Death of William Rufus, by Richard Cavendish

August 2nd, 1100

The fullest contemporary account of the death of William II of England, while hunting in the New Forest, comes from William of Malmesbury, a monk who was the leading chronicler of his day. He says that the King had an ominous dream the night before and felt uneasy, but in the afternoon he set out into the forest with a few companions. One of them was a Frenchman named Walter Tirel, Lord of Poix, a close friend of the King and the only one who stayed with him when the party scattered in the chase. The King shot an arrow at a stag, wounded it and shielded his eyes with his hand against the rays of the declining sun to watch where it went. At this point another stag burst on the scene and Tirel impetuously fired at it. He missed and, entirely unintentionally, his arrow pierced William's chest. The King immediately broke off the shaft which was sticking out of his body, but then collapsed and fell on the rest of the arrow, driving it further in. Tirel rushed to him, but finding the King unconscious and beyond aid, leapt on his horse and fled for dear life.

Tirel was not pursued. When the rest of the party discovered that Rufus was dead, they found urgent matters to occupy them elsewhere - including settling on a new king. It was left to a few local countrymen to put the corpse on a cart and take it to Winchester. It dripped blood all the way.

William of Malmesbury was writing twenty years or so after the event. His account presumably came from hunt servants who were with the King and Tirel that day. Who else was in the hunting party is uncertain, though William's younger brother Henry was certainly one of them. Another generally well-informed chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, added that Tirel was reputedly a dead shot, that there were servants on the scene with Rufus and Tirel, and that Tirel fled to France after the killing, while Prince Henry made for Winchester (where the royal treasury was located).

The King's plain tomb can still be seen in Winchester Cathedral, though the fact that the cathedral tower fell down a few years later was taken by many churchmen as a sign of God's displeasure at his presence there. William Rufus - the nickname referring either to red hair or a red face - seems to have been a capable soldier and a chivalrous and generous leader, but he was thoroughly unpopular in Church quarters. He had driven the saintly Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury out of the country, he treated clerics and their pronouncements with sarcastic derision and he kept vacant ecclesiastical appointments in his own hands and appropriated the income. Still unmarried and childless in his forties when he died, he was also accused of unorthodox sexual preferences.

The chroniclers believed that the godless king had met his death at the hand of God, but writers since have often scented murder. If there was a plot to kill Rufus, then on the face of it the principal beneficiary was his brother Henry, who succeeded him on the throne as Henry I and who made no attempt to punish Tirel. On the other hand, he does not seem to have rewarded him either and it has been argued that for Henry it was not really a good moment for Rufus to die. A particularly wild theory made the death of Rufus a deliberate sacrifice, a ritual 'killing of the king' for the good of his land and people, but the idea found few takers. Fatal hunting accidents were far from unknown at the time and this is the probable if prosaic explanation. The death has always interested people, however, and the Rufus Stone, erected in the eighteenth century near Minstead on the traditional site of the King's death, became one of the earliest tourist attractions in Hampshire.

© History Today

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