Beaulieu History Society

Newsletter No 3 September 2017

This is an article from the Newsletter, which in turn is information extracted from Arthur Lloyd's booklet The Death of Rufus published in August 2000, 900 years after Rufus was killed

"THE DEATH OF WILLIAM RUFUS - AUGUST 2"d 1100

William I (The Conqueror) was crowned King in 1066. Around 1051 he had married Matilda [at 4
foot 2 inches was Britain's smallest ever queen.] and they had ten children. William the Conqueror
was badly injured when he was thrown against the pommel of his horse's saddle in Rouen on 15th
August 1087 and after lingering in great pain for several weeks died on Thursday 9th September 1087
in Rouen. He was succeeded, not by his eldest son Robert, but by his third son Rufus. His second son
Richard had died in a hunting accident in the New Forest, the date of which is uncertain, but it was
between 1069 and 1074.

This article is taken from 'The Death of Rufus' written by Arthur Lloyd who has given his permission to
quote from his book.

William Rufus was crowned King on September 26th 1087. He was at Winchester several times during his
reign and it seems very probable that he journeyed to the Forest to hunt at least on some occasions when he
was there. He was specifically recorded as being at Brockenhurst in June 1099 and again in the summer
1100, when he met his death. Gaimar in his long poetic history makes three references to the king being at
Brockenhurst:

1.... a messenger then
went full fast to tell the king.
He found him at Brockenhurst
At the head of the New Forest
Where he sat at his dinner.

then

2. In the 13th year that he reigned them,
Then it befell, as it please God,
The king went to hunt
Towards Brockenhurst to shoot.
This is in the New Forest
A place which is called Brockenhurst.
Privately he went;
Walter Tirel he took with him.

The fat season for red deer began on 1st August and lasted for six weeks, so Rufus's arrival with his
courtiers in 1100 was on the opening day for hunting. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earliest record,
states, 'On the morning after Lammas, King William was killed with an arrow while hunting, by one of his
men.' The place of death has been a source of dispute for a long time.

The first time that a place is positively associated with the king's death is in the 1530s when John
Leland, Henry VIII's topographer, visited Sir William Berkeley at Berkeley Castle. The Berkeley
family, in the 15th and 16th centuries, had held Bisterne, Ibsley and part of Minstead, so Sir William
had some familiarity with the Forest. He explained to Leland how the New Forest was governed and
then added 'The place whey it is sayde that Tyrell kyllyd King William Rufus ys called
THOROUGHAM, and there standyth yet a chapelle'. Even more significantly the Berkeley family
were in possession of Exbury, on the eastern side of the Beaulieu River, facing the Truham estates,
from 1339 to 1484.

 

Neither Berkeley nor Leland stated where `Thorougham' was situated, presumably because they knew
it was a place-name still in common use or, at least, generally known. We now know that it ceased to be
used in 1607 and remained forgotten until the present writer identified it with a place on the Beaulieu
estate.

William Camden, the distinguished antiquarian, quotes a Latin verse penned by Bishop John White,
the Bishop of Winchester (1556-59) which rendered in English says: 'Rufus destroyed churches,
market places and farming land, and built Beaulieu in the rural forest. The king was hunting a stag
when Tirell, not seeing his aim transfixed the king with an arrow, so vengeance was done on the
king.' The Bishop, in this verse, can be seen to be following several of the medieval chroniclers in
thinking Rufus created the New Forest and compounded this with an error about founding Beaulieu
Abbey. What is intriguing about the verse is that the death of Rufus is described immediately after
the mention of Beaulieu which might be taken to give the impression that there is a connexion. It is
possible the bishop may have visited Beaulieu before the dissolution in 1538 or knew what Leland
meant by `Thorougham'.

John Stow (1615) wrote... 'King William on the morrow after Lammas day hunting in the New Forest of
Hampshire in a place called CHORENGHAM where since a chapel was builded.' Stow made notes from
Leland's manuscript and in doing so seems to have misread the initial capital 'T' of Thorougham and
transcribed it as 'C', an easy mistake to make if the top bar of the 'T' was indistinct. A few years later, John
Speed, a renowned historian of the day referred to the pace as CHORENGHAM also.

