Article in the Hampshire Magazine September 1962

Where did Rufus Die?
by A.T. Lloyd
(who has started one of Hampshire's fiercest controversies)

While Lord Montagu is appealing for items to exhibit in a small maritime museum at Buckler's Hard, there is on his estate a farm which marks the site which, according to the earliest writers to mention the reputed site of William Rufus's death, is the place where the Red King fell. It is, of course, some distance from the stone which for over 200 years has indicated the place of his death as having occurred at Canterton Glen.

The earliest writer to refer to the spot where Rufus died was Henry VIII's librarian, Leland; he categorically stated 440 years after the event, that it was at Thorougham - "and there standeth yet a chapelle." Thorougham is the place now called Park Farm on the Beaulieu estate, close to the sea.

No medieval writer had specified the spot, although Florence, the monk of Worcester, did point out that Rufus had fallen where his father, the Conqueror had destroyed a chapel. Significantly, Thorougham had been in ecclesiastical hands since early Saxon history; the manor was granted to the Cathedral in 749, and was held by the Minster and its Bishop - Domesday makes clear (VCHi, 510) - till it was incorporated into the Forest in 1079; presumably its link with the Cathedral caused the chapel to be erected. Reference is made to this grant, made in 749 by King Cuthred, in Mr Gover's book on The Place Names of Hampshire, which is awaiting publication; it was then spelt "Thruhham".

Unfortunately the place-name. Thorougham became lost. In Charle II's reign the chief oral tradition pointed to a tree then standing in Canterton Glen, at the extreme opposite part of the Forest - over 12 miles away as the crow flies. A letter published in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1786, mentions that the tree had been cut down about 1738, and J. Milner, writing to the same magazine in 1789, stated that the stump was "burned by one William House out of mere wantoness" - a fact not known till after his death.

On account of this tradition and to perpetuate the memory of the event, John, Lord Delaware,erected a stone on the site in 1745; this stone was itself attacked by relic-hunting vandals, and it was found necessary in 1841 to encase it in iron.

Hampshire historians, however, had not forgotten Leland's Thorougham. The Rev. William Gilpin of Boldre, writing his Remarks on Forest Scenery about 1790, kept his gaze too firmly on the Canterton area. He wrote (on page 166): "I met with no place of the name of Thorougham in New Forest; and neither the remains nor remembrance of any chapel." Yet his parish was contiguous with that of Beaulieu where - it is just possible - some men still called Park Farm byt its old name. Gilpin's ex-curate, the Rev. Richard Warner, who did fine exploratory work on the county's history, wrote on pages 231-233 in his Topographical Remarks (1793) that "the chapel of Park Grange remains to this day, though in a dilapidated state." Later writers suggest that the reamains were pulled down about 1810. Warner, like his friend Gilpin, seems not to have heard that Park Farm had been, at least till Queen Elizbeth's time, known as Thorougham.

Gilpin, indeed, had bedevilled the issue by suggesting "it is probable  that Thorougham might be what is now called Fritham," with his mind on the so-called Rufus Stone, and presumably because both place names end in - ham!

One hundred years ago the greatest writer on the Forest,  J.R. Wise, carefully listed the evidence in magnificenr footnotes to pages 95-97 of his New Forest, but he fell into Gilpin's trap - "Thorougham, evidently meaning Fritham" - were his words. But Wise did realise , as Warner had not, that the five manors in Domesday called "Truham" and "Trucham" must be the area Leland knew as Thorougham.

The great Victorian medievalist, Dr. Round, at the end of his 48-page essay on Hampshire Domesday for the Victoria County History (published in 1900) pointed out that the "record-type" edition of the County's Domesday had erroneously turned "Truham" into an administrative Hundred. However he accepted withouit question the identification of "Truham" with "Fritham", going so far as to gibe at Moody's lack of consistency in his Hampshire in 1086 for omitting to make that identification each time the name appeared in his book. Dr. Round suggests, probably correctly, that the Domesday scribe sometimes made errors by putting some places under the wrong Hundred name in his list. This would certainly explain one reference to "Truham" being in "Rodedic" Hundred, which had its centre in the Milton area. The other four manors with that name (one is spelt "Trucham") are all listed under the Bovre (Boldre) Hundred, which, of course, is coreect for Park Farm, but it worried both Moody and Round, with eyes still fixed on Rufus stone area. Dr Round went much too far at the end of his essay Domesday Surrey by writing in exasperation - "as is the rule in Domesday, the Hundred headings are worse than useless, because their constant omission leads the student astray."

