Helmdon is a village and civil parish about 4 miles (6.4 km) north of Brackley in West Northamptonshire, England.

[4] In the reign of Edward the Confessor two Saxons, Alwin and Godwin, held the manor "freely", i.e. without a feudal overlord.

[5] They were dispossessed after the Norman Conquest of England and the Domesday Book of 1086 records that Robert, Count of Mortain held a manor at "Elmedene".

[5] In the 12th century on William de Torewelle (Turville) held the manor of "Helmendene" of the fee of Leicester.

In 1317 Nicholas de Turville granted 971⁄2 acres at Helmdon to his daughter Sarah and her husband Robert Lovett.

[8] Helmdon's main manor house, Overbury, seems to have been at the southern end of the village, south of the parish church.

[10] The south aisle includes a tomb recess[11] with a Purbeck Marble slab and foliated cross.

[9][10] It has an ornately cusped, ogeed and crocketted piscina and three-bay sedilia,[9] plus a low-side window on each side.

[10] However, stone-quarrying was by then a significant industry in Helmdon, it supplied most or all of the stone for the church, and leading local masons would have had considerable economic standing.

[17] In the porch of the 1856 rectory is the wooden lintel of a Tudor fireplace bearing a carved dragon, the year 1533 (or 35) and a set of initials.

[7] The quarries were on the north side of the Tove Valley, on the low ridge just beyond the northern edge of the village.

[7] This was followed by Easton Neston House near Towcester, completed 1702; Blenheim Palace in the period 1705–10; and Woburn Abbey from 1749 to 1780.

[7] Helmdon may also have supplied stone to build Brackley Town Hall in 1705–06 and to remodel Canons Ashby House in 1708–10.

[7] Blenheim is 26 miles (42 km) from Helmdon, and most of its stone was supplied by much nearer quarries in Oxfordshire: either Burford and Taynton[7] or Cornbury Park and Glympton.

[7] The trade of making lace by hand was a well-established cottage industry in the East Midlands by the late 16th century, and the earliest record of it in Helmdon dates from 1718.

[23] Makers around Towcester and Buckingham had a reputation for the finest lace,[23] and although mechanised competition began with Heathcoat's bobbin net machine in 1808, quality lace-making by hand thrived for several more decades.

[23] Lace-making in the parish peaked in the middle of the 19th century, when the 1851 Census recorded that 94 women and girls — more than 30% of all Helmdon's female inhabitants — worked in the trade, and the youngest workers were under 10 years old.

[28] Also in the middle of the 20th century the Bell diversified as a filling station, with a single hand-operated petrol pump outside.

[30] When the Great Central Main Line was being built in the second half of the 1890s, the landlord added a wooden building behind the pub in which he lodged some of the navvies.

[30] A Charles Fairbrother had the Reading Room built in 1887 as a men's meeting place as an alternative to the pubs.

[31] Throughout its history the Reading Room has been the meeting place of many of Helmdon's activities, serving in effect as the village hall.

It passed roughly east–west along the Tove Valley through the middle of the village, where its Helmdon station was opened.

[34] From 1894 to 1898 Scott had a construction yard in the Tove Valley at Helmdon with a network of sidings connected to the SMJR.

[35] It was next to where the company built Helmdon Viaduct, a nine-arch structure of Staffordshire blue brick that carried the GCML main line across the valley.

[36] In response the London and North Eastern Railway, which had succeeded the GCR in 1923, renamed its main line station "Helmdon for Sulgrave" from 1928.

[37] By the 1930s they included a post office, three grocers, a butcher, an egg-dealer, a fruiterer, a baker, a newsagent, a tailor and a shoe repairer.

[37] Other local tradesmen included two coal merchants, a wheelwright who also made coffins, a builder who was also the parish undertaker, and even a maker of boot polish.