The inns of Banbury make some historic figure. It was in one of them—the chronicler says not which—that the dispute took place between the two Yorkist commanders, which led to the battle of Danesmoor being lost by their side, in July, 1469.
The occasion was the revolt of the great Earl of Warwick against Edward the Fourth. To intercept Warwick at Northampton the Earl of Pembroke was marching with a force from Gloucestershire, and was joined on the Cotswolds by Lord Stafford of Southwick, newly raised a step in the peerage by being created Earl of Devon. Lord Stafford’s troops numbered six thousand good archers: a very welcome reinforcement; but, even so, the combined forces dared not at once risk an engagement with the rebels at Daventry, and fell back upon Banbury. There a quarrel took place between Lord Stafford and the Earl of Pembroke, all on account of a pretty girl. Says Hall: “The earle of Pembroke putt the Lorde Stafforde out of an Inne, wherein he delighted muche to be, for the loue of a damosell that dwelled in the house: contrary to their mutuall agrement by them taken, which was, that whosoeaver abteined first a lodgyng should not be deceaved nor remoued. After a greate many woordes and crakes, had betwene these twoo capitaines, the lord Stafford of Southwyke, in greate dispite departed with his whole compaignie and band of Archers, leauynge the erle of Pembroke almost desolate in the toune.”
Accordingly, so weakened, the next day the Earl of Pembroke was defeated. He took refuge in Banbury church, but, according to Hall, was dragged forth by the fierce John Clapham, who beheaded him in the porch with his own hands.
Possibly it was at the “Red Lion,” in the High Street, that the damosell lived who caused all the strife between those great lords. If so, it renders that fine old house the more interesting. Modern needs, and a not unreasonable desire to keep incoming guests and their belongings dry, have caused the picturesque courtyard to be roofed in with glass, thus hiding many of its pictorial qualities; but you still enter from the street by a fifteenth-century oaken portal, much blunted by wear and tear and many successive coats of paint and varnish in all those succeeding centuries; yet indubitably still fifteenth-century work.
But the most picturesque inn at Banbury is the “Reindeer.” History is silent as to the why or the how of its acquiring that name, and is indeed dumb in almost every other respect concerning the old house. The “Reindeer,” both in itself and in its situation, is scarcely like the “Red Lion,” an hotel. You look in at the “Reindeer” for a drink and for curiosity only; for the house does not precisely invite guests, and probably does most business on market days, when country folk from neighbouring villages throng the strait and crooked streets of Banbury and put up their traps in its yard and insist on liberally drinking the health of one another. Parson’s Street, indeed, the situation of the “Reindeer,” is a market-street and crowded shopping centre, where brazen-tongued salesmen exhort housewives to “buy, buy, buy”; or indulge in rhapsodical, exclamatory passages in praise of their goods. You are gazing, let us say, outside the “original” Banbury-cake shop, opposite, upon the magpie black and white of the “Reindeer” frontage, when a parrot-like voice is heard exclaiming, in ecstatic rapture, “O what loverly heggs!” and, turning, you perceive, not a grey parrot in a gilded cage, but a white-aproned provision-dealer’s assistant, unfortunately at large. Fleeing into the courtyard of the inn, you still hear faint cries of “There’s ’am!” “O mother! what butter!”
The neighbourhood, it will be perceived, does not in these days lend itself to quiet residence, and although, by the evidence of its architecture, the “Reindeer” was doubtless at one time one of the chief hotels of the town, it has long ceased to hold anything like that position.
The old oaken gates and the black-and-white timbering above appear to be the oldest portions of the house: the gates themselves inscribed with the date “1570” on one side, and on the other
“IHON · KNIGHT ◈ IHONE · KNIGHT ◈ DAVID HORN.”
The great feature of the inn is, however, the noble oak-panelled chamber known, for whatever inscrutable reason, as the “Globe Room.” Exterior and interior views of it are the merest commonplaces in Banbury. There are, in fact, three things absolutely necessary, nay, almost sacramental, for the stranger to do in Banbury, without having performed the which he is a scorn and a derision. The first of these indispensable performances is the eating, or, at any rate, the buying of Banbury cakes. And here let me add that the Banbury cakes of Banbury have a lightness and a toothsomeness entirely lacking in the specious impostors made elsewhere. Just as there are no other such pork-pies as those of Melton Mowbray, and as Shrewsbury cakes can apparently only be made at Shrewsbury, so the “Banburys” made in other towns are apt to lie as heavy on your chest as a peccadillo upon a tender conscience. But in their native town they disappear, to the accompaniment of cups of tea, with a rapidity alarming to the pocket, if not to the stomach; for they cost “tuppence” apiece, and a hungry pedestrian or cyclist finds no difficulty in demolishing half a dozen of them.
