Читать книгу A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside - Johnny Scott - Страница 49

Yews, being evergreen and producing red berries, were of particular significance to the ancients. Again, a splash of colour in the stark winter landscape would have been an emblem of hope and a symbol of the enigmatic power of nature. Yew trees symbolised both death and immortality, being poisonous but immensely long-lived, and able to re-root their branches to produce fresh saplings. A grove of yew trees was considered by the Druids to be particularly holy and so they preferred to make their wands from yew, rather than oak or crab apple, the other favourite wand-making woods. A rod made of yew, called a fe, was used to measure corpses for burial, and the pagan habit of placing a piece of yew foliage in a coffin persisted until the eighteenth century.

Many yews of great age have survived in churchyards because of their sacred associations, both before and after Christianity. The habit of planting yew trees in churchyards is open to dispute; one theory is that they were planted to deter graziers from turning sheep into graveyards to eat the grass. However, this lacks credulity, as the parishioners wanted the grass in graveyards to be grazed and would peg cut brambles on the actual graves to keep the sheep off them. Another, which suggests that yews were planted to provide staves for the mighty bow of the Middle Ages, is also implausible; the yews would take far too long to grow to have been of any use, and in any case, most yew staves were imported from Italy. The last theory, and the one that I subscribe to, is that early Christian churches were built on sites of pagan worship and that the habit of planting yews near churches simply persisted. This is based on the instructions given by Pope Gregory in 597 to the Benedictine monk, Augustine, as he departed on his mission to convert the pagan Britons. Gregory insisted that Augustine should not destroy the heathen temples, but only remove the idolatrous images, wash the walls with holy water, erect consecrated altars and try to convert the sites to Christian churches.