This is Strutt's plate of the Crawley Elm, which, he says, grows in the middle of the village, providing “an inexhaustible source of pleasure to the train of village children who cluster like bees around it; trying their infant strength and courage in climbing its mimic precipices, while their parents recall, in their pastimes, the feelings of their own childhood; when, like them, they disported under the same boughs.”
A less rose-tinted view of the Crawley Elm was provided in another book on trees, Henry Phillips’ Sylva Florifera, published in 1823. He says that a poor woman once gave birth in this tree, and lived there for a long time, but that it is now kept locked up to prevent such infants becoming a burden on the local poor-rates:
… as the parish is not willing to be burthened with all the young elms which might have been brought forth from the trunk of this singular tree, the lord of the manor has very wisely put up a door at the entrance of this lying-in hospital, and which is kept locked, except upon particular occasions, when the neighbours meet to enjoy their pipe, and tell old tales in the cavity of this elm, that is capable of containing a party of more than a dozen.
Strutt makes no mention of the locked door or the story of the poor woman giving birth, details which rather undermine the impression of bucolic harmony and happiness given by his more or less contemporary account of the Crawley Elm.
A less rose-tinted view of the Crawley Elm was provided in another book on trees, Henry Phillips’ Sylva Florifera, published in 1823. He says that a poor woman once gave birth in this tree, and lived there for a long time, but that it is now kept locked up to prevent such infants becoming a burden on the local poor-rates:
… as the parish is not willing to be burthened with all the young elms which might have been brought forth from the trunk of this singular tree, the lord of the manor has very wisely put up a door at the entrance of this lying-in hospital, and which is kept locked, except upon particular occasions, when the neighbours meet to enjoy their pipe, and tell old tales in the cavity of this elm, that is capable of containing a party of more than a dozen.
Strutt makes no mention of the locked door or the story of the poor woman giving birth, details which rather undermine the impression of bucolic harmony and happiness given by his more or less contemporary account of the Crawley Elm.
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