CHAPTER XV. EDWARD I., LONGSHANKS. A.D. 1272 - 1307.

Edward was bitterly angry now. He sent on an army to deal unsparingly with the rising, and set out to follow with his son, now grown to man's estate. Crueller things than he had ever allowed before were done to the places where Robert Bruce had been acknowledged as king, and his friends were hung as traitors wherever they were found; but Bruce himself could not be caught. He was living a wild life among the lakes and hills; and Edward, who was an old man now, had been taken so ill at Carlisle, that he could not come on to keep his own strict rule among his men. All the winter he lay sick there; and in the spring he heard that Bruce, whom he thought quite crushed, had suddenly burst upon the English, defeated them, and was gathering strength every day.

Edward put on his armor and set out for Scotland; but at Burgh-on- the-Sands his illness came on again, and he died there at seventy years old.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey, under a great block of stone, and the inscription on it only says, "Edward I., 1308 - The Hammer of the Scots - Keep Treaties." His good wife, Queen Eleanor, had died many years before him, and was also buried at Westminster. All the way from Grantham, in Lincolnshire - where she died - to London, Edward set up a beautiful stone cross wherever her body rested for the night - fifteen of them - but only three are left now.