Yew Tree
(Taxus baccata)

FOR botanist, artist, poet, or moralist, few trees have so unique an interest as the Yew. Wearing the serious aspect of age even in youth, its somber foliage, massive trunk, and rugged bark form a striking emblem of immortality. Its very name is mysterious in its simple brevity, and has been traced back to the sacred word for Jehovah, the Immortal. In Latin and in Portuguese, iva; in Old German, iua; in Welsh, yw; in Anglo-Saxon, eow; in Old English, iw, ew, ewe, eugh, and uhe; in French, if; in Swedish, id; and in modern German, eibe, "we find," says Dr. Prior, "the Yew so inextricably mixed up with the Ivy that, dissimilar as are the two trees, there can be no doubt that these names are in their origin identical."

Its hard, durable, reddish wood presents characters that enable us readily to recognize it in the peat-beds of pre-historic times. In the bogs of Ireland, Scotland, and Cumberland, in the Cambridgeshire fens and the submerged "moor-logs" at the mouth of the Thames, it is as perfectly preserved as bog-oak, being of a rich brown tint; and under the microscope this exhibits in the woody fibers, as when alive, a unique combination of "bordered pits" and spiral lines. 

The wood of the Yew, which, from being susceptible of a high polish, used to be much valued in cabinet-work, is not, as is often thought, exceptionally slow in forming. The contrary opinion has been formed from a consideration of the slowly-increasing girth of those charge trunks of aged Yews which are so disproportionately large, as compared with the extent of bough and leafage, that the formation upon them of the very thinnest growth of wood represents really a very fair total cubic amount.

From the measurement of the layers of annual growth in many Yews, De Candolle concluded that it was within the mark to reckon their increase in diameter at a line a year throughout their life, and it was from such measurements that he concluded that such trees as sometimes occur with a girth of twenty-seven feet, or more, may even have passed the age of two thousand years.

As an evergreen, overshadowing the crops, the Yew would do more harm than larger and perhaps more valuable deciduous trees, and the herdsman must soon have discovered that it was frequently fatal to his cattle, so that it is not to be wondered at that the species should have become less abundant in our hedgerows than it once was. Bearing the staminate and pistillate flowers on different trees, one individual would moreover, if solitary, be unable to reproduce itself by means of seed.

There were, however, many cogent reasons why some specimens of the tree should be preserved. Ages before Christianity had invested the gloomy evergreen of gnarled red trunk and vastly superhuman longevity with a glamour of superstitious awe and veneration, the fancies of the uneducated had, no doubt, surrounded it with a halo of poetic romance; but we have no positive evidence connecting it with Druidical worship. It is not improbable, however, that its green boughs, "renewing their eternal youth," may have been connected with the Spring festival of Eostre, which the Christian Church was able to sanctify and adopt, as it adopted also the winter use of the Holly, which lent itself yet more readily to Christian symbolism; whilst it was unable to do the same for the Mistletoe, which social progress has gradually stripped of all its impropriety, and of nearly all its significance. As the pagan nations of antiquity in South Europe took the Cypress as a symbol of immortality, so the Yew may well have been adopted in the north; and certain it is that whilst the Holly lingers round ancient British earth-works, and has long effected its entrance into our churches, it does not occur in our churchyards. Even the additional argument that Yew twigs were used to sprinkle the holy water in the "Asperges" before mass will hardly be a sufficient answer to this objection.

The following verses for Candlemas Eve are, however, worth reproduction in this connection:--

"Down with the Rosemary and Bayes;
Down with the Mistleto;
Instead of Holly, now upraise
The greener Box for show.

The Holly hitherto did sway,
Let Box now domineere
Until the dancing Easter Day,
Or Easter's Eve appeare.
Then youthful Box, which now hath grace
Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped Yew.

When Yew is out, then Birch comes in,
And many flowers beside;
Both of a fresh and fragrant kinne,
To honour Whitsontide."

