Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 17, 1906.djvu/336

322 Oak formed the badge of the Stuarts. As, however, it was not evergreen, the Highlanders regarded this as ominous of the fate of the royal house.' Among the many Scottish armorial bearings in which an oak-tree figures Sir James Balfour Paul Lyon gives those of Reginald Macdonald Steuart (1813) as 'Arg. an oak tree vert surmounted of a double-headed eagle displayed or.' Again, in the grounds of Dalhousie Castle, some two miles from Dalkeith, is the famous Edgewell Oak, so called because it stands on the edge of a fine spring. Local tradition has it that a branch falls from the tree whenever a member of the [Ramsay] family dies. The original oak fell early in the eighteenth century; but a new one sprang from the old root, and the tree was still flourishing in 1889.

In England too special sanctity attaches to the mistletoe-bearing oak. At Croydon there used to be a great forest of oak-trees called Norwood, in which at a point where four parishes met stood an ancient tree known as the Vicar's Oak. One of the oaks in this forest bore mistletoe, 'which some persons were so hardy as to cut for the gain of selling it to the apothecaries