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Thou bedd of rest, reserve for him a roome

Who lives a man divorced from his deare wife,

That as they were one hart so this one tombe

May hold them near in death as linckt in life,

She’s gone before, and after comes her head

To sleepe with her among the blessed dead.

At Scamblesby, between Louth and Horncastle, is another pathetic inscription on a wife’s tomb:—

To Margaret Coppinger wife of Francis Thorndike 1629.

Dilectissimæ conjugi Mæstissimus maritorum Franciscus

Thorndike.

L.(apidem) M.(armoreum) P.(osuit)

The old manor house of the Hyde family is at the north end of the village. The road for the next ten miles over Deeping Fen is uninteresting as a road can be. But this will be amply made up for in another chapter when we shape our eastward course from Spalding to Holbeach and Gedney.

THE FATHER OF FEN FARMERS

In Deeping Fen between Bourne, Spalding, Crowland and Market Deeping there is about fifty square miles of fine fat land, and Marrat tells us that as early as the reign of Edward the Confessor, Egelric, the Bishop of Durham, who, having been once a monk at Peterborough, knew the value of the land, in order to develop the district, made a cord road of timber and gravel all the way from Deeping to Spalding. The province then belonged to the Lords of Brunne or Bourne. In Norman times Richard De Rulos, Chamberlain of the Conqueror, married the daughter of Hugh de Evermue, Lord of Deeping. Their only daughter married Baldwin FitzGilbert, and his daughter and heiress married Hugh de Wake, who managed the forest of Kesteven for Henry III., which forest reached to the bridge at Market Deeping. Richard De Rulos, who was the father of all Lincolnshire farmers, aided by Ingulphus, Abbot of Croyland, set himself to enclose and drain the fen land, to till the soil or convert it into pasture and to breed cattle. He banked out the Welland which used to flood the fen every year, whence it got its name of Deeping or the deep meadows, and on the bank he set up tenements with gardens attached, which were the beginnings of Market Deeping. He further enlarged St. Guthlac’s chapel into a church, and then planted another little colony at Deeping-St.-James, where his son-in-law, who carried on his activities, built the priory. De Rulos was in fact a model landlord, and the result was that the men of Deeping, like Jeshuron, “waxed fat and kicked,” and the abbots of Croyland had endless contests with them for the next 300 years for constant trespass and damage. Probably this was the reason why the Wakes set up a castle close by Deeping, but on the Northampton side of the Welland at Maxey, which was inhabited later by Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII., who, in addition to all her educational benefactions, was also a capital farmer and an active member of the Commissioners of Sewers.