An engraving of the Hall and moat, after Stanfield, forms an illustration to the third volume of the 1834 edition of Crabbe.
When Crabbe began _The Village_, it was clearly intended to be, like _The Borough_ later, a picture of Aldeburgh and its inhabitants.

Yet not only Parham, but the country about Belvoir crept in before the poem was completed.

If the passage in Book I.beginning:-- "Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er," describes pure Aldeburgh, the opening lines of Book II., taking a more roseate view of rural happiness:-- "I, too, must yield, that oft amid those woes Are gleams of transient mirth and hours of sweet repose, Such as you find on yonder sportive Green, The squire's tall gate, and churchway-walk between, Where loitering stray a little tribe of friends On a fair Sunday when the sermon ends," are drawn from the pleasant villages in the Midlands (perhaps Allington, where he was afterwards to minister), whither he rambled on his botanising excursions from Belvoir Castle.
George Crabbe and his bride settled down in their apartments at Belvoir Castle, but difficulties soon arose.

Crabbe was without definite clerical occupation, unless he read prayers to the few servants left in charge; and was simply waiting for whatever might turn up in the way of preferment from the Manners family, or from the Lord Chancellor.

The young couple soon found the position intolerable, and after less than eighteen months Crabbe wisely accepted a vacant curacy in the neighbourhood, that of Stathern in Leicestershire, to the humble parsonage of which parish Crabbe and his wife removed in 1785.