Now with worms for his courtiers
He lies in the narrow
Cold couch of the chancel:
—But whence was the arrow?
In his cups; Rufus, it is said, was ‘fey,’ as the old phrase has it, on the day of his death. He feasted long and high, and then chose out two cross-bow shafts, presenting them to Tyrrell with the exclamation given above.
Serlo; He was Abbot of Gloucester, and had sent to Rufus the narrative of an ominous dream, reported in the Monastery.
The true dreams; On his last night Rufus ‘laid himself down to sleep, but not in peace; the attendants were startled by the King’s voice—a bitter cry—a cry for help—a cry for deliverance—he had been suddenly awakened by a dreadful dream, as of exquisite anguish befalling him in that ruined church, at the foot of the Malwood rampart.’ Palgrave: Hist. of Normandy and of England, B. IV: ch. xii.
Young Richard; Son to Robert Courthose, and hunting, as his uncle’s guest, in the New Forest in May 1100, was mysteriously slain by a heavy bolt from a Norman Arbalest.
The Evil-wood walls; ‘Amongst the sixty churches which had been ‘ruined,’ my Father remarks, in his notice of the New Forest, ‘the sanctuary below the mystic Malwood was peculiarly remarkable. . . . You reach the Malwood easily from the Leafy Lodge in the favourite deer-walk, the Lind-hurst, the Dragon’s wood.’
Through the long Minster; Winchester. Rufus, with much hesitation, was buried in the chancel as a king; but no religious service or ceremonial was celebrated:—‘All men thought that prayers were hopeless.’
EDITH OF ENGLAND
1100
Through sapling shades of summer green,
By glade and height and hollow,
Where Rufus rode the stag to bay,
King Henry spurs a jocund way,
Another chase to follow.
But when he came to Romsey gate
The doors are open’d free,
And through the gate like sunshine streams
A maiden company:—
One girdled with the vervain-red,
And three in sendal gray,
And touch the trembling rebeck-strings
To their soft roundelay;—