At his mills he exacted exorbitant mulctures, and he hung all who dared to complain; if any ventured to grind wheat, mashloch, or rye with hand querns, they were also hanged; and though it was statute and ordained that he who stole a halfpenny-worth of bread should be scourged, that he who stole a pair of shoes should be pilloried, or eightpence worth should have one leg cut off, the tyrant hanged them all. Thus his Dule-tree was never without a man hanging from it, with the black gleds flying round him; for Comyn ground alike to the dust the burgesses within the walls and the gudemen of the Newland Mailings without; so that it was generally said in Dumbartonshire, that the devil himself would be a gentler overlord than he; and he was so hated that men remembered the dreadful fate of his father in Badenoch, and it came to be whispered about that there was a prophecy made by a weird woman, that he too should _die a violent death_! His wife, Lady Gwendoleyne, was esteemed one of the most beautiful women in Scotland, and none had outshone her at the Court of Queen Yolande, the consort of Alexander III. Lovely beyond all comparison, tall, stately and magnificent in form, with pale commanding features and dark eyes, indicative rather of pride of birth and loftiness of mind than of gentleness, she made the people--even those whom her beauty dazzled, and her slightest smile would have won for ever--shrink and quail before her, as beneath the eye of some mysterious spirit; for the keen black eye of that imperious lady is said to have been as dangerous in its beauty as it was terrible in its expression. She had been wedded early to the Red Lord of Badenoch; they had three daughters, the youngest of whom (according to Andrew Wyntoun) was married to the traitorous MacDougal of Lorn. They had also one son, who at the time this history opens, A.D. 1306, was in his eighteenth year, and was said to be a handsome, gallant, and high-spirited youth; but, unfortunately, devoted to the false Baliol, at whose mock Court in the Castle of Perth he resided, and there he had been educated.