Travellers by road who fleet from Hockerill on to Newport, turning neither to the right nor left, pass through Stansted Street and know nothing of the ancient village of Stansted Mountfitchet, of which it is an offshoot. It is a pity, for that village is a distinctly interesting place. Turning to the right hand at the cross-roads, one arrives at the centre of the old settlement in less than half a mile. It was originally built in a deep hollow, under the heavy shadow of the giant earthworks on whose shoulders the Gernons or Montfichets in early Norman times built a tremendous Giant Blunderbore of a castle. Somewhere here, in very remote times, stood a stone building, probably a ruined Roman villa, whence the Saxon name of Stane Stead derived; but its site and its history are alike unknown, and the knightly deeds of the Montfichets are equally forgotten. That Norman family obtained its original name of Gernon from some ancestor who especially distinguished himself by going unshaven in times when (if we may believe the evidence of the clean-shaven, or merely moustached, effigies of Norman warriors) it was the fashion to shave. His comrades, like the vulgar boys of the present day, who shout “there’s ’air!” after any inordinately hairy person, gave him the nickname of “Les Gernons,” which means “Whiskers”; and, in a manner common at that time, when family names derived from individual peculiarities, it was as “Whiskers” that his descendants became known, whether they went whiskered or whiskerless. They are found referred to as “Gernon” and “Grenon,” but it was not very long before they dropped the name for that of their castle, built on the ancient mound that was here when they came, and named by them “Mont FichÉ,” or “firm mount.”

It is many years since these ancient lords of Stansted became extinct, and even the famous family of De Veres, who succeeded to their property, has followed them into oblivion. Their stout castle, too, has gone the way of many another sturdy fortalice, and only the great mounds and fosses that girdle and seam the hillside are left. “Only,” we say, but a word with so depreciatory a sound is scarcely in order when used in connection with these impressive earthworks that fire the imagination of even the casual railway traveller. For it is from the railway those castle mounds are most impressively seen, just as it is from the railway station that Stansted village looks its best. In the hasty glance from the passing train, the village roofs, rising one above the other up the hillside, seem to be crowned by the dignified tower of some benignant old church, richly pinnacled and turreted in the South Devon manner, and it is only on closer acquaintance one discovers this to be no worshipful old building, but the modern (1889) district church of St. John, built to the joint honour and glory of God and one of the Pulteney family. It is built of red brick, with Bath stone enrichments—very rich and sugary, and probably from the designs of a confectioner principally engaged in the manufacture of ornamental Twelfth-cakes. The exterior of the tower, prodigal in pinnacles, crockets, and mediÆval fandanglums of all sorts, and stuck about with blank windows that open upon nothing, is surely the last word in the ready-made picturesque, and lacks the reposeful dignity properly belonging to a church. The interior, where there is less scope for riotous fancy, is better.

The old church is over a mile distant from the village, and stands in or beside Stansted Park. Its situation, remote from the life of the place, but closely adjoining the Hall, tells us that the ancient lords of Stansted who built and maintained it held the welfare of their own souls dear, and that of the people’s immortal part altogether too cheap. Indeed, rightly considered, the building and maintenance of this and many another church of its kind was in the nature of an insurance policy against fire—the dreaded eternal fire.

It is a small Norman and Early English building, restored in 1889 and rubbed up and carpeted in rather a drawing-room style of comfort, so that the monumental effigies look somewhat second-hand and apologetic. The battered, crusading, or, at any rate, cross-legged, effigy of one Roger de Lancaster looks even tenth-hand, and, shoved into a dimly lighted corner, with a bar of Windsor soap in his mouth, a mop and a pail and other housewifely things disposed negligently about his mailed person, is the picture of ancient dignity in reduced circumstances. The tomb, with recumbent effigy, in the south wall of the chancel, is that of Sir Thomas Middleton, 1631. With him lies his wife, killed by a stag in Stansted Park.

The alabaster tomb, with life-sized and coloured effigy of Esther Salusburye in the Lancaster Chapel, is found unexpectedly by the stranger, behind the organ. The full-length figure lying there, so naturally coloured and dressed in the height of fashion of that bygone year of 1604, when she died, is so extraordinarily lifelike that one almost shrieks with momentary fright; and indeed the work is so perfect, it rather resembles a human being masquerading as an effigy than a mere carved and painted mass of stone. Her high-heeled shoes, the black-painted Early Jacobean skirt and bodice, with the deep lace cuffs, generous ruff, and high-crowned hat, form a perfect picture of an English lady’s costume in the days when James I. was King.

