Most village churchyards can boast a yew tree. It
is not very clear why this is so. Yew trees are poisonous to livestock
and eating their foliage will kill cattle and horse and sheep, so they
are and were a risk. The attraction, probably, was that they were evergreen
and that they were the only evergreen to suit a churchyard. We are accustomed
to evergreen pines and firs and laurels, but none of those are native
to this country; they were seventeenth or eighteenth century imports
from abroad. The only native evergreens in the Middle Ages, when the
church was built, were the yew and the holly and Scots pine. The Scots
pine is native to Scotland and not native here, the holly tree does not
grow into a large sheltering tree good for a churchyard, and so the yew
was the obvious tree.
It has other ‘virtues’.
Village people would be careful to keep their unwelcome
cattle out of a churchyard with yews in it, as the yew is poisonous
to livestock. Cattle strayed commonly in the past, particularly from
common land, and were rounded up and impounded in the village pound.
Payhembury had its pound of course still surviving by name at Pound
Cottage. Forty years ago Slade Barton cows used to stray down the village
street from Slade yard after milking, until the cowman, Mr Vittles,
could shoo them onto a field; and there would have been other herds
of cattle in the village in the past.
The yew has the virtue
of being immortal in a curious way. After fifteen
hundred years perhaps the main trunk collapses, but the tree does not
die. Instead it sprouts from the rim of the tree near the ground and
sends up shoots, and these will grow to a great age. This is what happened
to the Payhembury yew. It now consists of four large sprouted branches
with a mound in the middle where the old trunk collapsed. These branches
must at some time have been selected to grow, as there would have been
many more such sprouts originally. Some believe that the original tree
was struck by lightning and split into four.
Some say yews provided
necessary bow staves for village people to practise
their archery regularly, as they were at one time bound to do by law.
But those who know say that bow staves for the English long bow were
commonly imported from Spain. It was their perpetual greenness and
their ability to regrow, a sign of perpetual life and resurrection,
that distinguished the yew and was appropriate in the churchyard. They
gave good shelter to the church from the wind and the rain, summer
and winter.
The Payhembury yew has
a girth, in 2005, at soil level, of circa 35ft, but it is
now four trunks not one. It seems likely these trunks were deliberately
chosen out of the mass of growth that would have sprouted out of the
bottom of the tree, when the old trunk collapsed. Someone must have
thought ‘let’s have four trunks’ and cut out the
rest. When did this happen? When did the old trunk collapse finally?
The four stems are odd; botanists say that two carry male flowers and
one carries female flowers, and one is uncertain! This does not apparently
prove that there were once separate trees; that is how yews are apparently.
The four separate trunks are in girth at ground level 11', 13' 1'',
8' 10'' and 12' 9'' respectively, perhaps not all the same age therefore,
or with different advantages of light and exposure. The tree does not
stand alone. There is another yew close by of some age, 12'7'' in girth,
and recently yet another has been planted, a seedling from the well
known ancient Tandridge tree. Long may they grow! They will outlive
me and all who read this, and their children and their childrens’ children
for many generations doubtless!
Robin Stanes is a founder member of the
Devon History Society, and has also served as its Hon. Editor. He
is the author of the Phillimore county history of Devon, and
other books on the county’s past. He was
a farmer in Devon for 15 years, and his particular interest is Devonshire farming
practice in the past.
Acknowledgements:
Payhembury Parish Magazine
The Devon Historian
Copyright© 2007 Robin Stanes
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