Of the sisters of John Scot, Margaret, the eldest, was the grandmother of John Baliol, who became a competitor for the crown of Scotland. Isabella, the second sister, by her marriage with Robert le Brus, the Lord of Annandale, had a grandson—the brave and heroic Robert Bruce—the “Bruce of Bannockburn,” and the idol of the Scottish people. After Henry the Third had assumed the Earldom of Chester the castle of Beeston was left to the charge of castellans, and the people of Cheshire had a sorry time of it; for David, the son of Prince Llewelyn, endeavoured to cast off the English yoke, and long and bloody were the struggles for freedom on the one hand, and for dominion on the other—the county being overrun and ravaged alternately by friends and enemies until nearly every rood of land was soaked with the blood of the combatants. In the attack made by the King in 1245 the whole borderland was laid waste, and the wyches or salt-pits were destroyed. Eleven years later the county was plundered and desolated by the Welsh; and in the year 1256 the young Prince Edward, to whom Henry had two years previously assigned the Principality, made his first progress into Cheshire, when his castle of Beeston was placed in the charge of Fulco de Orreby. This year was an eventful one, for before its close the Welsh again arose in insurrection, when Prince Edward was compelled to retire; but the King marched an army to his support, wasting the harvest as he advanced, and well-nigh depopulating the county, when, as the ancient chronicler, Matthew Paris, records, “the whole border was reduced into a desert, the inhabitants were cut off by the sword, the castles and houses burnt, the woods felled, and the cattle destroyed by famine.” The day was not far distant when Beeston was to be wrested from its royal possessor, and find itself garrisoned by the soldiers of a rebellious subject The struggle between the Crown and the Barons had commenced, and was continued under varying circumstances; but the Sovereign was eventually borne down by the union of ambitious nobles. The rival armies met at Lewes, and in that hollow which the railway now traverses, on the 14th of May, 1264, the King saw his army defeated by the valorous Simon De Montfort, Earl of Leicester, aided by the forces of the Welsh Prince Llewelyn, and he himself, with his son Prince Edward and the King of the Romans, made prisoners. The next day a treaty, known as the _mise_ of Lewes, was entered into; but the King and his son were detained as hostages until all matters in dispute should be settled. In this forced peace Edward was compelled, by a deed executed at Woodstock, December 24, 1264, to surrender his Earldom of Chester, and with it his castle of Beeston, to the victorious De Montfort, in whom the administration of the realm was then virtually vested.