No Grass Will Grow on Davies’ Grave

In an English Tradition of the last century, the grass did not merely tremble on the happening of a tragedy; it refused to deck the grave of a man unjustly put to death. In the churchyard at Montgomery is a bare spot of the size and shape of a coffin. It is told that a young farmer incurred the enmity of two prosperous neighbors, who brought a false accusation and had him arrested for highway robbery. He was convicted and sent to his death–for in those times robbery was a hanging matter. Before the execution he said, “If I am innocent of the crime for which I suffer, the grass, for one generation at least, will not cover my grave.” So soon as the bell began to toll for the hanging, the sky darkened, and as Davies put his foot on the scaffold there was a glare of lightning and an appalling roar of thunder that struck terror to his accusers, and the multitude that had assembled to see the killing fled, crying that the end of things had come. In 1852, thirty years after the hanging, a village clergyman in Montgomery wrote that the grass had not yet covered the grave, and that, although attempts had been made to induce a growth, it always died, leaving the soil cold and bare, as if burned off by lightning.

From: Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits, and Plants, by Charles M. Skinner, c. 1911 by J.B. Lippincott Company