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The Serpent's Tale (History)
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aurelius



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Wine aged in barrels takes up some of the compounds from the wood. Gradually it was realised that the flexibility of the wood was not the only consideration:

Pliny the Elder, who died in 79 AD, wrote that storing wine in barrels made of Yew made it poisonous

https://www.bordeaux-undiscovered.co.uk/blog/bordeaux-aged-in-pine-barrels/

Unless you wanted to end it all:

A former school librarian killed himself by eating poisonous yew tree leaves after losing his job, an inquest has heard.


This, in 2014; his father

read his son’s diaries after he died, told the hearing: “He must have had thoughts of suicide because he mentioned yew tree leaves in his diaries".


and

Already the Celts and ancient Germanic peoples knew about the poisonousness of the yew, which played an important part in the mythology of these civilizations. For hunting, the arrows were made poisonous with yew juice, and yew leaves were used for homicide and suicide. In modern times taxine is rarely used with suicidal intent, although this method is actually recommended on the respective Websites. After a 14-year-old boy had intensively studied poisonous plants and methods of suicide on various Websites, he cut leaves from a yew tree (taxus baccata) in his parents' garden, crushed and ingested them and died soon afterwards. At the forensic autopsy pieces of the partially crushed, partially completely preserved yew leaves were found in the stomach. The histological findings were unspecific, e.g. marked general blood congestion of the internal organs and pronounced cerebral and pulmonary edema. When the tree leaves found in the stomach were viewed under the light microscope, a stoma typical of taxus was observed; chemical-toxicological investigations revealed 3,5-dimethoxyphenol in the gastric content, which is considered a marker for the ingestion of taxus.


Maybe, then, that is why Adam was warned "You may eat from every tree in the garden, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for on the day that you eat it, you will certainly die".
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Mick Harper
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Cranborne Chase remained crown property until 1616, when it was granted to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury. His great-grandson, the 3rd Earl, sold it to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury in 1671. His son, the 2nd Earl, sold it in 1692 to Thomas Freke (d. 1701), who bequeathed it to Elizabeth Freke (the wife of his kinsman, also Thomas Freke) and her father Thomas Pile, with reversion to George Pitt should she die without children. Pitt inherited Cranborne Chase from her in 1714, and it passed from father to son in the Pitt family to his great-grandson George Pitt, 2nd Baron Rivers, after whose death it was disfranchised.[2]

You might have a look at Cranbourne Chase if the underlined people are anything to go by. The first two were pretty much Prime Ministers, the third is presumably the family of two more Prime Ministers and the fourth would seem to indicate the world's first formal archaeologist (Pitt-Rivers).
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aurelius



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Mick Harper wrote:
Remarkably, pollen counts from peat bogs suggest the great forests which returned to Europe after the glaciers retreated consisted of nearly 80% Yew trees.

Remarkable? It transforms our understanding of the universe.

I'm withdrawing this statement, which has been regurgitated on several 'New Age' type sites, as it looks like it is an exaggeration - at least until their unnamed source turns up. This is because the nearest corroboration I can find from a scholarly source merely says "in some places...Northern Alps and eastern Upper Bavaria, local values even reached between 65 and 80 percent respectively..."

Nevertheless, that yews were far more abundant than they are today is supported unanimously.
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aurelius



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The Useful Yew

According to palaeobotanists, yew-like fossils have been found in rocks that are over 200 million years old, which places them after ferns but before the flowering plants really got flowering.

It is unquestionable that Taxus was much more abundant in the Bronze Age than today, and its wood had been exploited by man as early as the Neolithic. Yew trunks and stumps have been found beneath the Fens, swamped by rising sea levels around 6,000 years ago.

Otzi the ice-man’s axe handle is fashioned from yew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi

A 250,000-year-old yew spear found at Clacton in Essex is claimed to be the world’s oldest surviving wooden artefact.



Radio carbon testing has placed the alien-looking Roos Carr figures (above), discovered in East Yorkshire, at around 2600 BC. They, and what may pass as a serpent surf-board into which four were pegged, are made of yew.

(If any of you know of any other uses of the wood apart from the aforementioned tankards, barrels bows and spindles, please let me know.)

Yew withies were used to ‘stitch together’ at least one of the oaken Ferriby boats discovered in the muddy shores of the Humber. The three are from varying dates between 1680 BC and 2030 BC. The Dover Bronze Age boat, for which yew fibres were also employed to pleach the planks, has been dated to 1575-1520 BC. In general the yew- or willow-sewn plank boats from England and Wales, constructed between c.2,000 to 800 BC are the oldest known planked vessels from Atlantic Europe. Using planks rather than hides or a hollowed out tree trunk they represent a significant advance in boatbuilding technology.

Stitching together – joining, leads us to one of those ‘Stone Age word elements’, iug, to join. From this we get yoke, junction and in Latin, iuxta/English juxtapose. Linguists claim the Indo-European root is yewg, and in mythology the World Tree, Yew, joins the Underworld with Asgard.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Hatty wrote:
BehindTheName:
Ewan: Anglicized Scottish form of Eoghan.

Eoghan: Possibly means "born from the yew tree" in Old Celtic. It is sometimes used as a Gaelic form of Eugene.

Eugene: From the Greek name Ευγενιος (Eugenios) which was derived from the Greek word ευγενης (eugenes) meaning "well born", composed of the elements ευ "good, well" and γενης (genes) "born".

(There's gen again.) "Well born" has a hint of "youth" about it.

Taking a leaf out of Komorikid's glossary, 'yew' seems to have 'Yahweh' associations - rebirth, strength, eternity, and beware those who come too close (every part of the yew is poisonous).


Cypress = Cyrus = Christ ?
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Wile E. Coyote


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Maybe boat building ie the grave ferry to otherworld. Still this would better link to cedars.

online wrote:
Cedar oil was used by the Egyptians in embalming as a preservative against decay and the word for it was used figuratively for "immortality" by the Romans. Cedar chest, one made of cedar wood to protect contents from moths and other insects, is attested from 1722. Related: Cedrine.


Nope Wiley is losing the thread. Wouldnt be the first......
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aurelius



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Hatty wrote:

BehindTheName:
Ewan: Anglicized Scottish form of Eoghan.

Eoghan: Possibly means "born from the yew tree" in Old Celtic. It is sometimes used as a Gaelic form of Eugene.

Eugene: From the Greek name Ευγενιος (Eugenios) which was derived from the Greek word ευγενης (eugenes) meaning "well born", composed of the elements ευ "good, well" and γενης (genes) "born".
(There's gen again.) "Well born" has a hint of "youth" about it.


To which can be added

VARIANTS Efigenio, Efigenios, Efigenius, Ephigenio, Ephigenios, Eugen, Eugenio, Eugenios, Eugenius, Eugeniusz, Evgeni, Evgeny, Evgueni, Evguenni, Geneâ–¼, Geno, Ifigenio, Ifigenios, Iphigenios, Iphigenius, Jeno, Owenâ–², Yevgeni, Yevgeny

http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Eugene#XaYbJ0Xlee3umDXH.99

This site prefers the meaning of Eugene et al as 'noble aristocrat', but this may be a filtered relic of the once widespread traditions that selected trees were either converted into the first human couple (Norse mythology), bore human fruit (in ancient Greek and Indian tradition) or where individual births took place under (e.g. Zeus born to Rhea under a Poplar).

Shades of the tree as a fecund phallus. Feck!
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aurelius



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Yewtymology (1: British Isles)

The phonetic rendering of ‘yew’ changed little over the centuries, but until the modern standardisation of botanical spelling the written expression certainly has. The OED lists the Old English forms of iuu, eow, eoh; Middle English the variants ewe and ew. Chaucer used ‘Ew’ in the The Knight’s Tale; Turner in his Herball refers to “the berries of the Italian Ughe”; Shakespeare “They told me they would binde me here, unto the body of a dismal Ewghe” (Titus Andronicus); Bacon, ‘Eugh’; Samuel Johnson in his Rambler no.44 threw himself “under a blasted yeugh”. None of them could spell.

