Chapter XXIII

THE road, mounting steeply out of Stamford, reaches a fine, elevated track commanding wide views. This is the spot chosen by Forrest for his painting of the old “Highflyer” London, York, and Edinburgh coach which ran from 1788 to 1840. In less than two miles the road crosses the border of Lincolnshire, traversing for six miles an outlying corner of little Rutland, the smallest county in England, and entering Lincolnshire again on passing Stretton. Great Casterton, at the foot of the hill two and a quarter miles from Stamford, is in Rutland. It is said to be situated on the Guash, but that stream and the bridge over it, from which the old road-books often called the village “Bridge Casterton,” are not readily glimpsed.

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.

[Picture: The “Highflyer,” 1840 (After Forrest)]

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.

[Picture: Bloody Oaks]

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.

[Picture: Interior of a Village Inn. (After Morland)]

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.

Here we have passed the little Rutlandshire village of Stretton on the right, which obtained its name of “Street-town” from having been on the ancient road called the Ermine Way. Here we come again into Lincolnshire.

For some twenty miles the Great North Road runs through this broad county, the land of the “yellow-bellies,” as Lincolnshire folk are named, from the frogs and eels that inhabit their fens and marshes. North and South Witham, giving a name to Witham Common, lie unseen, off to the left, and the once famous old “Black Bull” stands, as it always has stood, solitary beside the road, out of sight from any other house. It consists of two separate buildings, at right angles to one another and erected at different times. The original house is a structure of rag-stone, placed a little way back from the road, and facing it. The second building, which bears a more imposing architectural character, and with its handsome elevation of red brick and stone, bears witness to the once extensive business of the “Black Bull,” stands facing south, with its gable-end to the road, thus forming two sides of a courtyard. Long ranges of stables extend to the rear. The place is now in use as a farmhouse and hunting-box, and a screen of laurels and other evergreen shrubs is planted on the site of the old coach-drive. Sturtle, who kept the house in the old days, is gathered to his fathers, and the railway whistle sounds across country, where the guards’ horns once aroused the echoes of Morkery Woods or Spittle Gorse.

How different the outlook now from the time when Sir Walter Scott made entries in his _Journal_. “Old England,” he writes, from his hotel at Grantham, “is no changeling. Things seem much the same. One race of red-nosed innkeepers are gone, and their widows, eldest sons, or head waiters exercise hospitality in their room, with the same bustle and importance. The land, however, is much better ploughed; straight ridges everywhere adopted in place of the old circumflex of twenty years ago. Three horses, however, or even four, are often seen in a plough, yoked one before the other. Ill habits do not go out at once.”

A few years later, and these things, which had changed so little, were revolutionised. The railway carried all the traffic and the roads were deserted, the “red-nosed innkeepers” so rarely seeing a guest, that when a stray one arrived they almost fell on his shoulder and wept. Agriculture, too, converted even Witham Common into a succession of fertile fields, and thus banished wayfaring romance to the pages of history or of sensation novels.

[Picture: House, formerly the “Black Bull,” Witham Common]