At a later period the Turbervilles came into the possession of the manor of Bere Regis at the breaking up of Tarent Abbey, and at this time the good fortune of the family was at its zenith. But with the spoils of the church came a gradual and general downfall of the old family, and with the increased riches, we may conjecture, the Turbervilles went roaring on their way more riotously than ever. There is an entry in the parish registers of Bere, under the year 1710, of the interment of Thomas Turberville, the last of the ancient race. An intermediate stage of the house is represented by D'Albigny Turberville, the oculist mentioned by Pepys, who died in 1696 and was buried in Salisbury Cathedral. After the year 1710 the old manor-house of the Turbervilles, standing near the church, was strangely silent. Their time was over and gone, the wine had been drunk, the singers had departed. But the stories of their carousals and great deeds were still a matter for dispute and discussion at the village inn, and the eerie old house was especially regarded with feelings of awe and few cared to go near it after dark. It was not what they had seen, but what they might see, that caused them to shun the old place. I can picture the Dorset rustic of that time (and the distance between Hodge the "Goodman" of 1710 and Hodge the driver of the motor tractor is almost nothing at all) shaking his head on being asked his reasons for avoiding the house, and saying, with a grin, as how he "shouldn't like to go poking about such a divered [dead] old hole." The ancient manor-house was allowed to lapse into ruin, and now nothing at all remains but a few crumbling stones: "Through broken walls and grey The winds blow bleak and shrill; They are all gone away. Nor is there one to-day To speak them good or ill; There is nothing more to say." There is reason to believe that the rustics in Wilts and Dorset who bear different forms of the name Turberville, altered into Tellafield and Troublefield, are in truth the descendants of illegitimate branches of the family. One ancient Dorset rustic with the name of Tollafield, who aroused my interest, said to me in all seriousness that he would not care to go rummaging into the history of the old Turberville people. "You depend upon it, they were a bad lot--the parson told me so. There is no telling what them folks' speerits might not be up to, if so be the old devil had got ahold on 'em." This rustic, though an old man, had an eye as keen as a hawk's, was a man of immensely powerful frame, and would sleep under a hedge any night and feel little the worse for it. When I looked at his clear, hard blue eyes and straight, haughty nose he gave me the feeling that the Turberville blood had really survived in him. Then I learned that he was a flagrant poacher and, like the old earth-stopper in Masefield's poem,