Nearly opposite the dated gateway to the mansion, already engraved and described, is the entrance to the village of Audley End, which is approached through an avenue of trees, [Illustration] which hide it from the road. The first view of its humble habitations, as delineated in our engraving, is very striking, and as simply antique as need be. Its old gables and deep-bowed windows, over which climb the honeysuckle and ivy, tell at once the age of their erection, and carry the spectator back to the days of Elizabeth. It is a compact little village, of about forty cottages, which form a narrow street of close tenements, all of which may be detected at a glance. The ground on which the village is built rises and falls in picturesque undulations; and at its farthest extremity, the gables seen in our next cut belong to the ancient brick tenements, picturesque in decay, of which a view is here given. They are thus described in the volume so [Illustration] frequently quoted:--“The buildings surround two courts, one of which is appropriated to ten old women, permitted to reside there by Lord Braybrooke, to whom the premises belong. The other court is occupied as a farm-house, together with the old chapel, long since converted into a barn; but there are no traces of its former destination, excepting an iron cross on the eastern gable, and the lofty ceiling, supported by oak beams; and this part of the building is in a very ruinous state.”[21] These premises were, doubtless, originally erected for purposes of charity, and perhaps placed under the control of the monastery, having no especial endowment. At a later period, Thomas first Earl of Suffolk made some allowance to the inmates, and the building is described in the parish register as “my lord’s almshouse;” but his widow discontinued the payments, nor is there any tradition of their having been since claimed as matter of right. “It is recorded in one of the chronicles of Walden Abbey, that on the festival of St. Mark 1258, when Fulco Bishop of London, and Hugo de Balsham Bishop of Norwich, consecrated the church of Walden, Bishop Hugo performed the same ceremony for the chapel of the _Infirmaria_, and granted an indulgence to those who visited it on the feast of its dedication. It also appears from an inquisition, dated the forty-sixth of Edward III., that Humphrey Earl of Essex, Hereford, and Northampton, was seised, _inter alia_, of the advowson of the hospital of the Abbey of Walden; we may therefore suppose the almshouses, or the site which they occupy, to have been the place alluded to, and this conjecture is confirmed by the premises having been described in some old leases as the Hospital Farm.”[22] [Illustration: F. W. Fairholt, Delᵗ. on Stone by W. Walton. M & N. Hanhart, Lithogʳˢ. FEERING HOUSE, ESSEX.] FEERING HOUSE, ESSEX.