Just after the Easter Festival, the said King Edward besieged Stirling Castle for three months without a break; and he ordered the whole of the lead of the monastery of St. Andrews to be stripped off and carried to Stirling aforesaid for the construction of the engines for the siege. At length, however, the warden of the said castle, William Oliphant by name, surrendered the castle to him, under a certain condition in writing and under seal. But, notwithstanding his promise, the King, on taking the castle, belied his word and broke through the condition by taking the said William Oliphant, the warden of the said castle, in bonds with him to London, and consigning him to a fearful dungeon. The same year also, when he had taken castles, towns and all the other strongholds, and the whole of the leading lords of the realm had made their submission to him, and the whole of the castles and towns formerly destroyed had been rebuilt, and there was no one but William Wallace alone who remained faithful to the King of Scotland; and after he had appointed wardens and officers of his own there, and all and sundry of the Scottish nation had taken the oaths of fealty and homage, the said King, together with the Prince of Wales and their armies, went back to England, leaving, however, one Chief Warden as his lieutenant to put down and chastise any outbreaks by any of the rest, both Scottish and English; and he never afterwards showed his face in Scotland. After his departure, the English nation lorded it in every part of Scotland, harassing the Scots in many and manifold ways, and ruthlessly doing them to death with wrongs, massacres, and stripes, under the awful yoke of slavery. [100] Near Elgin. [101] Probably in about seven quarts. ROBERT THE BRUCE CROWNED KING OF SCOTLAND (1306). +Source.+--_Nicholas Trivet's Annals_, pp. 407-408. (English Historical Society Publications.) In the same year, on the twenty-ninth day of January, Robert the Bruce, aspiring to the kingdom of Scotland, sacrilegiously slew the noble John Comyn, who had refused to abet his treacherous rebellion, in the church of the Minorite Brethren at Dumfries, in the castle of which town the King's justices were then sitting. Thereafter, on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, he had himself solemnly crowned King in the abbey of Canons Regular at Scone. The wife of the Earl of Buchan secretly departed from her husband, taking all his war-horses with her, and hastened to Scone to place the diadem on the head of the new King; for her brother, the Earl of Fife, on whom devolved the duty by hereditary right, was then absent in England. This Countess was captured in the same year by the English, but, when some of them wished to put her to death, the King interfered; instead, he confined her in a wooden cage on the wall of the Castle of Berwick, so that she might be seen by the passers-by. DEATH OF EDWARD THE FIRST (1307).