Famine, however, accomplished what mere force could not effect. On the 20th of December, 1265, after the Dictum[191] had been issued, a special stipulation was entered into, that “Sir Henry Hastynges and all those that were with him should have life and limme, horse and harnesse, with all things within the castelle to them belongyng, and a certeine of leysure to cary away the same.” The Castle was then delivered up to the king. The principal cause which had rendered this monarch so unpopular among his natural subjects, the old and high-spirited nobility, has been already noticed in the account of Rochester. His patronage of foreigners, and predilection for exotic customs, had prejudiced the native chivalry against him; and hence the series of battles and sieges, which only ended with the death of <g>Simon de Montfort</g>,[192] and the surrender of Kenilworth Castle. At this siege stone balls of great size were employed by the besieged; some of them, which have been since dug up, measure sixteen inches in diameter, and ‘weigh nearly two hundred pounds.’ “But I doe not thinke,” says an old commentator, “that the gunnes of those dayes were such gunnes as we nowe use, but rather some pot gunne, or some such other invention.” The warlike engines then in use, however--the ‘catapultæ’ or ‘mangonels’--were sufficiently powerful to throw stones much heavier than those found at Kenilworth, as in a subsequent portion of this work we shall have occasion to show. It was whilst prosecuting this siege that the king gave his niece in marriage to the Duke of Brunswick; when the queen and her ladies, who had travelled from Windsor for that purpose, graced the ceremony with their presence. Having thus recovered possession of the fortress, King Henry bestowed it upon his younger son Edmund, “with free chase and free warren, and right to hold in Kenilworth the weekly market and annual fair,” already mentioned; and, two years afterwards, created him Earl of Lancaster. [Sidenote: 1279.{]