THE FIRE KINDLERS - CHAPTER 2

WHEN RUFUS FELL

If you were dwelling in the New Forest and at the Christmas season heard a knock at the door, you would perhaps be confronted with an odd variation to the usual carol-singers or waits who are to be seen and heard on all the doorsteps of Old England at that time. You might see a party oddly attired in costumes made of fancy paper, painted faces, masks and silk hats, who would proceed to perform a kind of play. They would doubtless call to mind what you have read of the Greek "Comedians" who used to go around in like manner at the Dionysia, or winter festival of Dionysius. And quite probably they are indeed perpetuating a survival of that ancient custom of their forefathers, for there are sure to be some descendants of the Purkis family amongst them, and the play they act is a sort of pageant of the death of William Rufus, and his burial.

They are known as the "Mummers" and in true Greek style they precede their acting with a prologue which goes like this:

"Eight hundred years ago, sir,

"As I have heard men say,

"A King rode in the forest

"His royal stag to slay;

"Through brier and brake the huntsman’s horn

"Rang with a cheerful swell;

"But instead of a royal stag that day

"The King of England fell."

The Purkis family, who have dwelt continuously in this locality for two thousand years, have long since forgotten the Greek ancestry to which they bear an unconscious witness by the survival of habits and customs such as those of the " Mummers ". But they seem to find a most peculiar source of pride and pleasure in tracing their descent from the Charcoal Burner who had the odd luck to discover the body of the dead King William Rufus, who conveyed his corpse to Winchester in his cart.

What is there in such a trivial incident to be so proud of? What an absurd event to become the corner stone of a family tradition! Is it not indeed strange that history found room to record the Charcoal Burner's humble part and still more so that it should record his name? And yet the description on the stone set in the New Forest close by the Charcoal Burner’s cottage, gives as the reason for its existence-"That an event so memorable might not hereafter be forgotten !"

Surely there must be some unknown reason for the perpetuation of the memory of that fateful evening of August 2nd, 1l00. It is even said that about midnight on August the second every year a ghostly procession may be seen anywhere along what is known as the King's Lane. It is the Charcoal Burner with his gruesome burden wending his way to Winchester. The way he went is called the "King's Lane". It ran through the forest from the foot of Fryern Hill northward across Hocombe Road, through Cranbury Park, Silkstead and St. Cross to Kingsgate and the Cathedral. Perhaps but half of the story has been told. Perhaps there was a secret which could not be confided to a mind too immature and which died with the one who kept it.

When I was a boy at school, I used to be much annoyed by our Headmaster, who would suggest that my ancestor was a very suspicious character, possibly guilty of regicide!

I thought he was just poking fun at me, and indignantly denied the possibility of such a thing. Was it not written upon the stone that "an arrow shot by Sir Walter Tyrell at a stag, glanced, and struck King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, on the breast, of which stroke he instantly died"?

However, since then I have stirred the embers of history. I have seen in the accounts of those who lived at that time the smoke and heat of the struggle between the State and the Church, which was at the same time a struggle between a freedom-loving people and a system of feudal despotism. The part the Charcoal Burner played may have been a most vital one, but it is obscured in the smoke of mystery.

One thing at least is practically certain - that the death of Rufus was no accident. It may be recalled that William the Conqueror once narrowly escaped a "fatal accident" when his horse stumbled upon some hot coals hidden in the sward of the forest, no doubt the remains of a Charcoal Burner's fire.

Many accounts of the ruthlessness of William II in the New Forest seem by the light of the more reliable historians to have been exaggerated. He did not plant trees upon much arable land. But he did take lands which were covered with valuable timber, notably the estate of Baron Yyvery or Avery and the Purkis estate, and converted them into a royal game preserve, and his penalties for infringement of the forest laws were cruel and inhumane. "It was safer to kill a man than to kill a deer."

His immoral conduct offended everyone, but especially the Church, who were particularly angry when he defied the Pope and banished Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to Normandy.

The accounts of Vitalis, the ecclesiastical historian, in "Patrologiae Cursus Completus" and Malmesbury in "Gesta Regum Anglorum", though highly coloured, are extremely significant; with a fabric of miraculous occurrences Vitalis appears to be covering something up. Indeed, one might say that he stretches it a little too far and unwittingly exposes a little of the truth he is trying to hide. His story is an orgy of bad dreams and visions. 1 have condensed it briefly from "Historia Ecclesiastica", Pars III Liber X, Caput XII, and from "Patrologiae Cursus Completus", Tomes 158 and 159.

On the fateful eve of August 2nd, 1100, Rufus dreamed that he saw himself mortally wounded and bleeding profusely. He had but breakfasted when his friend FitzHamon came in and gave him a solemn account of a dream which a monk in the palace had had during the night. He had seen the Red King enter a chapel, approach a crucifix and proceed to break it apart, tearing limb from limb. The Sacred Image bore it for a while but at length struck him, so that he fell on the floor and fire and smoke were seen issuing from his mouth.

William Rufus was undeterred by these omens and called for the horses. He is said to have handed Sir Walter Tyrell his arrows saying as he did so, "The keenest arrows to the best marksman." The royal party were just mounted on their horses and ready for the chase when in rode messengers with a letter from the Abbott of Gloucester relating to a vision which a monk of the abbey had had during the night. He had seen the Court of Heaven and Our Lady on her knees before the Saviour interceding for the sufferings of the poor of England, that He would pity their wrongs and avenge them by punishing the monarch who oppressed them. The Saviour answered her with these words, "You must be patient and wait; due retribution will in time befall the wicked."

In February, 1093, the King had been seized with sickness when in the neighbourhood of Gloucester. He had been taken in and doctored by monks of the abbey and rested there until he was restored to health.

Before he left he made a solemn vow to give peace and security to the Church and to govern the people with just and merciful laws. Apparently he soon forgot his vow, for in 1095 he sought to deprive Anselm of his bishopric and in 1097 banished him from England. He (Rufus) was threatened with excommunication by Pope Urban in 1099, and only saved by Anselm's entreaties.

0n the Sunday previous to the King's hunting party a sermon was preached by Fulchered, Abbot of Shrewsbury, on the oppression of the poor, which closed with these significant words: "The bow of God’s vengeance is bent against the wicked, the arrow, swift to wound, is already drawn out of the quiver. Soon the blow will be struck, but the man who is wise will amend and avoid it."

Meanwhile, in France there was more dreaming going on. On the eve of the tragedy Hugh, the Abbot of Cluny, visited Anselm in his exile and told him he had just dreamed that he had seen William Rufus summoned before the judgment seat of Christ and sentenced to eternal damnation. At Lyons on August the first, where Anselm was living in exile, a youth who had obviously made a mistake, either in the date or in the tense of his message, brought news from England that King William Rufus had been mysteriously slain in the New Forest while hunting, a day before it had actually taken place.

The King however, drowned his fears, if he had any, in strong drink and the hunting party set out bravely. They were, besides the King, his brother, Henry, William of Breteuil, Walter Tyrell and FitzHamon. Every contemporary historian has a slightly different story of the death of Rufus, and each one has a different number present when the deed was done. Malmesbury says that Rufus and Tyrell were alone. The sun was setting in the west, sending a dazzling glow down through the avenue of trees, the King, seeing a stag break into the open, shot, but missed. As, the frightened stag ran down the avenue of blinding sunlight, the King shaded his eyes with his hand; Tyrell shot at the stag, but missed it and struck the King in the breast. Tyrell, afraid to be caught alone with the corpse, turned his horse and galloped all the way to Southampton, where he instantly boarded a ship just ready to sail for France. He crossed the Channel that night, and went at once with the news to Anselm, who immediately went to the chapel and chanted a "Te Deum", which was the usual form of an act of Thanksgiving.

There is a story told that he stopped at a Blacksmith's at the first stream he came to and had his horse's shoes put on backwards so that he could not be followed, and that the Blacksmith was afterward heavily fined for having done so. The story sounds rather unlikely to me, but the place where the Blacksmith is supposed to have lived is called "Tyrell's Ford" to this day.

Malmesbury seems to he the most accurate, or at least the most plausible raconteur of his time. The account must be either that of Sir Walter Tyrell himself or that of an unseen man who shot the fatal arrow. But one naturally would expect him to have a tale that would clear himself, so after all that does not throw much light on the mystery, though it is just as likely to be a true account as any.

Edward Watts in "Historia Major Angliae" has a Bishop in the hunting party, who insists on spoiling the day's sport by explaining to the King the symbolism of the various dreams. The King, feeling fear seize him, tries to overcome the Bishop with black magic, uttering, "Trahe arcum, Diabole!" But a goat appeared and drew the King's attention so that he could not complete the spell and at that instant an arrow fell from heaven and struck him in the breast.

The corpse of the King must have been loaded into the Charcoal Burner's cart almost immediately after he was slain, for we are told that there were bloodstains on the grass far on the way to Winchester. According to Malmesbury the King was slain about sunset, which would be late in the evening at the beginning of August. It is about twenty-five miles from the scene of the tragedy to Winchester, and the Charcoal Burner's horse with his gruesome burden could not proceed at more than a walking pace. Yet Watts says that the King was buried and the grave filled in before the break of day. There was no funeral service, there were no mourners; the only witnesses of that strange burial in the silence of the night were the monks of the Cathedral and Purkis, the Charcoal Burner.

The grave under the central tower must have been prepared for him beforehand. It was a fitting place for the tomb of a monarch, and this was the sole royal honour bestowed upon him. Even this appears to have been too much, for it was not long before the immense tower, so broad that a regiment of soldiers could have stood on top of it, crumbled down on top of the tomb, and people said that it was a sign of the wrath of Heaven at his sinfulness and never would they build it up again.

Everyone seemed relieved to hear that he was gone, and no one sought to inquire how. Watts says he was buried "unlamented, unknelled and unaneled". No bell was tolled, no mass was sung, he was given the burial of a murderer, and perchance the huntsman who had brought down his royal quarry was shriven in his stead and was looked upon as one who had been an obedient and willing instrument for the vengeance of God.

Malmesbury, on the contrary, states that he was buried on the following day, "many persons looking on but few grieving". And implies that he did receive the full rites of the Church, for he says concerning the falling of the tower that it was "a sign of the displeasure of Heaven, that he had received Christian burial".

The contemporary historians do not mention the possibility of the arrow glancing upon the oak tree. This legend appears on a stone which was placed on the spot where the oak tree stood on which the fatal arrow is said to have glanced. As this is within a stone's throw of the Purkis homestead, it is altogether likely that the Charcoal Burner's family had more to do with perpetuating that story than anyone else. I have thought that it would be almost impossible for anyone so to shoot an arrow that it would glance off a tree and be deflected so as to strike a desired object, but I am told by an experienced archer that it can be done.

The stone which took the place of the oak tree became much mutilated at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I am afraid that the Purkis family had something to do with that, some taking chunks of the stone away as souvenirs and others inscribing their own names upon it. So it was encased in iron in 1841 and that is its present condition.

One interesting mutilation on the original stone is the crossing of the word "happened" in a sentence, and the writing in of the word "related". Evidently someone thought that things did not happen just as they were related.

The iron casing that now encloses the stone is three-sided, with an inscription on each of the three sides, thus:

1. "Here stood the oak tree on which an arrow, shot by Sir Walter Tyrell at a stag, glanced, and struck King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, on the breast, of which stroke he instantly died on the 2nd of August, 1100."

2. "King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, being slain as before related, was laid in a cart belonging to one Purkis and drawn from thence to Winchester and buried in the Cathedral Church of that city."

3. "That an event so memorable might not hereafter he forgotten, the enclosed stone was set up by John Lord Delaware, who had seen the tree growing in this place.

"This stone having been much mutilated and the inscription on each of its three sides defaced, this more durable memorial with the original inscriptions was erected in the year 1841 by William Stringer Bourne, Warden."

Above the spot where the stone stands rises a steep hill which commands a view of the forest for miles around. It would he an easy thing to follow the progress of a hunting party from this high ground and then to run down to one of the dense clumps of holly bushes that abound in this part of the forest, and shoot an arrow unseen and unheard. Itseems obvious that the whole thing was planned beforehand, and that Rufus was given a fair warning and every inducement to repent his past and change his ways. If he had been penitent he would have sought his confessor and have spent the day in penance. But as he did not, the arrow of vengeance was ready for him.

Who shot the arrow?

It seems unlikely that a Norman knight like Sir Walter Tyrell should have any motive for such an act, and even if he did, there were humbler people who could do it much more safely. But what of a free man with the blood of liberty-loving Greece in his veins, whose property had been encroached upon by the King's harsh decrees?

But let us not peer too closely into the cloudy smoke of mystery lest we be scorched by the flames. Let the smoke of obscurity still veil the subtle mystery of the Charcoal Burner's fire.

One spark of truth we have glimpsed. One caustic principle has burned our souls. In the struggle against the tyranny of vice and oppression, there was someone willing to take the utmost risk to make a criminal of himself in order to rid his nation of the crime of oppression. No doubt the Church that placed oppression of the poor among the sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance, offered sacrifices to Heaven for the soul of him who slew the oppressor.

The man who let that fateful arrow fly struck the first blow in the battle for the freedom of British democracy, a battle that has been waged relentlessly until it has won for us Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, and all the priceless heritage of the British Constitution.

"I know not who the bow-string drew;

"I know not how the arrow flew;

"Who bore the bow? The King who slew?

"I know not-but 'tis soothly said

"That Tyrell drew, - and the King is dead."

-Wace.