Aubrey, referring to this old superstition, says:

"I cannot omit taking notice of the great misfortune in the family of
the Earl of Winchelsea, who at Eastwell, in Kent, felled down a most
curious grove of oaks, near his own noble seat, and gave the first blow
with his own hands. Shortly after his countess died in her bed suddenly,
and his eldest son, the Lord Maidstone, was killed at sea by a
cannon bullet."

Modern European folk-lore still provides us with a curious variety of
these spirit-haunted trees, and hence when the alder is hewn, "it
bleeds, weeps, and begins to speak.[18]" An old tree in the Rugaard
forest must not be felled for an elf dwells within, and another, on the
Heinzenberg, near Zell, "uttered a complaint when the woodman cut it
down, for in it was our Lady, whose chapel now stands upon the
spot."[19]

An Austrian Märchen tells of a stately fir, in which there sits a fairy
maiden waited on by dwarfs, rewarding the innocent and plaguing the
guilty; and there is the German song of the maiden in the pine, whose
bark the boy splits with a gold and silver horn. Stories again are
circulated in Sweden, among the peasantry, of persons who by cutting a
branch from a habitation tree have been struck with death. Such a tree
was the "klinta tall" in Westmanland, under which a mermaid was said to
dwell. To this tree might occasionally be seen snow-white cattle driven
up from the neighbouring lake across the meadows. Another Swedish legend
tells us how, when a man was on the point of cutting down a juniper tree
in a wood, a voice was heard from the ground, saying, "friend, hew me
not." But he gave another stroke, when to his horror blood gushed from
the root[20]. Then there is the Danish tradition[21] relating to the