It can be no matter for surprise that many inns have historic associations. Indeed, when we consider that in olden times the hostelries of town and country touched life at every point, and were once the centre of local life, it becomes rather surprising that not more tragic events, more treaties and conferences, and more plots and conspiracies are associated with such places of public resort. Strange, mysterious plotters, highwaymen, and great nobles resorted to them, and, coming to things more domestic, there, under the inn’s hospitable roof, town councils not infrequently met in those times before ever “municipal buildings” were dreamed of, and conducted their business over a cheering, and inebriating, cup. Your inn was, in short, then at once your railway-station, club, hotel, reading-room and mart. There were distinct advantages, in the social sense, in all this. It meant good-fellowship when respectable townsfolk were not ashamed to spend a winter evening in the parlour of a representative inn, or play a game of bowls in summer on the bowling-green with which most such houses were once furnished, and the man who now glowers in unneighbourly and solitary way over his hearthstone, would expand, with such opportunities, into as good-natured a fellow as any of the olden time. [Illustration: THE “REINDEER,” BANBURY.] 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.”