Fullers of Bodingmares had lived in the parish of High Tilt for nearly three hundred years. They had come into the neighbourhood as Forest Squires, impoverished by Royal Charles, to eat the bread of poverty and retreat during the days of the Commonwealth. They had sunk into the country of their seclusion when their Cause revived they did not revive with it. The concerns of a Sussex village received their souls just as its churchyard soil received their bodies. The Fullers mixed no more with prelates and nobles, but with country parsons and small squires. Then, as Bodingmares sank from manor to farmhouse, so their company sank to farmers and marsh-graziers; and, as time went on and the big farms of the Rother Valley grew and exalted themselves over Bodingmares, to the small men among these, the tenants, the copy-holders, the fifty-acre men. Slowly yet remorselessly the country of the Rother Levels was eating up the Fullers. Bodingmares stood close to where the River Rother and the River Dudwell flow together in the flats beneath Haremere Hall. The dwelling-house, spiked about with Lombardy poplars, stood among its barns and oasts on the high ground by Bugshull Wood, but the Fullers land their fields of skinny oats, their sheep pastures, their acres of turnips and wurzels sloped down to the brookside, and found shelter there for a loop-shaped hop garden, in summer a place of green twilight and scented, steaming air.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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