The New Forest: Its History and Its Scenery

by John R. Wise

It will be as well to repeat the story, as told by the two Chroniclers who give the fullest account, with all its omens and apparitions. The King had gone to bed on the evening of the 1st of August, and was suddenly awoke by a fearful vision. He dreamt that he was bled, and the stream of blood, pouring up to heaven, clouded the very day. His attendants, hearing his cries to the Virgin, rushed in with lights, and stayed with him all that night. Morning dawned: and Robert Fitz Hamon, his special friend, came to him with another dream, dreamt also that very night by a foreign monk then staying at the court, who had seen the King enter a church, and there seize the rood, tearing apart its legs and arms. For a time the image bore the insult, but suddenly struck the King. He fell, and flames and smoke issued from his mouth, putting out the light of the stars. The Red King’s courage, however, had by this time returned. With a laugh, he cried, “He is a monk, and dreams for money like a monk: give him this,” handing Fitz Hamon a hundred shillings. Still the two dreams had their effect, and William hesitated to test their truth.[114] At dinner that day he drank more than usual. His spirits once more returned. He defied the dreams. In spite of their warnings, he determined to hunt. As he was preparing, his armourer approached with six brand-new arrows. Choosing out two, he cried, as he gave them to Walter Tiril, Lord of Poix and Pontoise, who had lately come from Normandy, “The best arrows to the best marksman.” The small hunting-party, consisting of his brother Henry, William of Breteuil, Walter Tiril, and Fitz Hamon, and a few more, set out. As they are leaving the courtyard, a monk from St. Peter’s Abbey at Gloucester arrives. He gives the King a letter from Serlo, the abbot. It told how a monk of that abbey had dreamt that he had seen the Saviour and all the host of heaven standing round the great white throne. Then, too, came the Virgin robed in light, and flung herself at the feet of her Son, and prayed Him, by his precious blood and agony on the cross, to take pity on the English; prayed Him, too, as He was judge of all men, and avenger of all wickedness, to punish the King. The Saviour answered her, “You must be patient and wait: due retribution will in time befall the wicked.” The King read it and laughed. “Does Serlo,” he asked, “think that I believe the visions of every snoring monk? Does he take me for an Englishman, who puts faith in the dreams of every old woman?”[115] With this the party once more sets out into the Forest, the woods still green with all their deep summer foliage.

So they hunted all that noon and afternoon. The sun was now setting. Tiril and the King were alone.[116] A stag bounded by: the King shot and slightly wounded the quarry. On, though, it still bounded in the full light of the setting sun. The King stood watching it, shading his eyes with his hands. At that moment another deer broke cover. Tiril this time shot, and the shaft lodged itself in the King’s breast.[117] He fell without a word or groan, vainly trying to pull out the arrow, which broke short in his hand.

Thus perished William the Red. Tiril leapt on his horse. Henry galloped to Winchester, and the other nobles to their houses. One exception was there. William of Breteuil, following hard upon Henry to Winchester, honourably declared the rights of the absent Robert, to whom both Henry and himself had sworn fealty. William’s body was brought on a cart to the cathedral, the blood from his wound reddening the road.[118] There the next morning[119] he was buried, unlamented, unknelled, and unaneled.[120]

Rufus’s Stone.

So runs the story as told by the Chroniclers. And to this day popular tradition not only repeats their tale, but points to the places associated with the event. Below our feet lies the lonely glen of Canterton, where the King is said to have fallen. The oak from which, as the legend runs, the arrow glanced, is long since dead, but a stone marks its site, now capped over with a hideous cast-iron case.[121] In the woods and in the village of Minestead still live some of the descendants of Purkess, who is reported to have carried the bleeding corpse in his charcoal-cart to Winchester along the road now known as the King’s Road. Twelve miles away, on the extreme south-west boundary of the Forest, close to the Avon, stands a smithy, on the site of the one where, the legend says, Walter Tiril’s horse was shod, and which, for that reason, to this day pays a yearly fine to the Crown: and the water close by, where the fugitive passed, is still called Tyrrel’s Ford. And Rufus lies in Winchester Cathedral, his bones now mixed with those of Canute; and under a marble tomb, in the south aisle of the presbytery, sleeps his brother Richard, slain also like himself in the Forest.

So runs the story, unquestioned save here and there by some few faint doubts.[122] As to the tradition, I think we may at once set aside its testimony. The value of mere tradition in history weighs, or ought to weigh, nothing. Here and there tradition may be true in a very general sense, as when it says the Isle of Wight was once joined to Hampshire; but it is never particular in its dates, and is ever in too much hurry to compare facts. Tradition, as often as not, kills the murderer instead of the murdered; and makes the man who built the place to have been born there. Tradition is, in fact, the history of the vulgar, and the stumbling-block of the half-learned.

We will look at the broader bearings of the case. The first thing which strikes us is the fact that two other very near relatives of the Red King, his brother and his nephew, also lost their lives by so-called accidents in the New Forest. If we are to believe the Chroniclers, his brother Richard met his death whilst hunting there, according to one narrative, by a pestilential blast—surely, at the least, a very unsatisfactory account;[123] though, by another version, from the effects of a blow against a tree.[124] His nephew Richard was either wounded by an arrow through the neck, or caught by the boughs of a tree and strangled—a still more improbable death;[125] whilst, according to Florence of Worcester, he was killed by the arrow of one of his own knights.[126] We will only here pause to notice not only the extreme improbability, but the contradictory statements in both cases, which will not, of course, increase the value of the same evidence concerning Rufus.[127]

And now we will examine the version of his death. History is at all times subjective enough, but becomes far more so when written by unfriendly Chroniclers, who have good reasons for suppressing the truth. The story reads at the very first glance too much like a romance. In the first place, we have no less than three dreams, which are always effects rather than causes—after-thoughts rather than prophecies, well fitted to suit the superstition of the times, and to deceive the crowd. Then, too, we find the old device of the armourer craving the King to take six brand-new arrows, by one of which at the hand of his friend he is fated to fall on the very spot which his father had laid waste, and where he is said to have destroyed a church.

It may of course be urged that all this is in accordance with what we know of the eternal power of the moral laws, that the sins of the fathers are ever visited upon the sons to the third and fourth generations, and that time ever completes the full circle of retribution. But the flaw is, that this special judgment is too special. “Divine vengeance” and “judgment of God,” the Chroniclers cry out one after another, and this is thought sufficient to account for three so-called accidental deaths. The moral laws, however, never fall so directly as they are here represented. Their influence is more oblique. The lightning of justice does not immediately follow each peal of suffering.