To stare the woods for roosting pheasants
Up near the tree-trunk on the bough.
He never trod behind a plough.
He and his two sons got their food
From wild things in the field and wood."
It was my fortune to run into the old fellow coming out of the Royal Oak one night with his friends. He was very exuberant and arrogant. I heard him offering to fight three men, "knock one down, t'other come on" style. Then it came over me with a sudden sense of largeness and quietude that the game old ruffian had his place in the order of things. This tyrant of the low Tudor tap-room was perhaps a Turberville, one of the rightful, immemorial owners of the land. If he has not the right to a pheasant for his Sunday dinner, then tell me who has. Perhaps when we, with our picture palaces and styles and jazzy-dances, have passed away our hoary friend the poacher will abide, his feet among his clods, rooted deep in his native soil. And if all this thin veneer of civilisation was suddenly ripped away from us, how should we emerge? Hodge would still go on poaching, sleeping under hedges, outwitting the wild things in the woods and drinking home-brewed ale. He would not even feel any temporary inconvenience. How old-fashioned and out-of-date we with all our new things would feel if we were suddenly brought into line with the eternally efficient Hodge!
From Bere Regis to Wool is a pleasant ride of five or six miles. Close to Wool station is the manor-house, now a farm, which was once the residence of a younger branch of the Turberville family, and readers will remember it is the place where Tess and Angel Clare came to spend their gloomy and tragic honeymoon. In Hardy's Tess the house is called Wellbridge Manor House, in remembrance of the days when Wool was called Welle, on account of the springs which are so plentiful in this district. Of course the house is named from the five-arched Elizabethan bridge which spans the reed-fringed River Frome at this point. Each arch of the bridge is divided by triangular buttresses, which at the road-level form recesses where foot-passengers may take refuge from passing motors or carts. The manor-house is of about the time of Henry VIII., and has been much renovated. Over the doorway a date stone proclaims that the building was raised in 1635 (or 1655), but it has been suggested that this is the date of a restoration or addition to the building. The two pictures of Tess's ancestors mentioned in the novel actually exist, and are to be seen on the wall of the staircase: "two life-sized portraits on panels built into the wall. As all visitors are aware, these paintings represent women of middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten. The long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams."