Yew Trees

It is the loveliest tree I have ever seen, that yew tree at Stoke Poges. A cathedral of a tree, full of fan traceries and mullioned windows where birds look in; its trunk a stalwart column, its branches architraves; not Gothic, tapering to a spire, but squat and strong like a Norman tower; thickly leaved to its very foundations; a monument to the unheadstoned dead who have gathered in its shade. The old fellow, the sexton, said it was mentioned in the Doomsday Book. Perhaps it was. It has an air of immortality about it. The calm magnificence of eternity.

The old fellow urged me into the church. He was not a tree worshiper like myself. He was more concerned with the pew that had held the members of the ancient and honorable Pitt family, with their small traffickings in comfort, the cushions that had eased their backs and the stones that had warmed their feet; with their private entrance through the vestry to save them from exposure to snow or rain, and even more from exposure to the common folk who came in at the front door.

This was September, golden, ruddy, bright. A still sun glossed the dark green leaves of the yew tree and inked them again in gigantic shadow on the grass. In the fields beyond, grain was being harvested. Here in the churchyard was harvest, too. And endless quiet. There was no sound at all to break the repose of that sleeping company. The place made death seem infinitely desirable. I looked back to the church beside which Gray lay in his red brick tomb, unshaded and unlovely. He seemed, like the sexton, to have drawn apart from the yew tree. Yet, I think he would have preferred to lie with the ‘unhonoured dead’ in the mouldering turf, soil of its soil, dust of its dust. Instead of the storied urn with which Stoke Poges sought to do him honor, the yew tree should have been his headstone. I began to think about yew trees. Why are there so many in the English churchyards? I thought I had the answer to my question when I was told that a statute of Edward I states that the yew trees were planted in churchyards to defend the church against high winds. So they were gallant trees, defenders of the faith, protectors of God and architecture.

Another year in another churchyard at Iffley, where age-old graves undulate about the old Norman door with its dogtooth and its signs of the zodiac, last relic but one of its kind, I saw again a lovely yew tree. Another ancient sexton presided over the place. Why are sextons always old? Is it a bit of dramatic harmony that those who are almost done with life are drawn irresistibly to the service of the dead? This particular ancient looked as if he were steeped in tradition, and as if he might have fancies. So I was moved to ask him my question about yew trees.

‘Well, you see, young lady, it’s this way,’ he began. ‘There’s very elastic wood in the yew tree, and they do say in the old days it were used for making bows. Sometimes they’d call a bow a yew, for the wood it were made of. But the trees all belonged to the gentry, the earls, and the lords of the manor, and the like. The only land the poor folk owned was the bit of ground they was to be buried in. And, however doughty they was, they dast not strip the trees of their betters for wood for their bows. So they set to and planted their own yew trees in the churchyards, which was common property, and many a stout weapon the peaceful graves gave up, I warrant you.’

The old fellow liked the idea. He started and told it to me all over again. I liked it myself. It went further than my notion that the yew trees were defenders of the property of God against His elements. It made them warriors in their own right. I was glad that, after all, yews were planted not, like the cypress, for the dead, but for the living.