It is not only for Easter decorations that Yew-boughs are utilized by the Church; for, out of the lands of palms and olives, the Catholic Church has to make shift with Willow and Yew on Palm Sunday, so that the latter tree has in many districts acquired the name of "palm," though Willows are more generally so called. That staunch Protestant, William Turner, need not have opened, as he does, the vials of his wrath upon the Popish priests for this custom as a deception, since the prayers in the mass for the day expressly add the words, "and other trees," after mentioning palm and olive. In the Churchwardens' Accounts for Woodbury, Devon, in 1775, it is recorded "That a Yew or Palm tree was planted in the churchyard, ye south side of the church, in the same place where one was blown down by the wind a few days ago, this 25th of November."

The Yew was also used in funerals--a custom alluded to by Shakespeare in "Twelfth Night," in the line--

"My shroud of white, stuck all with Yew;"

and Sir Thomas Browne suggested that sprigs so used have taken root and grown into our churchyard trees. Again, in some parts of the country corpses were rubbed with an infusion of Yew leaves to preserve them.

Perhaps the best evidence, faute de mieux, to connect the Yew with Druidic times is the fact that it is particularly abundant in the churchyards of Wales and the west of England. In the churchyard at Mamhilad there are, for instance, twelve or thirteen trees, one of which has a girth of more than thirty feet.

Some one has said that the religion of one age becomes the superstition or witchcraft of the next; so perhaps the "slips of Yew sliver'd in the moon's eclipse" by the weird sisters in "Macbeth," may point not merely to the well-known poisonous character of the tree, but also to a former reverence for it.

Man is apt in all ages to be utilitarian, and if the shade of the "dismal Yew" had once been a rendezvous for the clan where the Druid, as chief medicine-man, dispensed justice and wisdom, it was, no doubt, soon found desirable that the material for the chief weapons of the day should be enclosed, that it might not be browsed, with results possibly fatal, by the cattle. It is probably to this use of it for making bows that the tree owes its Latin name of Taxus. Thus in his earliest botanical work, "Libellus de re herbaria" (1538), William Turner writes: "Taxes an uhe tre unde hodie apud nos fiunt arcus;" and the poet Spenser, in 1590, speaks of it as--

"The eugh, obedient to the bender's will."

It was to bows of Yew that we mainly owed the victories of Crecy and Poictiers; Edward IV enacted that every Englishman should have such a bow of his own height; and so peaceable a man as Elizabeth's tutor, Roger Ascham, as we see from his "Toxophilus" (1544), regretted the day when--

"England were but a fling
But for the eugh and the grey goose wing."

Its position to the south, or more strictly south-west of the church, must probably be accounted for by some such belief as that referred to by Robert Turner, in the "Botanologia" (1664), as follows:

"The Yew is hot and dry, having such attraction that if planted near a place subject to poysonous vapours, its very branches will draw and imbibe them. For this reason it was planted in churchyards, and commonly on the west side, which was at one time considered full of putrefaction and gross oleaginous gasses exhaled from the graves by the setting sun. These gasses, or will-o'-the-wisps, divers have seen, and believed them dead bodies walking abroad. Wheresoever it grows it is both dangerous and deadly to man and beast; the very lying under its branches has been found hurtful, yet the growing of it in churchyard is useful."

This belief in the fatal effect of even sleeping under the boughs of the Yew dates from Galen and Dioscorides; whilst Caesar records the death of Catibulus, king of the Eburones, from drinking its juice. Gerard, however in his "Herball" (1579), rashly denies all this, saying," All which I boldly affirm as untrue, because I have eaten my full of the berries, and slept in the branches, not once but oft, without hurt."

The facts would seem to be that the seeds themselves are poisonous, but the fleshy pink cup, or "aril," as the botanists term it, of which children are so fond, is harmless. As to the boughs and leaves, it appears that cattle can be gradually accustomed to them when mixed with other food; but that, either when green, or when cut and half withered, they have been repeatedly fatal to horses oxen, sheep, and deer. Gilbert White was probably right when he said that it was "either from wantonness when full, or from hunger when empty," that the Yew is eaten by them with fatal consequences. Though the leaves are believed to act as a vermifuge, they are likely to be equally fatal to children, the poison acting either on the cerebrospinal nerves or directly on the heart.

The topiarian art in many an old farm-house garden shows the Yew, patient under the shears, tortured into peacocks, pyramids, teapots, and other unnatural shapes. Certainly it is a tree which in its varied surroundings reflects many aspects of our history, religion, and social life.

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