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It’s romantic and dramatic history is also captured in the following poem:
"What scenes have pass’d, since first this ancient Yew
In all the strength of youthful beauty grew!
Here patriot Barons might have musing stood,
And plann’d the Charter for their Country’s good;
And here, perhaps, from Runnymede retired,
The haughty John, with secret vengeance fired,Might curse the day which saw his weakness yield
Extorted rights in yonder tented field.
Here too the tyrant Henry felt love’s flame,
And, sighing, breathed his Anne Bolyn’s name;
Beneath the shelter of this Yew-tree’s shade,
The royal lover wood’d the ill-star’d maid;
And yet that neck, round which he fondly hung,
To hear the thrilling accents of her tongue;
That lovely breast, on which his head reclined,
Form’d to have humanized his savage mind;
Were Doom’d to bleed beneath the tyrants steel,
Whose selfish heart might doat, but could not feel.
O had the Yew its direst venom shed,
Upon the cruel Henry’s guilty head,
Ere Englands sons with shuddering grief had seen
A slaughtere’s victim in their beauteous queen!"
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The few ruins that are left of St Mary’s Priory,
in whose grounds the yew tree once stood.
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