BERE REGIS
THIS “blinking little place,” and now perhaps a not even blinking, but
fast asleep village, was at one time a market-town, and, more than that,
as its latinised name would imply, a royal residence. Kingsbere, said to
mean “Kingsbury”—that is to say, “King’s place” or building—really
obtained its name in very different fashion. It was plain “Bere,” long
before the Saxon monarchs came to this spot and caused the latter-day
confusion among antiquaries of the British “bere,” meaning an underwood,
a scrub, copse, bramble, or thorn-bed, with the Anglo-Saxon “byrig.” We
have but to look upon the surroundings of Bere Regis even at this day, a
thousand years later, to see how truly descriptive that British name
really was. It was of old a place greatly favoured by royalty, from that
remote age when Elfrida murdered her stepson, Edward the King and Martyr,
at Corfe Castle, and thrashed her own son Ethelred here with a large wax
candle, for reproaching her with the deed. Those events happened in A.D.
978, and it is therefore not in any way surprising that no traces of the
ferocious Queen Elfrida’s residence have survived. Ethelred, we are
told, hated wax candles ever after that severe thrashing, and doubtless
hated Bere as well; but it was more than ever a royal resort in the later
times of King John, who visited it on several occasions in the course of
his troubled reign. Thenceforward, however, the favours of monarchs
ceased, and it came to depend upon the good will of the Abbots of Tarent
Abbey and that of the Turbervilles, who between them became owners of the
manor.
The village street of Bere is bleak and barren. It is a street of rustic
cottages of battered red brick, or a compost of mud, chopped straw, and
lime, called “cob,” built on a brick base, often plastered, almost all of
them thatched: some with new thatch, some with thatch middle-aged, others
yet with thatch ancient and decaying, forming a rich and fertile bed for
weeds and ox-eyed daisies and “bloody warriors,” as the local Dorsetshire
name is for the rich red wall-flowers. Sometimes the old thatch has been
stripped before the new was placed: more often it has not, and the merest
casual observer can, as he passes, easily become a critic of the
thoroughness or otherwise with which the thatcher’s work has been
performed, not only by sight of the different shades belonging to old and
new, but by the varying thicknesses with which the roofs are seen to be
covered. Here an upstairs window looks out immediately, open-eyed, upon
the sunlight; there another peers blinkingly forth, as behind beetling
eyebrows, from half a yard’s depth of straw and reed, shading off from a
coal-black substratum to a coffee-coloured layer, and thence to the amber
top-coating of the latest addition. Warm in winter, cool in summer, is
the testimony of cottagers towards thatch; and earwiggy always, thinks
the stranger under such roofs, as he observes quaint lepidoptera
ensconced comfortably in his bed. Picturesque it certainly is, expensive
too, although it may not generally be thought so; but it is more enduring
than cheap slates or tiles, and, according to many who should know, if
indeed their prejudices do not warp their statements, cheaper in the long
run.
[Picture: Bere Regis]
It is, in fine, not easy to come to a definitive pronouncement on the
merits or demerits, the comparative cheapness or costliness, of rival
roofing materials. The cost of the materials themselves, payments for
laying them, and the astonishing difference between the enduring
qualities of thatch well and thatch indifferently laid forbid certitude.
But all modern local authorities are opposed to thatch, chiefly on the
score of its liability to fire. All the many and extensive fires of
Dorsetshire have been caused by ignited thatch; or else, caused in other
ways, have been spread and magnified by it. Yet, here again your rustic
will stoutly defend the ancient roofing, and declare that while such a
roof is slowly smouldering, and before it bursts into a blaze, he can
dowse it with a pail of water. No doubt, but that water, from a well
perhaps two hundred feet deep, and that ladder from some neighbour
half-a-mile away, are sometimes not to be brought to bear with the
required celerity.
This, let it be fervently said, is not an attack upon thatch: it is but
the presentation of pros and cons, and is no argument in favour of that
last word in utilitarian hideousness, corrugated galvanized iron, under
whose shelter you freeze in winter and fry in summer.
Meanwhile, here are ruined cottages in the long street of Bere, whose
condition has been brought about by just such causes, and whose
continuation in that state is due, not to a redundancy of dwellings, but
because the Lady of the Manor at Charborough, despising the insignificant
rents here, will not trouble about, or go to the expense of, rebuilding.
Hence the gaps in the long row, like teeth missing from a jaw.
Not a little hard-featured and stern at first sight, owing to the entire
absence of the softening feature of gardens upon the road, this long
street of Bere has yet a certain self-reliant strong-charactered aspect
that brings respect. It has, too, the most interesting and beautiful
church, rich in historical, and richer in literary, associations.
[Picture: Bere Regis]
Bere Regis in its decay is a storehouse of old Dorset speech and customs.
To its cottagers vegetables are “gearden-tackle,” sugar—at least, the
moist variety—is “zand,” and garden-flowers all have quaint outlandish
names. The rustic folk have a keen, if homely philosophy. “Ef ’twarnt
for the belly,” said one to the present writer, in allusion to cost of
living, “back ’ud wear gold.” “Bere,” said another—an ‘outlandish’
person he, who had only been settled in the village a decade or so and
accordingly was only regarded as a stranger, and so indeed regarded
himself—“Bere, a poor dra’lattin twankyten pleace, ten mile from
anywheer, God help it!” which is so very nearly true that, if you consult
the map you will find that Dorchester is ten miles distant, Corfe Castle
twelve, Wimborne twelve, Blandford eight, and Wareham, the nearest town,
seven miles away.
“Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” as Mr. Hardy elects to rechristen Bere Regis,
owes the ultimate limb of that compound name to Woodbury Hill, a lofty
elevation rising like an exaggerated down, but partly clothed with trees,
on the outskirts of Bere Regis. The novelist describes this scene of an
ancient annual fair, now much shrunken from its olden import, rather as
it was than as it is. “Greenhill was the Nijni Novgorod of South Wessex;
and the busiest, merriest, noisiest day of the whole statute number was
the day of the sheep-fair. This yearly gathering was upon the summit of
a hill, which retained in good preservation the remains of an ancient
earthwork, consisting of a huge rampart and entrenchment of an oval form,
encircling the top of the hill, though somewhat broken down here and
there. To each of the two openings, on opposite sides, a winding road
ascended, and the level green space of twenty or thirty acres enclosed by
the bank was the site of the fair. A few permanent erections dotted the
spot, but the majority of the visitors patronised canvas alone for
resting and feeding under during the time of their sojourn here.”
The place looks interesting, viewed from beneath whence two
forlorn-looking houses are seen perched on the very ridge of the windy
height. But it is always best to remain below, and so to keep romantic
illusions; and here is no exception. Climbing to the summit, those two
houses are increased to fifteen or seventeen red-brick, storm-beaten
cottages, some thatched, others slated, mostly uninhabited; all
commonplace. The fair is still held in September, beginning on the 18th,
the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Formerly it lasted a week, and,
at the rate of a hundred pounds a day in tolls to the Lord of the Manor,
brought that fortunate person an annual “unearned increment” as the
Radicals would call it, of £700. Nowadays those tolls are very much of a
negligible quantity.
Here it was, during the sheep fair, that Troy, supposed to have long
before been drowned in Lulworth Cove, but living and masquerading as Mr.
Francis, the Great Cosmopolitan Roughrider, enacted the part of Dick
Turpin in the canvas-covered show, and, looking through a hole in the
tent, unobserved himself, observed Bathsheba, who had thought him dead.
The villagers of Bere look askance upon the dwellers on this eyrie. They
tell you “they be gipsy vo’k up yon,” and hold it to be the last resort
of those declining in worldly estate. Villagers going, metaphorically,
“down the hill” in the direction of outdoor relief, move to the less
desirable cottages in the village, and then, complete penury at last
overtaking them, continue their moral and economic descent by the
geographical ascent of this hill of Woodbury, whence they are at last
removed to “The Union.”
