Mythology

100 TOAST, Anagram A SOTT. Exposition. A Toast is like a Sot; or, what is most Comparative, a Sot is like a Toast; For when their substances in liquor sink, Both properly are said to be in drink. (8) YEW TREES IN CHURCHYARDS. There are many theories to account for the ancient practice of planting churchyards and cemeteries with yew trees. Some authorities ascribe it to the adoption of ancient funeral rites; others to the prosaic notion of keeping the wind off the church; others, again, to the warlike need of bows and arrows yew being especially serviceable. A large body of writers believe the use of the yew was symbolic it typified by its unchanging verdure the doctrine of the resurrection. A few cynically assert that yews, being gloomy and poisonous, are rightly used for churchyard decoration; and there are not wanting writers who see in the practice a tribute to the superstitious regard men have always paid to trees. We may examine one or two of these suggestions, although no definite conclusion may be possible. We know that the ancient Britons planted yews near their temples long before Christianity was introduced into England, and this would suggest a custom on the island not necessarily Roman or Christian. A writer in The Gentleman s Magazine (1781) says: We read in the Antiquities of Greece and Rome that the branches of the cypress and yew were the usual signals to denote a house in mourning. Now, sir, as Death was a deity among the antients (the daughter of Sleep and Night), and was by them represented in the same manner, with the addition only of a long robe embroidered with stars, I think we may fairly conclude that the custom of planting the yew in churchyards took its rise from Pagan superstition, and that it is as old as the conquest of Britain by Julius Caesar. Gough, in the Introduction to his second volume of Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain, speaking of the signs of death in houses among the ancients, notices branches of pine and cypress, on the authority of Euripides, Hecuba, 191, 192 Suet. Aug. 101; AEn. xi. 31. He says in a note, Will it be thought a far-fetcht conjecture that yew-trees in churchyards supply the place of cypress round tombs, where Ovid, Trist. III. xiii. 21, says they were placed? Far-fetched or not, the evidence is too slight to enable us to say confidently that the use of the yew comes to us from Pagan times. Barrington, in his Observations on the Statutes, says that trees in a churchyard were often planted to skreen the church from the wind; that, low as churches were built at this time, the thick foliage of the yew answered this purpose better than any other tree. I have been informed, accordingly, that the yew-trees in the churchyard of Gyffin, near Conway, having been lately felled, the roof of the church hath suffered excessively.

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