As it turned out, the Victoria County History to which Dr. Round had contributed so brilliantly in Volume 1, in 1900, was the first to notice Thorougham correctly, since Tudor times. This was in Volume IV, published in 1911 (pages 651 and 655). "Three chapels, those of Boverey, Througham and St Leonard were included in the grant" (of Beaulieu Abbey lands) to Wriothesley" in 1538." Once again ill-luck interferred with a linked identification, for the magnificent index listed Domesday names separately from the general place names references.

It was the complete lack of an index that prevented a tie-up in the recently published compilation by the Galley Press on the "New Forest" (1960). In that book Juanita Berlin in her essay (page 39) The Gypsies of the New Forest tried to bring gypsy folk memory to aid the identification of Thorougham and the site of the King's death with Fritham. On page 157, Captain Widnell in his eassy Bealieu Abbey and its estate , stated that in a survey of 1578 Throughams Park is cited in detail." At last we are back on solid documentary grounds, though no attempt was made to link the Beaulieu estate to Rufus.

There is yet one more place that was suggested before the Rufus "tree" site was selected. The Elizabethen antiquarian Stow, says in his Annals" (1580) that Rufus died at a "place called Chorengham" where "standern a chappell." This place is not known in any Hampshire document, and is never likely to be found. Dr. C.H. Talbot who has worked on the Beauieu Abbey medieval documents, among which is the Sacrist's accounts he found a reference to "Trout(t)-ham" suggested to me recently that Stow or his compositor made a slip in copying "Thorougham". The use of a half uncial capital T shaped like a C with a horizontal bar, brought about the spelling "Chorengham." (the letter 'u' is often copied as an 'n.). Once the two names are placed, one below the other, the truth that this suggestion was what occurred is straightway evident.

Domesday, too, can give us one very rare link - a present day place name with a Saxon owner's name, for just over a mile west of Park Farm is Colgrim';s Mere. It is surely not stretching probability too far to infer that the name is derived from Colgrin, the owner of one  of the five Truham manors in 1066?

So, if Leland was right, Rufus was killed close to the southern sea bounds of the Forest, near the present farm buildings of Park Farm.

It is worth remarking that the southern sea boundary of the Forest is nothing like so long as some people imagine. Many books on the Forest - thinking of the brief list of bounds dating from 1280 that has been regarded as the earliest perambulation extant - refer glibly to the bounds originally being along the whole coast Westwards from Dark Water to Christchurch. This does not tie up with Domesday's record, contemporary with the creation of the Forest. The heading to the group of Forest Manors and those affected by it is not merely "In the New Forest" but also most significantly - "and round about it." Actually too, the 1280 list is not the earliest, for in the neglected Christchurch Priory Cartulogy is a list which is sufficientky detailed to be a true perambulation. It is undated, but of John's reign, at least 64 years ealier than that in print. The bounds are virtually the same as those today, that is - inland beside the East bank of the Lymington river, via Sway, and not along the coast. The boundary banks along this route are still very obvious, in some places being six feet tall.

One more coincidence springs to mind when thinking of Rufus's death. Within 14 years two writers recorded very early names for the Forest area. In 1100, Florence of Worcester stated that Rufus was killed in "the New Forest, called in English, Ytene." Philologists, such as Sir Frank Stenton, are absolutely sure that this word means that the area was known to have been the territory of the Jutes, as Bede had averred in the 1730s. Fourteen years before Rufus's death a Domesday clerk made a queerly worded statement, when referring to Christchurch Priory lands: "In Bovere Hundred the church of the Holy Trinity of Thuinam, had 8 acresin Andret, but this land is now in the Forest." It is very likely that this is not a lost manorial name, but the name of the whole wooded area from Eastern England, called "Andredesweald" in Saxon documents.

Fortunately one more piece of this intriguing jig-saw remains to be fitted into place, and it takes us much nearer the fatal year 1100. My attention has been drawn to an extract from the Annals of Waverley Abbey, quoted in Fowler's A History of Beaulieu Abbey (p16, 1911). Translated from the Latin, this reads: "In the year 1204 King John once built a Cistercian Abbey which he named Bellus Locus, near the spot where William Rufus was killed."

The word 'near' is a comparative one, but the furthest part of the Park Farm estate, the farm itself, is only three-and-a-half miles away, whereas the site of the legendary oak is about 10 miles from the Abbey. Fowler did not realise the significance of his quotation which he was using to explain the origin of the place-name Beaulieu. However it is most important not only for its suggestion of the site, but more especially because the Annalist was writing probably less than 120 years after Rufus' death.

Colin Bower
31 October 2024

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