The Sacred Yew
Dr. Vaughan Cornish in The Churchyard Yew and Immortality has given substantial evidence for the churchyard yew being as archaic a symbol of immortality as the last sheaf ift the ritual of "crying the neck." I believe myself that the sanctity ascribed to the yew in Britain may well have taken its origin from the Silures of the Welsh Border, conquered by the Second Augustan Legion from Caerleon inithe first century, because of the close association between the churchyard yew and the Celtic saints. Dr. Cornish maintains that the yew was sacred in Bronze Age Britain and even earlier, and much Iberian blood sur- vives in the Marches to this day. What, to the best of my remembrance, Dr. Cornish does not mention is a very interesting fact revealed in the twelfth-century Book of Llandaff, that gold-mine of information about the early Celtic Church of the West. Its records say that the space "from between the yew tree and the church" was a sanctuary in the fifth century and earlier as inviolable as the interior of the church itself. One entry, for instance, describes how a virgin escaped from the retainers of a Welsh princeling and took refuge between yew and church. But she was carried off despite the sacrilege. The leader of the impious crew became insane, and did not recover until full restitution had been made and a grant of land with it to the church. Anybody who knows the woods of Wye must have noticed the frequency of the yew among them, and how beautiful in spring is the contrast between its dark shades and the fairylike blossom of the lovild cherry. The yews in the churchyards of the Border are often of such hoariness as, in Sir Thomas Browne's words, to " antiquitate antiquity," and the ones in Cusop Churchyard near Hay are mentioned in Domesday Book.
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