A study of the Domesday book shows that there had been 6 manors beside the River Otter [from 1205,
Beaulieu River], all called TRUHAM or TRUCHAM [alias Thorougham, alias Througham]. Truham
probably means 'trough or valley settlement' though the second element of the name ham might derive from
Kamm in which case it would mean a 'marsh area'. In either case the six manors must have been in the
valley of the River Otter.

Cuthred of the family of King Athelred of Wessex gave a manor, DRUCAM, to Winchester Cathedral
in 735 (recorded in Annales Monasterii de Wintonia, edited by Luard in 1865). This is the earliest
recorded grant of any place in this area of Hampshire, pre-dating the Shire name by over 20 years.
Luard was using 13th century copies of the early charters and — like Birch, when he recorded
`Thruhham' of 749 — left the name in italics as an unidentified place.

In Saxon times there were two symbols for Th; D with a horizontal bar ( D ) was used for names beginning
with the th sounding as in thin. Presumably the 13th century copier omitted the little bar, so writing simply
`Drucam' (which should have been pronounced `Thrucam').

I suggest that this was the northernmost "Truham" of the Domesday Book — where a monk could be based
to teach the heathen Jutes about Christianity, as in 686, Wessex had defeated the Jutes of the Isle of Wight
and mainland nearby [i.e. later — the New Forest].

Referring back to Leland, Henry VIII's topographer, and his reference to 'a chappelle' there, recent
writers have supposed that the chapel noted by Leland was either a chapel set up to commemorate
the site of the king's death or, alternatively, the chapel noted by the medieval chronicler, Florence of
Worcester. He had remarked, 'that where the king was killed a chapel had stood' obviously meaning
a Saxon chapel that went out of use once William I had put the area under strict Forest laws.

Shortly after Beaulieu Abbey was founded, a monk of Waverley Abbey noted in its Annals that
Beaulieu had been built close (grope) to the site where Rufus was killed. So it is possible that the
`Truham' held by the Bishop of Winchester could be closer to where the abbey was to be built about a
century later. [N.B. It was known that, at the time of Domesday, the Bishop of Winchester held the first,
probably most northerly, 'Truham'.]

What is of undoubted interest is the fact that in 1203, a year or two before Beaulieu Abbey was
founded, King John had spent the large sum of £79 14s 9d on repairing his hunting lodge 'in the
corner of the New Forest at Bellus Locus'. The sheer size of the repair suggests a substantial
building that had stood for 50 years or more. The fact that in 1204 the abbey was called Bellus Locus
Regis strongly suggests that it must have been built close to the recently refurbished hunting lodge,
though possibly on the other side of the river, the `Truham' side. Earlier writers on the history of
the abbey had assumed that Bellus Locus Regis (the lovely site on royal land) was a new name given
to the foundation and had not been occupied before.

The different strands now can be seen to intertwine. Winchester Catherdral's `Thrucam, the Bishop's
`Truham', Florence of Worcester's destroyed chapel near where Rufus fell, Waverley Abbey's Annals note
that Beaulieu Abbey was built near the site of the king's death, Leland's `Thorougham' and the abbey at
Bellus Locus Regis — all were in the proximity, though possibly on different size of the river.

All the evidence appears to confirm the death of Rufus to have take place very close to the village of
Beaulieu itself.

Arthur Lloyd

['The Death of Rufus' by Arthur Lloyd was published in 2000 by 'The New Forest Ninth Centenary Trust' and
gives much greater detail concerning not just the whereabouts but also the actual incident. It is available at
local libraries. — Ed.]

Note: It is known that for a long time there had been a Chapel at Park, though this is unlikely to have
any connection with the death of Rufus. In Beaulieu, King John's Abbey by Dom. Hockey he mentions
`In 1563 the chapel at Park was also being used as a farm store. Described by Richard Warner in 1793,
it was destroyed in the 19th century.' Captain Widnell, in his chapter on Beaulieu Abbey in The New
Forest states... 'In addition there had been the important Throughams Park, today Park Farm, where
the outline of the chapel, finally pulled down in the early nineteenth century, can he easily discerned,
for its foundations stand under the brick and slate southern wing of the existing farmhouse."

Colin Bower
31 October 2024

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