As well as in personal names the significance of yew can be traced in settlements. Bevan-Jones, in his Ancient Yew: A History of Taxus baccata makes the point that yew-ish place names don’t appear in areas where the tree has never been recorded, namely Cornwall, Suffolk and Norfolk; but they do appear in many other situations, as with oak of course. Examples are Ivegill (‘yew stream’) in Cumbria, Iwade in Kent, Iden and Ifield in East Sussex, Iwerne in Dorset (recorded in 877 as Ywern), Ewhurst (various counties), Evercreech in Somerset, Eboracum of course...there are many, and allied to these are the numerous ‘Yew Tree Farm’ and ‘Yew Tree Hill’s. In many of these places yews are now as rare as hens’ teeth, or non-existent.

Then we come to the way our Celtic neighbours expressed ‘yew’. In Welsh, yew has been variously ywen, yw, ywe and yreu-yw; in Ireland, County ‘Mayo’ comes from the Irish Magh Eo, meaning ‘plain of the yew’. The country also has six Cell Iubhair’s, meaning ‘yew church’. The old Celtic is eburos, Old Irish ibar, Scots Gaelic iubhar (pronounced ‘ure’). A cemetery in Inverness was known from some Gaelic sources as ‘mound of the yew wood’. I’ll come on to the associations beween churches and yews in a later posting. I know of no ‘oak (dar-) church’.
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Hatty
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It seems rather strange, assuming yews are as poisonous to sheep and cattle as we're told, to choose a place with a yew tree for a farm. Even odder to plant a yew tree there if one didn't already exist.
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aurelius



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Hatty wrote:
It seems rather strange, assuming yews are as poisonous to sheep and cattle as we're told, to choose a place with a yew tree for a farm. Even odder to plant a yew tree there if one didn't already exist.


It does indeed, though I seem to remember that in an earlier thread there was an observation (your own?) that small quantities of yew may have been added to animal feed occasionally to treat parasites...? I think I posted a table which listed the varying livestock tolerance to yew. Deer are identified as having a high maybe the highest - tolerance whilst not being 'livestock' in the traditional sense.

Most livestock would only be tempted to eat yew if their normal food was unavailable and they were hungry, so if their pasture was in part of the farm clear of the yew tree the risk would have been low. My assumption is that this is post-enclosure.

So was the yew deliberately planted by the farmer or was it a relic? If the latter maybe there was some other non-medical reason why it was retained - superstition, perhaps? The provision of shade? To dry out an area of ground?
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Mick Harper
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Deer are identified as having a high maybe the highest - tolerance whilst not being 'livestock' in the traditional sense.

I cannot help thinking there is some connection between these two facts. Just as yews are oddly on the cusp between domesticated and not, so deer are on the same odd cusp.
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Boreades


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aurelius wrote:
Thanks Borry.


You're welcome. :-)

If you enjoyed that, you might like some of the new &/or updated pages:

Exodus
(Movement of Jah Cornish people, or how French was invented in England)
http://grael.uk/exodus

Gnostic Fish
On the connections between Euclid, the English Reformation, James Bond and the Rosicrucians
http://grael.uk/fish

Here Be Dracos!
On the sometimes-violent connections between Drake and Huguenots
http://grael.uk/dracos

The end is a bit of a whimper (re the Proddies -v- Popists) - Mick might have unkind things to say about that?
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Mick Harper
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Your Grael site is coming along nicely. Who knows, you might turn it into a book sometime. Your effusions about Literary French and its relationship to English is covered in the last chapter of Forgeries (you didn't get that far). It's not spelled out--you might care to do so--but the underlying assumption is that while the English made the first stuttering steps, it was the Occitanians who ran with the ball and took it over to Britain (via the Plantagenets) where it transmigrated back to northern France.

There is an AE aspect to this. The French, as you know, are an insufferably arrogant race and while they might, if really pushed, concede some priority to the English, they dismiss Occitanians as a bunch of peasants.
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Boreades


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More thanks.

I'd appreciate feedback on the newest page:
http://grael.uk/brexit410

I might expect a few gratuitous insults on why Brexit 410 is nothing like Brexit 2019, but even so, there is the question of the EU Defence Policy, and Britain is commited to that regardless of Brexit 2019.

I'll get back to the Occitanians ASAP
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Wile E. Coyote


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Nice site design.

Keep it up.
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