Below Woodbury Hill, on the edge of Bere Wood, the scene of an old
Turberville attempt at illegal enclosure, is rural Bloxworth, whose
little church contains the fine monument of Sir John Trenchard “of the
ancient family of the Trenchards in Dorsetshire,” Sergeant-at-Law and
Secretary of State in the reign of William and Mary. He died in 1695,
aged 46. Ten years before, he had been an active sympathiser with the
Duke of Monmouth, in that ill-fated rebellion, and it is told, how, when
visiting one Mr. Speke at Ilchester, hearing that Jeffreys had issued a
warrant for his arrest, he instantly took horse, rode to Poole and thence
crossed to Holland, returning with the Prince of Orange three years
later.
Above all other interest at Bere is the beautiful church, standing a
little distance below the long-drawn village street, and clearly from its
character and details, a building cherished and beautified by the Abbey
of Tarent, by the Turbervilles, and by Cardinal Archbishop Morton, native
of the place.
The three-staged pinnacled tower is very fine, the lower stage
alternately of stone and flint, the three surmounting courses diapered:
the second and third stages treated wholly in that chessboard fashion.
The beautiful belfry windows, of three lights, divided into three stages
by transoms, are filled with pierced stonework. The exterior south wall
of the church is of alternate red brick and flint, in courses of threes.
There is a remarkable window in the west wall of the north aisle, and in
the south wall the exceptionally fine and unusual Turberville window, of
late Gothic character and five lights, filled in modern times by the
Erle-Drax family, of Charborough, with a series of stained-glass armorial
shields, displaying the red lion of the Turbervilles, all toe-nails and
whiskers, and ducally crowned, ramping against an ermine field, firstly
by himself and then conjointly with the arms of the families with which
the Turbervilles, in the course of many centuries, allied themselves.
The Erle-Draxes have not, in honouring the extinct Turberville, forgotten
themselves, for some of the shields display their arms and those of the
Sawbridges, Grosvenors, Churchills, and Eggintons they married.
[Picture: Bere Regis: Interior of Church]
Entering, the building is seen to be even more beautiful than without.
Its most striking and unusual feature—unusual in this part of the
country—is the extraordinarily gorgeous, elaborately carved and painted
timber roof, traditionally said to have been the gift of Cardinal Morton,
born at Milborne Stileman, in the parish of Bere Regis. The hammer-beams
are boldly carved into the shapes of bishops, cardinals, and pilgrims,
while the bosses are worked into great faces that look down with a fat
calm satisfaction that must be infinitely reassuring to the
congregations.
The bench ends are another interesting feature. Many are old, others are
new, done in the old style when the church was admirably restored by
Street. Had Sir Gilbert Scott been let loose upon it, it may well be
supposed that the surviving bench-ends would have been cast out, and nice
new articles by the hands of his pet firm of ecclesiastical furnishers
put in their stead. One is dated, in Roman numerals, MCCCCCXLVII;
another is inscribed “IOH. DAV. WAR. DENOF. THYS. CHARYS,” and another
bears a merchant’s mark, with the initial of “I. T.” The Transitional
Norman pillars are bold and virile, with humorous carvings of that period
strikingly projecting from their capitals. It evidently seemed to that
now far-away waggish fellow who sculptured them that toothache and
headache were things worth caricaturing. Let us hope he never suffered
from them, but he evidently took as models some who were such martyrs.
[Picture: Pew ends in Bere Regis Church]
But the centre of interest to us in these pages is by the Turberville
window in the south aisle, beneath whose gorgeous glass is the great
ledger-stone, covering the last resting-place of the extinct family. It
is boldly lettered:
_Ostium sepulchri antiquae_
_Famillae Turberville_
_24 Junij 1710_
(_The door of the sepulchre_
_of the ancient family_
_of the Turbervilles_).
