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.”