"A gready earl soon after was, Burnin' in sik greediness, That his plough irons himself stall, And hid them in a peet pot all. He playned to the sheriff sare, That stolen his plough irons were; The sheriff than paid him shillings twa, And after that he done had sa, Soon a great court he gart set, Wytting of that stelth to get." The fraud was discovered, and the perpetrator of it hanged. The murder of James I. is one of the few crimes anterior to the commencement of the records, of which a contemporary account, circumstantial and truthlike, has been preserved.[P] Few historical tragedies bear comparison with this, either in the audacity with which the assassination was planned, or the relentless atrocity with which it was perpetrated. Nothing can afford so lively an illustration of the perilous tenure of the Scottish crown in the fifteenth century. We would fain have had the telling of this story, and of that part, especially, where, after the household traitor had removed the great iron bolt, a young damsel, a daughter of the house of Douglas, thrust her arm in the socket. "She was but young," says Hector Boece, "and her bones not solid, and therefore her arm was soon broken in sunder, and the door dung open by force." Poor child! few have been the acts of loyal devotion so heroic as hers; but the whole narrative has been so fully and minutely incorporated with history, as to afford us no excuse for here repeating it.[Q] [P] It may be found at the end of vol. i. of Pinkerton's _History of Scotland_, and in vol. ii. of the collection of reprints called _Miscellanea Scotica_. [Q] See Tytler's History, iii. 307, _et seq._