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 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 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.
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 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.