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.