Deddington is a town and civil parish in Oxfordshire, England, 6 miles (10 km) south of Banbury.

[2] Clifton, Deddington and Hempton stand on a ridge of Jurassic ferruginous marlstone hills between the three watercourses.

Clifton is about 1+1⁄2 miles (2.4 km) east of Deddington, at the eastern end of the ridge where it slopes down to the Cherwell.

The highest point of the ridge is on the western boundary of the parish, more than 490 feet (150 m) above sea level.

The parish's topography is alluded to in a local rhyme: Aynho on the Hill Clifton in the Clay Dirty, drunken Deddington And Hempton high way —[2][4] The toponym is derived from the Old English for "place of the people of Dæda".

[5] After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, William the Conqueror's step-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, held the manor of Deddington.

The Earl of Warwick with his men surrounded the inn and Gaveston, seeing that his guards would not fight, had to come outside to be chained and thrown in prison.

In 1591 a survey of Deddington reported that "the soyle... is verye firtile yeldinge greate store of corne and pasture".

[12] In 1523–24 Deddington residents paid £62 8s 10d in tax on personal estate (land, goods or wages).

The earliest and simplest such system had two arable common fields and left one fallow each year.

[14] This was certainly the case by 1808, when Deddington practiced a four-year rotation of fallow, wheat, barley, and peas or beans.

In 1755 the Kidlington and Deddington Trust was formed to turn the north – south road into a turnpike.

The canal brought Warwickshire coal to the area, immediately reducing the local price of fuel.

[3] He contributed to Volume XI of the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, which includes Deddington and was published in 1983.

[24] In Farndon's absence Thomas Harris, a Quaker from Sibford Ferris, ran the business in Deddington until about 1762, when he married a Fardon from North Newington.

[25] His history thereafter is not known but he died at Milton and is buried in the grounds of the Friends' Meeting House at Adderbury West.

[27] He also installed the turret clocks at the parish churches of St Mary the Virgin, Kidlington in 1805 and Saints Peter and Paul, Deddington in 1833.

It replaced the old feoffees with new trustees, and decreed that the charity's surplus income be divided equally between buying coal for the poor of the parish and supporting Deddington's new National School,[30] whose new building had been completed in 1854.

In the 1820s[2] or early 1830s the parish adopted the Cropredy Plan, which was a formula for calculating what poor rate to set, and how much to subsidise farmers for each labourer they employed.

Deddington sought to be the centre of a poor law union, but too few neighbouring parishes were willing to join with it for the purpose.

It has an iron oxide content, giving it a rich brown colour characteristic of building stone in north Oxfordshire and neighbouring parts of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.

By the 15th century it was the house of a small manor held by the Dean and canons of St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

[49] Castle House next to the parish church was originally a 13th-century farmhouse, complete with its own small chapel.

[51] Appletree was the grandson of a "husbandman", but when he died in 1666 his wealth included a pipe organ and virginals in his parlour, oil paintings, plate worth £112, a horse-drawn coach, and an income from rents of £612 a year.

[52] In the 18th and early 19th centuries a succession of tenant farmers lived at Castle House and the building declined.

[62] Stone predominates as the material for Deddington's older houses, but from the 18th century a few were built of red brick.

[65] In 1854 a house at the junction of High Street and Horse Fair was converted into a prison designed by the architect JC Buckler.

[2] By 1832 the school was housed in converted buildings, including a barn, attached to Appletree Farm in Hopcraft Lane.

[2] Purpose-built boys' and girls' school buildings were designed by William Hambley of London and completed in 1854 on a new site in Banbury Road.

[82] Deddington has a regular farmers' market, several local shops, hotels and restaurants and four pubs: