"CRUEL RED KING”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19997, 14 January 1927, Page 12

"CRUEL RED KING”

FATE OF WILLIAM EUFT7S. WALTER TYRRELL’S ARROW. STORY OF ANCIENT OAK. "They have been selling one of the places in which William Rufus was killed, says the London Daily Telegraph. In the grounds of Lady Cross Lodge, which is near Brockenhurst, stands, we are assured, an ancient oak, which is that very one off which Walter Tyrrell's arrow glanced to slay the Red King. At any rate countless generations have repeated the assertion. The Telegraph proceeds with the story and its own comments as follows: — Countelss tourists have also visited the "Rufus Stone,” which was s«t up in 1745 “to mark the spot where grew the oak which turned Tyrrell’s arrow as aforesaid. But that is over Stony Cross way, which is on the other side of the New Forest. It seems improbable that William, however great his iniquities, was killed in both places. There are several others, some not to be discovered, in which also the ceremony is said to have been performed. The strongest desire to believe in the evidence of tradition must find this ance of it embarrassing. When “countless generations” have been telling incompatible tales, the certainty that some are false does not exclude the possibility that all may be. . , The most interesting thing about the story of Rufus’s death is that any decent authority for so picturesque a yarn should be lacking. All that the public of 1100 knew was that the King had a hunting party in the New Forest on August 1, and that next day some peasants brought his body, bleeding and dead, to Winchester. There it was buried in the Cathedral. So much was granted “out of reverence for the regal dignity.” But the clergy said no Mass, tolled no bell, and would not let anybody make offerings for his soul. When the Cathedral tower fell down seven years afterwards it war commonly held to prove that they had gone too far in admitting him to burial. “ THE CRUEL RED KING.” Out of this rather scanty_ material comes the thrilling, legend, with moral lesson complete which is at its best in Kingsley’s sham antique ballad, that “the cruel Red King” was doomed for his own and his father’s wickedness in devastating Hampshire to make the New Forest, that Tyrrell and he went hunting together, that the King shot at a hart and missed, and cried out: “Shoot thou, in the fiend’s name ”; thus, as the vulgar now say, asking for trouble. The contemporary chronicle only knows that the king was “ shot off with an arrow from his own men in That the rest of them, as well as Tyrrell, ran away from the body, has a queer look, but might mean that they had an honest accident and were scared. Tyrrell, so far as we know, gained nothing _ by the death, and was not punished for it. All the world seems to have that he did the deed, and he was denying it at a date when it would have been accounted rather a merit, INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE. The evidence, it is obvious, is most unsatisfactory. What inclines the amateur of criminal studies to believe that Tyrrell knew something about it is the absence of any obvious reason why people should have put it on him. He was a gentleman of birth and position,.he was considered friendly to the_ King, and found no favour with the King’s enemies. Yet all England went about saying “that Tyrrell drew and the King lay dead.” The main reason for scepticism is that if Tyrrell, and Tyrrell alone, did the deed, it is hard to understand why all the other fellows ran away. So the case of Rufus remains one of the enigmatic crimes of history.