It is a pretty stone-built village, with a well preserved Early English church beside the road. “Greatness,” either as a village or as the site of a Roman “castrum” (whence derives the “Caster”-ton) has long ceased to be a characteristic of this pleasant spot, and the ancient Roman camp is now visible only in some grassy banks where the rathe primrose grows.
Just beyond Casterton, coyly hiding down a lane to the left, is the little village of Tickencote, preserving in its name some prehistoric goat-farm, “Tyccen-cote” meaning in the Anglo-Saxon nothing more nor less than “goat’s-home.” Of more tangible interest is the splendid Norman church, of small size but extraordinary elaboration; a darkling building with heavy chancel arch covered with those zigzags, lozenges, birds’ heads, and tooth-mouldings so beloved by Norman architects, and with a “Norman” nave built in 1792 to replace that portion of the building destroyed many years before. The pseudo-Norman work of our own day is, almost without exception, vile, and that of the eighteenth century was worse, but here is an example of such faithful copying of existing portions that now, since a hundred years and more have passed and the first freshness of the new masonry gone, it is difficult to distinguish the really old work from the copy.
Returning to the highroad, a further two miles bring us to Horn Lane, the site of a vanished turnpike gate, and to the coppices and roadside trees of Bloody Oaks, where the battle of Empingham was fought, March 13, 1470, between the forces of Edward the Fourth and the hastily assembled Lincolnshire levies of Sir Robert Welles and Sir Thomas de la Launde, fighting, not for the Lancastrian cause, as so often stated, but in an insurrection fomented by the Earl of Warwick, whose object was to raise Edward’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, to the throne. It was a massacre, rather than a battle, for Edward’s army was both more numerous and better equipped, and the rebels soon broke and fled. Flinging away their weapons, and even portions of their clothing, as they went, the fight was readily named “Losecoat Field.” The captured leaders paid for their ineffectual treason with their blood, for they were executed at Stamford.
The country folks have quite forgotten Losecoat Field, and think the woodlands of Bloody Oaks were so named from the execution of John Bowland, a highwayman who was gibbeted at Empingham Corner in 1769.
Greetham spire now rises away to the left, and shows where that village lies hid. Here, away from the village and facing the highroad, stood, and stands still, the “Greetham Inn.” It is now a farmhouse, and has lost its stables, its projecting bar-parlour, and its entrance archway. Once, however, it was one of the foremost inns and posting-houses on the road. Marked on old Ordnance maps as the “Oak,” it seems to have been really named the “New Inn,” if we may judge from an inscription cut on stone under the eaves: “This is the New Inn, 1786.” However this may have been, it was known to travellers, coachmen, and postboys along the road only as “Greetham Inn.” Towards the last it was kept by one of the Percivals of Wansford. At that time no fewer than forty-four coaches—twenty-two up and the same number down—changed here and at the “Black Bull,” Witham Common, every twenty-four hours.
Less than a mile down the road is that humble little public-house whose strange sign, the “Ram Jam,” has puzzled many people. Its original name was the “Winchilsea Arms,” and it bore no other sign than the armorial shield of the Earls of Winchilsea until long after coaching days were done; but in all that time it was known only as the “Ram Jam House,” and thereby hangs a tale, or several tales, most of them untrue. All kinds of wild legends of the house being so crammed with travellers that it was called “Ram Jam,” from that circumstance, have been heard. But travellers, as a matter of fact, never stayed there, for the inn never had any accommodation for them. It was more a beer-house than anything else. It’s fame began about 1740, when the landlord was an officer’s servant, returned from India. He possessed the secret of compounding a liqueur or spirit which he sold to travellers down the road, this eventually becoming as well-known a delicacy as Cooper Thornhill’s “Stilton” cheeses. He called this spirit “Ram Ján,” which seems to be an Indian term for a table servant, and sold it in small bottles, either singly, for consumption on the journey, or in cases of half-dozens or dozens. The secret of this liqueur was imparted to his son, but afterwards died out, and it is said that “Ram Jam” ceased to be sold before the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Although the “Ram Jam” was never more than a tavern of a very humble description, and probably never sheltered guests above the rank of cattle-drovers, it is noted as having been the house where Molyneux, the black, slept before his fight with Tom Cribb at Thistleton Gap, three and a half miles away, on September 28, 1811. Cribb, who was easily the victor, had his quarters at the “Blue Bull,” another small roadside house, which stood, until the beginning of 1900, at the cross roads on Witham Common, where roads go right and left to Bourn and Melton Mowbray. It has now been demolished.