In the wall beneath the window is a defaced Purbeck marble altar-tomb,
and four others neighbour it. These are the tombs described in _Tess of
the D’Urbervilles_ as “canopied, altar-shaped, and plain; their brasses
torn from their matrices, the rivet-holes remaining, like marten-holes in
a sand-cliff,” and it was on one of those that Alec D’Urberville lay
prone, in pretence of being an effigy of one of her ancestors, when Tess
was exploring the twilight church.
The great monumental _History of Dorsetshire_ tells the enquirer a good
deal of the Turbervilles who, being themselves all dead and gone to their
place, have, with a slight alteration in the spelling of their name
served as a peg on which to hang the structure of one of the finest
exercises ever made in the art of novel writing. It seems that the
Turbervilles descended from one Sir Pagan or Payne Turberville, or de
Turbida Villa, who is shown in the Roll of Battle Abbey—or was shown,
before that Roll was accidentally burnt—to have come over with the
Conqueror. After the Battle of Hastings he seems to have been one of
twelve knights who helped Robert Fitz Hamon, Lord of Estremaville, in his
unholy enterprises, and then to have returned to England when his
over-lord was created Earl of Gloucester. He warred in that lord’s
service, in the Norman conquest of Glamorgan, and was rewarded with a
tit-bit of spoil there, in the shape of the lordship of Coyty.
In the reign of Henry III. a certain John de Turberville is found paying
an annual fee or fine in respect of some land in the forest of Bere,
which an ancestor of his had impudently endeavoured to enclose out of the
estate of the Earl of Hereford; and in 1297 a member of the family is
found in the neighbourhood of Bere Regis. This Brianus de Thorberville,
or Bryan Turberville, was lord of the manor, called from its situation on
the river Piddle, and from himself, “Piddle Turberville,” and now
represented by the little village called Bryan’s Piddle.
[Picture: Bere Regis: the Turberville Window]
At a later period the rising fortunes of this family are attested by
their coming into possession of half of the manor of Bere Regis, the
other half being, as it had long been, the property of Tarent Abbey.
Still later, when at last that Abbey was dissolved, the Turbervilles were
in the enjoyment of good fortune, for the other half of the manor then
came to them. This period seems to have marked the summit of their
advancement, for from that time they gradually but surely decayed, giving
point to the old superstition which dates the decadence of many an old
family from that day when it sacrilegiously was awarded the spoils of the
Church. This fall from position began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth,
but D’Albigny Turberville, the oculist who was consulted by Pepys the
diarist, and eventually died in 1696, as the tomb to him with the fulsome
inscription in Salisbury Cathedral tells us, was a distinguished scion of
the ancient race, as also was “George Turberville, gentleman,” and poet,
born at Winterborne Whitchurch, and publishing books of poems and travels
in 1570. These, doubtless, were not forms of distinction that would have
commended themselves to those old fighting and land-snatching
Turbervilles; but, other times, other manners.
The last Turberville of Bere Regis was that Thomas Turberville over whom
the ancient vault of his stock finally closed in 1710. His twin
daughters and co-heiresses, Frances and Elizabeth, born here in 1703,
sold the property and left for London. They died at Purser’s Cross,
Fulham, near London, early in 1780, and were buried together at Putney.
Shortly afterwards their old manor-house of Bere Regis, standing near the
church, was allowed to lapse into ruin, and thus their kin became only a
memory where they had ruled so long. Of the old branch of the family
settled in Glamorganshire, a Colonel Turberville remains the
representative, but the position of the various rustics who in Dorset and
Wilts bear the name, corrupted variously into Tollafield and
Troublefield, is open to the suspicion that they are the descendants of
illegitimate offspring of that race. There remained, indeed, until quite
recent years a humble family of “Torevilles” in Bere Regis, one of whom
persisted in calling himself “Sir John.” But as Mr. Hardy says, in the
course of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, instances of the gradual descent
of legitimate scions of the old knightly families, down and again
downwards until they have become mere farm-labourers, are not infrequent
in Wilts and Dorset. Their high-sounding names have undergone outrageous
perversions, as in the stated instance of courtly Paridelle into rustic
Priddle; but, although they have inherited no worldly gear they own the
same blood.