anything;’ with much more of the
like nature, and much concerning medicinal virtues ascribed to this
little animal. But the belief in the deadliness of the shrew’s bite has
been transmitted from one generation to another from times far more
remote than those of this credulous author. It prevailed among the
ancient Romans, and their remedy for a shrew’s bite was to cut the body
of the little creature asunder and place it on the injured part.