Stansted Street, skirting the main road with its old-fashioned but nondescript houses, has lost much of its picturesqueness of late years. The “White Bear,” kept in old times by Daniel Gilbey, and the “Old Bell” have disappeared, and it rejoices in a very new and ornate white brick house, designed in the snoburban style of architecture. A horse at full stretch is carved over the door, together with the inscription, “Galloping Villa.” If you ask any of the admiring villagers for information about this astonishing house, and why “Galloping,” they tell you “it belongs to Mr. ——, of the roundabouts.” Immediately opposite is a house and shop, whose builder or owner appears to have been extraordinarily proud of his building, for it bears not only the date of the year, but even the day of the particular month when it was finished: “L.S.T., July y^e 25, 1759.”

The very handsome old red-brick house, standing high above the road on approaching Ugley, and attracting attention by its fine wrought-iron gates and general air of distinction, is Orford House, built by Admiral Edward Russell, who commanded the allied English and Dutch fleets in their victory over the French at La Hague in 1692. The Admiral was created Earl of Orford in 1727.

The country grows particularly pretty as we approach Ugley, fields giving place to dense plantations, with oak woods and almost impenetrable coverts, presenting a vivid picture to the mind’s eye of what the great Forest of Essex must have been like in the long ago. “What’s in a name?” asks Shakespeare. Not much here, if we take that of Ugley by its sound; but a good deal if we make due enquiry, for it is really “Oakley,” the “oak meadow,” and, as Oakley, we do actually now find certain upstart signposts and wayside parish marks naming it. Again, if we leave the road and take the footpath that leads across a meadow (? the original “oak lea”) to the church, we shall find in the little churchyard the tombstone of an incumbent, dead not long since, who is described as vicar of “Oakley.” He had probably been a lifelong sufferer from the old rhymed pleasantry:—

In short, only the handsomest of men with the most amiable of natures can possibly afford to take the living of Ugly, for should the parson be plain, the obvious remarks as to his peculiar fitness for the place would become a burden to him, and unless of an angelic disposition, his “ugly temper” might be commented upon. Fortunately Ugley is among the smallest of places, and therefore the Ugley girls with feelings to be scarified by such a description are few. But, on the other hand, how easy the way to a most ingratiating compliment, in the exclamation of surprise:—

“You come from Ugley? Impossible!”

“Why impossible?”

“Because——”

But here you fill the hiatus to your own individual taste in flattery.

The embarrassments of such a place-name are many, and are not so easily surmounted as those of the Scilly Islanders, who are “Scillonians,” rather than Scilly people. Ugley, however, has a near neighbour in misfortune, in the hamlet of Nasty, to be found by the curious, scarce more than ten miles away, between Great Munden and Braughing, in Hertfordshire.

Ugley is said to have been the “Quercetum” of the Romans, so named by them “from the locality abounding in oaks.” In Domesday Book it is “Uggheley,” and it is even found written by some ancient vulgarian as “Huggele,” a really h’odious variant.

Ugley church is situated, as I have here made effort to show, in a very pretty setting of trees. They are not oaks, as they should be; but that would be to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” of allusion, and we must not expect such fitness and completeness. It is a small church, placed just outside a farmyard, but stands otherwise solitary and unheeded by those who keep the main road. It might be thought the Georgian red-brick tower was built on to the ancient body by some one concerned to make it fit the place-name—for it is not beautiful—did we not know that Georgian towers, and churches too, were commonly hideous, and this, therefore, by no means exceptional. But the kindly aid of Nature has done much here, and “that rare old plant, the ivy green,” has mantled the stark design to such purpose that it now gives the ideal rustic effect presented by the literary efforts of Gray’s “Elegy,” and the artistic convention of Birket Foster’s drawings. Its note is one with the Christmas cards of our youth, when no one was ashamed of such pictures as that of the old parish church in the snow, or the Robin Redbreast on his spray of holly.