about upon the Royal Infantry, now left without horse, and dashed in amongst them, slaying right and left.  Lindsay fell mortally wounded, and was taken prisoner, and his son in trying to save him shared the same fate, while the Royal Standard Bearer, Sir Edmund Verney, was slain and the standard taken; but this was afterwards recovered.  When Rupert returned from his reckless chase, it looked more like a defeat than a victory.  Both armies had suffered severely, and when Mr. Fisher, the Vicar of Kineton, was commissioned by Lord Essex to number those killed on the side of the Parliament, he estimated them at a little over 1,300 men, all of whom were buried in two large pits on land belonging to what was afterwards known as Battle Farm, the burial-places being known as the Grave Fields.  As these were about half-way between Radway and Kineton, we were quite near them when we were lighting the fires on the sides of the road the night before, and this may have accounted for the dreary loneliness of the road, as no one would be likely to live on or near the fields of the dead if he could find any more desirable place.  It was at the village of Radway where tradition stated the king and his sons breakfasted at a cottage in which for many years afterwards the old table was shown to visitors on which their breakfast stood, and it was on the hill near there where the boy-princes, Charles and James, narrowly escaped being captured as they were watching the battle that was being fought on the fields below.

We were in no hurry to leave Banbury, for we had not recovered from the effects of our long walk of the previous day and night, and were more inclined to saunter about the town than to push on.  It is astonishing how early remembrances cling to us in after life:  we verily believed we had come to Banbury purposely to visit its famous Cross, immortalised in the nursery rhyme: 

  Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
  To see a fine lady get on a white horse;
  She’s rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. 
  And she shall have music wherever she goes.

[Illustration:  BANBURY CROSS.]

The rhyme must, like many others, have been of great antiquity, for the old Cross of Banbury had been removed by the Puritans in the year 1602, and its place taken by a much finer one, recently erected to commemorate the marriage of the Emperor Frederick of Germany to the Princess Royal of England.  The fine lady and the white horse were also not to be found, but we heard that the former was supposed to have been a witch, known as the Witch of Banbury, while the white horse might have been an emblem of the Saxons or have had some connection with the great white horse whose gigantic figure we afterwards saw cut out in the green turf that covered the white chalk cliffs of the Berkshire Downs.  The nursery rhyme incidentally recorded the fact that the steps at the base of the Cross at Banbury were formerly used as a convenience