HELPSTON.

On the borders of the Lincolnshire fens, half-way between Stamford and
Peterborough, stands the little village of Helpston. One Helpo, a
so-called 'stipendiary knight,' but of whom the old chronicles know
nothing beyond the bare title, exercised his craft here in the Norman
age, and left his name sticking to the marshy soil. But the ground was
alive with human craft and industry long before the Norman knights came
prancing into the British Isles. A thousand years before the time of
stipendiary Helpo, the Romans built in this neighbourhood their
Durobrivae, which station must have been of great importance, judging
from the remains, not crushed by the wreck of twenty centuries. Old urns,
and coins bearing the impress of many emperors, from Trajan to Valens,
are found everywhere below ground, while above the Romans left a yet
nobler memento of their sojourn in the shape of good roads. Except the
modern iron highways, these old Roman roads form still the chief means of
intercommunication at this border of the fen regions. For many
generations after Durobrivae had been deserted by the imperial legions,
the country went downward in the scale of civilization. Stipendiary and
other unhappy knights came in shoals; monks and nuns settled in swarms,
like crows, upon the fertile marsh lands; but the number of labouring
hands began to decrease as acre after acre got into the possession of
mail-clad barons and mitred abbots. The monks, too, vanished in time, as
well as the fighting knights; yet the face of the land remained silent
and deserted, and has remained so to the present moment. The traveller
from the north can see, for thirty miles over the bleak and desolate fen