Why Edward I Refused a Surrender to Test His Trebuchet

In July 1304 the Scots holding Stirling Castle offered to surrender, and Edward I refused. He had spent three months building the biggest trebuchet of the siege, and he wanted to see it work first. The English accounts call it Lupus guerre, the War Wolf. Five master carpenters and forty-nine other men built it, and that year lead stripped from Scottish church roofs went into English counterweights. 📖 Source: David Nicolle, Medieval Siege Weapons (1): Western Europe AD 585–1385, Osprey (New Vanguard 58) The rope crew came from Newcastle upon Tyne: four men and one woman, sent by the town's mayor. The Scots answered with the only trebuchet they had, and its arm broke. An English government record keeps the king's answer to the surrender: nobody was to leave until the War Wolf had been tried. So about thirty men under Sir William Oliphant waited inside the walls for the shot. One chronicler, in the Flores Historiarum, claimed a single stone went through two walls. No other source confirms it, and no weight survives for the War Wolf's stones. Then, and only then, Edward let them walk out alive, and Oliphant went to the Tower of London as a prisoner. People ask how one person makes these. The answer is musayko.com, a platform I built to do it, and it's open to other creators now. Which siege should we cover next?