The Arrow at Lammas: The Death of William II Rufus in the New Forest, 2 August 1100

On the afternoon of Thursday 2 August 1100, the morrow of Lammas, a small party of magnates and household intimates rode out to hunt in the New Forest in Hampshire. They had gathered the day before at a royal hunting lodge. The party split into smaller groups in the woods. In one of them rode William II of England, called “Rufus” for his ruddy complexion, and a French knight named Walter Tirel, lord of Poix-de-Picardie in Ponthieu, who was understood to be an excellent archer. As the sun set, an arrow loosed by Tirel at a stag struck the king in the chest. He died without speaking.

Tirel rode out of the forest at once, took ship for France, and never returned to England. The body was reportedly left where it lay. The king’s youngest brother Henry, who had been in the hunting party, did not pause. He rode hard for the royal treasury at Winchester. There he was confronted by William de Breteuil, who tried to hold the treasury for the absent eldest brother Robert Curthose, then returning from the First Crusade. Henry prevailed. He was at Westminster within three days. On Sunday 5 August 1100 he was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey by Maurice, Bishop of London. The same day he issued the Coronation Charter, also called the Charter of Liberties, the written promise of reform that is conventionally regarded as the constitutional ancestor of Magna Carta. Robert Curthose, with a new wife and a substantial Apulian dowry, was within weeks of arriving back in Normandy.

For 926 years the chronicle record has not settled what happened in the forest. The question is whether the killing was a careless accident, a deliberate act by Tirel, or a coordinated assassination planned by Henry.

The king and the politics of 1100

William II was the third surviving son of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders. He was born in Normandy in the years around 1056 to 1060 (the precise year is given as a window in modern scholarship). His father died at Rouen on 9 September 1087. Rufus was crowned at Westminster Abbey on Sunday 26 September 1087 by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury. He never married and left no legitimate children. At his death he was therefore between about forty and forty-four years old.

Three threads converged on the New Forest in the summer of 1100.

The first was the inheritance settlement of 1087. The Conqueror had divided his lands. Normandy went to the eldest son, Robert Curthose. England went to Rufus. The youngest, Henry, received treasure, the figure traditionally given as 5,000 pounds of silver, and no major landed inheritance. The youngest brother began his career without a duchy or a kingdom.

The second was the contest over Normandy. In 1096 Robert Curthose mortgaged the duchy to Rufus for 10,000 marks to finance his departure on the First Crusade. Rufus ruled Normandy in his brother’s absence. By the summer of 1100 Robert was returning. He had married Sibylla of Conversano in Apulia, which brought a substantial dowry, and was within weeks of arriving back in Normandy at the moment Rufus died. The window for any rival claim against Robert was closing fast.

The third was the ecclesiastical conflict. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury since 1093, had clashed with Rufus over investiture, lay rights, and his attendance at the papal Council of Bari in 1098. He had been in exile in Rome since November 1097 and returned to England only after Rufus’s death.

The hunting party

A small party of magnates and household intimates gathered at a royal hunting lodge in the New Forest on the eve of Lammas, 1 August. They rode out on the afternoon of Thursday 2 August. The named participants in the chronicle and modern reconstructions include Walter Tirel, lord of Poix-de-Picardie and (by marriage to a daughter of Richard FitzGilbert of the Clare family) holder of Langham in Essex; Henry, the king’s youngest brother; William de Breteuil, royal magnate and keeper of the Winchester treasury; Robert FitzHamon, lord of Gloucester; and unnamed companions, household servants, and huntsmen.

William of Malmesbury, in Gesta Regum IV.333, preserves a tradition that on the eve of the hunt an armourer presented six arrows to the king. Rufus kept four and handed two to Tirel with words to the effect of “to the good archer, the good arrows.”

Malmesbury and Orderic also preserve a cluster of dream-portents around the hunt: a vision by a monk at Gloucester (or in some recensions a different monastery) warning of the king’s death, and a dream in which Rufus saw himself bled by a physician. Robert FitzHamon is named in some traditions as the man who carried the warning to the king, who is said to have laughed it off. These portents are reported here as documented twelfth-century chronicler tradition. They are a conventional medieval narrative device marking a sovereign’s death as foreshadowed by Providence, and are not reported as historical fact.

The arrow

The party split. Tirel and Rufus were in the same group. Every later account turns on that pair.

