Phillips in his Sylva Florifera (1823) states that "a variety has been discovered in a hedge near Bampton, Oxfordshire, which produces white berries." This variety, if it ever existed, appears to have been lost. He also commits himself to the statement that "the fruit of this tree are called haws, from whence the name hawthorn"; which proves that a man may be an excellent botanist and a bad etymologist. In Middle English "hawe" meant a hedge, and also ground enclosed by a hedge. It was in the latter sense that Chaucer wrote in the Canterbury Tales:
And eke there was a polkat [polecat] in his hawe.
The tree got the name of hawthorn, i.e. hedgethorn, because it has no rival as a hedge plant.
And this brings us to consider what is the economic value of the hawthorn. It has become indispensable for hedges, which are as inseparable from a foreigner's impressions of English landscape as poplars are from French country scenery, and as date palms are from that of Egypt.
Green fields of England! wheresoe'er
Across the watery waste we fare,
Your image in our hearts we bear,
Green fields of England, everywhere.
But the fields would not be so green, they would not indeed stamp themselves on the memory as fields at all, were it not for the hedges that mark them off. In Scotland hedges are not so universal, the preference being given to stone dykes, where the necessary material lies to hand, or, alas, to barbed wire, which, effective though it be as a fence, prevails to vulgarise the fairest scenery. Dr. Walker states in his Essays of Natural History (1812) that Cromwell's soldiers first planted, or taught the Scots to plant hedges in East Lothian and Perthshire. They learnt the planting all right, but not, it would appear, the subsequent management; for, except in the Lothians, it is the exception to see hedges rightly tended. The plants are allowed to straggle and to be browsed bare below by cattle, when the gaps are repaired by running a wire through them. Far more admirable is the craft of the English hedger, who knows how to make a beautiful and durable fence by plashing and binding.
The timber of hawthorn possesses more merit than is usually assigned to it; in fact, there cannot be said that there is any market for it, owing, probably, to the rough state in which it is almost invariably grown. But it is hard and heavy, with a fine grain, taking a good polish. Some of the wood-cuts in back numbers of the Gardeners' Chronicle were engraved on hawthorn; but Mr. Elwes, who has experimented practically with every British wood, considers that boxwood is of superior texture.
In the good times of old, when men strove more earnestly to cut each other's throats than, as at the present day, to catch each other's votes, every Highland clan has a distinctive badge consisting of a sprig of some common plant whereby friend might be known from foe. The small sept of Ogilvie chose the hawthorn.
No tree or plant has lent its name more freely to denominate places. The Norsemen are responsible for Thorn-ey on the left bank of the tidal Thames, to which the Saxons, forgetting that ey is good Norse for "island," extended the name pleonastically to Thorney Island, and then came Edward the Confessor to obliterate both names by building on the island the abbey and church—the West Minster.