After dinner the King prepared to hunt. "Being in great spirits," says Ordericus, "he was joking with his attendants while his boots were being laced, when an armourer came and presented him six arrows. The King immediately took them with great satisfaction, praising the work, and unconscious of what was to happen, kept four of them himself and held out the other two to Walter Tyrrel. "It is but right," said he, "that the sharpest arrows should be given to him who knows best how to inflict mortal wounds with them." This Tyrrel was a French knight of good extraction, the wealthy lord of the castles of Poix and Pontoise, filling a high place among the nobles, and a gallant soldier; he was therefore admitted to familiar intimacy with the King and became his constant companion. Meanwhile as they were idly talking and the King's household attendants were assembled about him, a monk of Gloucester presented himself and delivered to the King a letter from his abbot. Having read it, the King burst out laughing and said merrily to the knight just mentioned, "Walter, do what I told you." The knight replied, "I will, my lord." Slighting then the warnings of the elders, and forgetting that the heart is lifted up before a fall, he said respecting the letter he had received, "I wonder what has induced my lord Serlo to write me in this strain, for I really believe he is a worthy abbot and respectable old man. In the simplicity of his heart he transmits to me, who have enough besides to attend to, the dreams of his snoring monks and even takes the trouble to commit them to writing and send them a long distance. Does he think that I follow the example of the English, who will defer their journey or their business on account of the dreams of a parcel of wheezing old women?
"Thus speaking, he hastily rose and mounting his horse rode at full speed to the forest. His brother, Count Henry with William de Bretanel, and other distinguished persons, followed him, and having penetrated into the woods the hunters dispersed themselves in various directions according to custom. The King and Walter Tyrrel posted themselves with a few others in one part of the forest and stood with their weapons in their hands eagerly watching for the coming of the game, when a stag suddenly running between them the King quitted his station and Walter shot an arrow. It grazed the beast's grizzly back, but glancing from it mortally wounded the king, who stood within its range. He immediately fell to the ground, and, alas! suddenly expired."
William of Malmesbury gives a somewhat different account of the King's death. "The sun was declining when the King, drawing his bow and letting fly an arrow; slightly wounded a stag which passed before him; and keenly gazing followed it still running a long time with his eyes, holding up his hand to keep off the power of the sun's rays. At this instant, Walter, conceiving a noble exploit, which was, while the King's attention was otherwise occupied, to transfix another stag which by chance came near him, unknowingly and without power to prevent it—oh gracious God!—pierced his breast with a fatal arrow. On receiving the wound the King uttered not a word; but breaking off the shaft of the weapon where it projected from his body, fell upon the wound by which he accelerated his death. Walter immediately ran up, but as he found him senseless and speechless he leaped swiftly upon his horse, and escaped by spurring him to his utmost speed. Indeed, there was none to pursue him; some consented in his flight, and others pitied him, and all were intent on other matters. Some began to fortify their dwellings; others to plunder, and the rest to look out for a new king. A few countrymen conveyed the body, placed on a cart, to the cathedral at Winchester, the blood dripping from it all the way. Here it was committed to the ground within the tower, attended by many of the nobility though lamented by few. Next year [really in 1107] the tower fell; though I forbear to mention the different opinions on this subject, lest I should seem to assent too readily to unsupported trifles, more especially as the building might have fallen through imperfect construction even though he had never been buried there. He died in the year of our Lord's Incarnation, 1100, of his reign the thirteenth, on the fourth before the nones of August, aged above forty years."
So died the Red King. Whose arrow it was that slew him, whether it came aforethought from an English bow or by chance from that of Walter Tyrrel, we shall never know. The Red King fell in the New Forest and there was no one in all broad England to mourn him. William of Malmesbury says that a few countrymen carried his body to Winchester. We may well ask why not to Malwood Castle, which was close by? We may ask, but we shall get no answer. According to a local legend it was a charcoal burner of Minstead, Purkess by name, who found the King's body and bore it away, and ever after his descendants have remained in Minstead, neither richer nor poorer than their ancestor. As for Sir Walter, he is said to have sworn to the Prior of St Denys de Poix, a monastery of his foundation, that he knew nothing of the King's death. Leland tells us that in his day not only did the tree still exist against which, according to him, the arrow glanced off and struck the King, but a little chapel remained there then very old, in which Mass was wont to be offered for the repose of the King's soul. I wish that I might have seen it, for it would have pleased me.
Now when I had well considered all this, not without an orison for that misguided King, I set off for Cadnam, and holding now only to the road, marching fast, for it was late, I came over the ridge beyond Black water into the valley of the Test, and so entered Romsey a little after it was dark.
Romsey, as I soon found on the following morning, has nothing at all to offer the traveller except one of the most solemn and noble Norman churches in all England, monastic too, for it was the church of the great Benedictine Nunnery of Our Lady of Romsey. It is impossible to exaggerate the impression this astonishing Norman pile, of vast size and unsurpassed age and reverence, makes upon the traveller. One seems in looking upon it to see before his eyes the foundation of England. I cannot hope to describe it or to convey to another what it meant to me. It is at once grandiose and reverent, of enormous, almost incredible size and weight and strength larger than many a cathedral, heavy as a kingdom, stronger than a thousand years. It seems to have been hewn bodily out of the cliffs or the great hills.
It is enormously old. The house was founded or perhaps refounded more than a millennium ago by Edward the Elder in 907; his daughter was abbess here, and here was buried. In 967 Edgar his grandson gave the house to the Benedictines. It remained English after the Conquest, for William seems not to have dealt with it and in 1086 the sister of Edgar Atheling became abbess. Out of it Henry I. chose his bride that Abbess's niece Maud a novice of Our Lady of Romsey. Said I not well that it was as the foundation of England?
We know little of the Abbey for near a hundred years after that, and then in 1160 the daughter of King Stephen, Mary, whose uncle, Henry of Blois, was Bishop of Winchester, became abbess, and it was decided to rebuild the place. Thus the great Norman church we have, arose in the new England of the twelfth century. Mary, princess and abbess, was, however, false to her vows. How long she was abbess we do not know, perhaps only a few months or even days. At any rate, in the very year she became abbess, the year of her mother's death,[Footnote: See supra under Faversham.] she forsook her trust and married the son of the Earl of Flanders, and by him she had two daughters. Then came repentance; she separated from her husband and returned to Romsey as a penitent.