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.
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.
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.