The single most influential narrative is Malmesbury’s. As Malmesbury tells it, the sun was setting. A stag broke cover. Rufus loosed an arrow and wounded it. The stag ran on into the light of the setting sun, and the king shielded his eyes with his hand to follow it. At that moment a second stag passed close by. Tirel drew and shot at the second stag. The arrow, in Malmesbury’s words, “unknowingly and without power to prevent it,” struck the king in the chest. The king reportedly broke off the shaft, fell forward onto it (driving it deeper), and died without speaking.

The deflection detail, the arrow glancing off a tree or the animal before reaching the king, does not appear in Malmesbury’s text and enters the tradition later.

The chronicle tradition is multiple and not perfectly aligned. Malmesbury (composed c. 1120 to 1125, revised c. 1135) names Tirel as the shooter. Orderic Vitalis, in Historia Ecclesiastica Book X (completed c. 1141 at Saint-Évroult in Normandy), names Tirel and reports that he fled at once for France. Florence and John of Worcester, in the Chronicon ex Chronicis at the annal for 1100, also name Tirel. Geoffrey Gaimar’s Anglo-Norman verse L’Estoire des Engleis (c. 1136 to 1137), the earliest vernacular chronicle of the death, ends with the killing of Rufus and names Tirel. The Peterborough (E) recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written within years of the event, notably does not name Tirel: it records simply that on the morrow after Lammas Day the king was shot with an arrow by one of his own men while hunting. Eadmer, Anselm’s biographer and a monk of Christ Church Canterbury, focuses on the ecclesiastical politics rather than the hunt itself. Gerald of Wales, writing in the 1190s, reads the death as divine judgment; this is a later interpretive layer, not evidence.

Suger and the old knight

Around forty years after the killing, Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis composed the Vita Ludovici Grossi, the life of Louis VI of France. Suger had known Walter Tirel personally in France. In the Vita he records that he had often heard Tirel, when he had nothing left to fear and nothing left to hope for, swear under oath that he had not been in the part of the forest where the king was hunting that day and had never seen the king in the forest at all. (The paraphrase here follows the standard modern rendering of Suger’s Latin.)

The testimony is unusual. It is the only first-person witness statement that survives, recorded by a respected churchman who heard it repeatedly from an old man with no remaining motive to lie or to confess. It has been read in two opposed ways. On one reading, it is Tirel’s truthful denial of his role and the hunting-accident tradition naming him is wrong. On the other, it is the durable denial of a man who had carried out a deliberate killing and could not afford to admit it even at the end. Both readings remain in modern scholarship. Suger himself does not adjudicate.

Henry’s hours

Tirel rode out of the forest at once, took ship for France, and never returned to England. He retained his French lordship at Poix. The king’s body was reportedly left where it lay. Later New Forest tradition has it that a charcoal-burner named Purkis loaded the body onto his cart and carried it to Winchester, with blood marking the road. The Purkis story is folk tradition with later attestation; it does not appear in the principal twelfth-century chronicles and is reported here as tradition.

Henry did not pause. He rode hard for the royal treasury at Winchester. There he was confronted by William de Breteuil, who attempted to hold the treasury for Robert Curthose, the absent elder brother to whom Henry and the barons had previously sworn fealty. With the support of Henry de Beaumont, Robert of Meulan, and others, Henry prevailed. He occupied the castle and took possession of the treasury.

He was at Westminster within three days. Henry was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey on Sunday 5 August 1100, three days after his brother’s death. The ceremony was performed by Maurice, Bishop of London, because Anselm of Canterbury was still in exile in Rome and Thomas of Bayeux, Archbishop of York, was at Ripon. The same day Henry issued the Coronation Charter, a written promise to correct the abuses of his brother’s reign. It is preserved in multiple medieval copies and is conventionally regarded as the constitutional ancestor of Magna Carta. The witness list of the charter includes Maurice of London, William bishop-elect of Winchester, Gerard of Hereford, several earls, and Walter Giffard. Anselm returned from exile within weeks and reconciled with Henry on improved terms, though the investiture controversy between them flared again from 1105 and was settled only in 1107.

Burial, the falling tower, and the Rufus Stone

Rufus was buried at Winchester Cathedral beneath the central crossing tower, in a plain grave and without a royal monument.

The central tower collapsed in 1107. William of Malmesbury and other chroniclers, writing later, read the collapse as a divine sign of Rufus’s unworthiness for having been buried beneath it. Modern architectural opinion treats the collapse as a structural failure consistent with unstable building stone and over-ambitious Norman crossing designs of the period; other early Anglo-Norman cathedral towers failed in the same generation. Frank Barlow, in his standard biography, regards the providential reading as theology, not causation.

The Rufus Stone in Canterton Glen near Cadnam is a 1745 monument erected by John, Lord De La Warr, with an inscription claiming that the king fell at the spot. The original stone was damaged by souvenir hunters and in 1841 was encased in a triangular cast-iron monument with a recast inscription. The site is an eighteenth-century antiquarian commemoration, not primary location evidence. The twelfth-century chronicles do not fix a precise spot in the forest, and Barlow notes that there is no chronicler-based reason to attach the killing to that location. The exact site of Rufus’s death is genuinely unknown.

The Winchester tomb evidence is also weaker than popular accounts suggest. A monument long described as the Rufus tomb at Winchester Cathedral was opened on 27 August 1868, and the contents were examined on the assumption that they were looking at the Red King. The monument has since been re-attributed, in recent scholarship and in the cathedral’s current presentation, to Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester 1129 to 1171. Rufus’s bones are now believed to be among those distributed in the cathedral’s mortuary chests, which are inscribed with multiple royal names. There is no securely identified Rufus skeleton today. Popular reports of a “Rufus skeleton with rib damage” rest on the 1868 examination and on the now-overturned identification.

The hypotheses

The readings below are labelled. None is asserted as fact.

Hypothesis A. Hunting accident, with Tirel as the careless shooter. For: This is the version preserved by Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, and John of Worcester, and the position Frank Barlow defends as most plausible. Hunting accidents to nobles in this generation were common. Rufus’s own brother, Richard of Normandy, had died in a New Forest hunting accident around 1069 to 1075. An illegitimate nephew, also named Richard and a son of Robert Curthose, is reported by chronicle and later tradition to have died in a New Forest hunting accident in 1100, possibly only weeks before Rufus himself. The forest had a record of killing the king’s male relatives. Against: Tirel’s repeated denials in old age to Suger that he was ever in that part of the forest; Henry’s strikingly immediate readiness to seize the treasury and the crown.

Hypothesis B. Deliberate killing by Tirel acting on his own initiative. For: Tirel’s flight, on its face, is consistent with consciousness of guilt. Against: No chronicle gives Tirel a motive against Rufus, and the chronicle tradition does not impute one. Flight by a foreign knight after the accidental killing of a king would be entirely rational regardless of intent. The hypothesis has weak support in the record.

Hypothesis C. Coordinated assassination planned by Henry and executed by Tirel. For: Henry’s seizure of the Winchester treasury within hours, his coronation within three days, the prepared Coronation Charter, the closing window before Robert Curthose’s return from Crusade, and the fact that Henry was actually present in the forest party. C. Warren Hollister, in his Yale biography of Henry I, concedes that the timing is suspicious. Against: No twelfth-century chronicler directly accuses Henry. Tirel’s later denials are equally consistent with innocence and with a durable cover. Henry’s readiness can be read as the prudent contingency planning of a younger brother who knew Robert was about to arrive in Normandy with a wife and a dowry. The case is circumstantial.

Hypothesis D. A broader baronial conspiracy. For: Rufus was widely disliked among magnates and clergy; his chief financial administrator, Ranulf Flambard, was particularly hated; the political class had reasons to want a change of king. Against: The chronicle silence on baronial involvement beyond Henry is significant. Faction-based regicide conspiracies leave fingerprints in chronicle gossip, and these are absent.

Hypothesis E. Divine judgment. For: This is the framework the medieval chroniclers themselves used. Malmesbury, Orderic, and (later) Gerald of Wales read Rufus’s death as God’s punishment for his anticlericalism, his treatment of Anselm, and his perceived irreligion. The collapse of the Winchester tower in 1107 was read in the same key. Against: This is theological interpretation, not historical causation. It is reported here as part of the documented chronicler tradition, not as an explanation.

What remains unknown

Whether the killing was a careless accident, a deliberate act by Tirel for unknown reasons, or a coordinated plan involving Henry. The exact spot in the New Forest where Rufus fell. Whether any of the bones in the Winchester mortuary chests, or those examined in 1868 under the now-overturned attribution, are actually his. What, if anything, passed between Henry and Tirel before or after the killing. Why Tirel, when an old man with nothing to gain or fear, repeatedly insisted to Suger that he was not even in that part of the forest.