on the 1st of May was
entitled to a dish of cream for breakfast. This custom is now disused,
not so much from the reluctance of the masters to give the reward, as
from the inability of the servants to find the Whitethorn in
flower."--BRAND'S _Antiquities_.[112:1] Even those who might not see the
beauty of an old Thorn tree, have found its uses as one of the very few
trees that will grow thick in the most exposed places, and so give
pleasant shade and shelter in places where otherwise but little shade
and shelter could be found.

"Every shepherd tells his tale
Under the Hawthorn in the dale."--MILTON.

And "at Hesket, in Cumberland, yearly on St. Barnabas' Day, by the
highway side under a Thorn tree is kept the court for the whole forest
of Englewood."--_History of Westmoreland._

The Thorn may well be admitted as a garden shrub either in its ordinary
state, or in its beautiful double white, red, and pink varieties, and
those who like to grow curious trees should not omit the Glastonbury
Thorn, which flowers at the ordinary time, and bears fruit, but also
buds and flowers again in winter, showing at the same time the new
flowers and the older fruit.

Nor must we omit to mention that the Whitethorn is one of the trees that
claims to have been used for the sacred Crown of Thorns. It is most
improbable that it was so, in fact almost certain that it was not; but
it was a mediaeval belief, as Sir John Mandeville witnesses: "Then was
our Lord yled into a gardyn, and there the Jewes scorned hym, and maden
hym a crowne of the branches of the Albiespyne, that is Whitethorn, that
grew in the same gardyn, and setten yt upon hys heved. And therefore
hath the Whitethorn many virtues. For he that beareth a branch on hym
thereof, no thundre, ne no maner of tempest may dere hym, ne in the
howse that it is ynne may non evil ghost enter."

And we may finish the Hawthorn with a short account of its name, which
is interesting:--"Haw," or "hay," is the same word as "hedge" ("sepes,
id est, _haies_," John de Garlande), and so shows the great antiquity of
this plant as used for English hedges. In the north, "haws" are still
called "haigs;" but whether Hawthorn was first applied to the fruit or
the hedge, whether the hedge was so called because it was made of the
Thorn tree that bears the haws, or whether the fruit was so named
because it was borne on the hedge tree, is a point on which etymologists
differ.

FOOTNOTES: