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 arch?ologist 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 P?stum 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 th............