The old Crouch Oak on Walford Green is one of the sights of Surrey. It raises its gnarled and hollow trunk in the centre of the Ploy-Field, an ancient common meadow, and though decayed in its heart, is reckoned still among the principal bounds of Ringmer Forest. Its girth at the height of a man’s arms is over twenty feet. Beneath its spreading branches stands an upright stone of immemorial antiquity, which only the righteous wrath of a local archæologist succeeded in preserving a few years since from the modern desecration of a Jubilee inscription. This close combination of sacred tree and sacred stone is frequent and significant; it occurs all the world over, from Britain to the New Hebrides; it is found in India, in Syria, in Germany, in Ceylon, in civilized Rome, in barbaric New Guinea. Wherever the sacred tree spreads its brooding circle of welcome shade, there under its huge boughs the sacred stone bears witness to antique or still surviving rites of human sacrifice.
It is this, indeed, that gives our British Gospel Oaks their unique interest amid the public monuments of England. Alone among the temples of our old heathen faith they have outlived the overwhelming deluge of Christianity. In the south of Europe we have still the Parthenon and the columns of Pæstum to testify boldly to the older creeds. In the north, where temples made with hands were rarer, where art had not learned to raise such colossal piles as Karnak or Denderah, the sacred oak alone remains to us now as a lingering memorial of the cult of our ancestors. Even these, too, have been Christianized, in accordance with Gregory’s well-known advice to Augustine. The holy sites of the ancient faiths, said the wise Pope, in his epistle, were still to be respected; but the demons who inhabited them were to be exorcised by the use of Christian symbols, and the temples were to be sanctified to Christian worship. In accordance with this policy, a figure of the cross was marked upon the bark of the old sacred tree in Walford Ploy-Field, which thus became known as the Crouch or Cross Oak; for the Latin crux came first into our language under the truer English form of crouch, and only assumed its later pronunciation of cross under northern influences. Similar Christianization of holy oaks, shire oaks, boundary oaks, Druid oaks, and other heathen temples or heathen termini, went on all over England; so that what were once Thunor’s trees and Woden’s trees, or still earlier, the sacred haunts of native Celtic deities, became in the end those “Gospel Oaks,” under which, at the annual beating of the bounds, the priest stopped with his acolytes to read a few verses of St. Luke or St. Matthew. Sometimes, indeed, hardly more than the memory of some particular episode in the history of the sacred tree now survives, as at Addlestone, near Chertsey, where there is also a crouch oak, chiefly famous at present from a local tradition that Wickliffe once preached under its canopy of branches. But the older holy and even phallic virtue of this sacred trunk is proved by the fact that decoctions of its bark taken internally, after a well-known and almost world-wide fashion, are still considered by the girls of the village to operate as a love-charm.
The history of these ancient trees, so far as we can reconstruct it from the piecemeal evidence, is picturesque and singular. Originally, I believe, they were planted as saplings over the barrow or tumulus of some barbaric chieftain; not a few of them, indeed — like the King’s Oak at Tilford, near Farnham — still retain some title which recalls their royal or funereal origin. The sacred stone, which in every case seems once to have stood under their dense shade, was doubtless at first the standing-stone or gravestone of the buried chief; though later it probably served as an unhewn altar for the village sacrifices, like that offering of the lamb which till recent years was still torn to pieces on an anniversary festival in the Ploy-Field at Holne, in Devonshire. Every year, in point of fact, the people of each village used once to perambulate their bounds, as at the Roman Terminalia, and offer up at each holy tree and each terminus stone, which formed the main landmarks, a human sacrifice. The victims were usually boys — most probably captives from neighbouring tribes or villages; failing that, they were “bought with a price” within the tribe itself from their unnatural parents. Traces of these customs survive all the world over, while the practice itself is closely bound up with the worship of Terminus and other boundary spirits. In later and milder days, however, though the habit of beating the bounds survived, the incidents that accompanied it were considerably mitigated. The ceremony at first was essentially an exorcism, or driving of evil spirits beyond the village limits; and the boys seem to have been slaughtered as boundary guardians, in order that their ghosts might protect and maintain the local frontier. They were also scourged before being put to death, after a common superstition, so that their tears might act as a sympathetic rain-charm. But in later Christian days it began to be felt that to read the Gospels under the sacred oak of the boundary would sufficiently drive away all evil influences; and though the boys were still beaten at each terminus as a rain-charm, the meaning of the incident was so wholly forgotten that it was commonly interpreted as a means of impressing the boundaries on their memories — a foolish gloss of the usual fatuous eighteenth-century rationalizing type. Thus the Gospel Oak at Cheriton is now only remembered as the tree under which the Gospel was read at the perambulation of the bounds; the Crouch Oak at Addlestone has sunk into a prosaic legal boundary-mark of Windsor Forest; and the Twelve Apostles at Burley, near Ringwood, now reduced to five, have been finally Christianized out of all recognition, so that I cannot even conjecturally reconstruct their original dedication to some ancient Celtic or Teutonic deities.