No other merriment, dull tree, is thine.”
The Egyptians regarded it as a symbol of mourning, and the idea descended to the Greeks and Romans, who employed the wood as fuel for their funeral pyres. The Britons probably learned from the Romans to attach a funereal signification to the Yew, and inasmuch as it had been employed in ancient funeral rites, they regarded the tree with reverence and probably looked upon it as sacred. Hence, in course of time, the Yew came to be planted in churchyards, and, on account of its perpetual verdure, was, like the Cypress, considered as a symbol of the resurrection and immortality.
“Dark Cypresses the skirting sides adorned,
And gloomy Yew-trees, which for ever mourned.”—Harte.
R. Turner remarks that if the Yew “be set in a place subject to poysonous vapours, the very branches will draw and imbibe them: hence it is conceived that the judicious in former times planted it in churchyards on the west side, because those places being fuller of putrefaction and gross oleaginous vapours exhaled out of the graves by the setting sun, and sometimes drawn into those meteors called ignes fatui, divers have been frightened, supposing some dead bodies to walk; others have been blasted, &c.” Prof. Martyn points out that a Yew was evidently planted near the church for some religious purpose; for in the ancient laws of Wales the value of a consecrated Yew is set down as £1, whilst that of an ordinary Yew-tree is stated as only fifteen pence. “Our forefathers,” says he, “were particularly careful to preserve this funereal tree, whose branches it was usual to carry in solemn procession to the grave, and afterwards to deposit therein under the bodies of their departed friends. Our learned Ray says, that our ancestors planted the Yew in churchyards because it was an evergreen tree, as a symbol of that immortality which they hoped and expected for the persons there deposited. For the same reason this and other evergreen trees are even yet carried in funerals, and thrown into the grave with the body; in some parts of England and in Wales, planted with flowers upon the grave itself.” Shakspeare speaks of a “shroud of white, stuck all with Yew,” from which one would infer that sprigs of Yew were placed on corpses before burial. Branches of Yew were, in olden times, often carried in procession on Palm Sunday, instead of Palm, and as an evergreen Yew was sometimes used to decorate churches and houses at Christmas-time.——Parkinson remarks that in his time it was used “to deck up houses in Winter; but ancient writers have ever reckoned it to be dangerous at the least, if not deadly.” Many of the old writers were of Parkinson’s opinion as to the poisonous character of the Yew. Cæsar tells how Cativulcus, king of the Eburones, poisoned himself by drinking a draught of Yew. Dioscorides says that a decoction of the leaves occasions death; Galen pronounces the tree to be of a venomous quality and against man’s nature; and White, in his ‘History of Selborne,’ gives numerous instances in which the Yew has proved fatal to animals. Gerarde does not consider the berries poisonous, but thinks non-ruminating animals are injured by eating the foliage. He tells us that “Nicander, in his booke of counter-poisons, doth reckon the Yew-tree among the venomous plants, setting downe also a remedy, and that in these words, as Gorræus hath translated them:—
‘Shun the poys’nous Yew, the which on Oeata grows,
Like to the Firre, it causes bitter death,
Unlesse besides they use pure wine that flowes
From empty’d cups, thou drinke, when as thy breath
Begins to fade, and passage of thy life