Stirling seems to have been made a royal burgh, some time after the Scottish sovereign, Malcolm the Second, pushed his empire across the Forth, in the early part of the eleventh century. In 1119, less than a hundred years after this extension of the kingdom, Alexander the First granted the town its earliest known charter as a burgh which, however, is only a confirmation of some one which had been granted before. Stirling thus ranks with Edinburgh, Berwick, and Roxburgh, in a list which Chalmers presents of the four earliest institutions of this kind in Scotland; an association, by the way, which for some centuries enjoyed a sort of superiority or jurisdiction over the other royal burghs of Scotland, in the shape of a commercial Parliament, styled the _Curia Quatuor Burgorum_, (the earlier form of the present Convention of Scottish Burghs.) It is a circumstance strongly characteristic of the time when Stirling procured its first known charter, that the four royal burghs of Scotland were the appendages of the four principal fortresses. This is proved by the fact that King William the Lion was, in 1175, ransomed by his subjects from the English, who had taken him prisoner, by delivering up ‘the four principal fortresses, Stirling, Edinburgh, Roxburgh, and Berwick.’ From what different sources do the wealth and dignity of towns now arise! As it was the importance of its castle which caused Stirling to become a royal burgh, so does the town seem to have been extended in proportion to the value or use of that fortress. We have few data for ascertaining the progress which the town has made from age to age in size, prosperity, or population. It must have been benefited by the establishment of the neighbouring Abbey of Cambuskenneth in 1147, and by that of the Convent of Dominican Friars in 1233. In the reign of Bruce, when the castle was so considerable a place that that sovereign fought the battle of Bannockburn, mainly that he might get it into his possession; the town could not fail to have become larger than it was at the time of its receiving burgal honours. After the accession of the house of Stuart, when the castle became a royal residence, its prosperity must have received a great impulse. There is a tradition that at one time Stirling had a keen struggle with Edinburgh, for the honour of being pronounced the capital of the kingdom, and only lost the object of contention by a sort of _neck heat_, the provost having unluckily ceded the head seat, at a grand public banquet, to the provost of Edinburgh, which was held decisive of the matter at issue. Of course, the tradition is a vague one, and cannot be set forward as authority; yet such an impression could only have been made upon the popular mind, in consequence of a strong conviction, long entertained, of the eminence of Stirling in the list of Scottish burghs. Throughout the successive reigns of the Jameses, as they are called, the town must