General Notes

!Third son of William the Conqueror.  King of England 1087-1100.  Pursued a domestic policy which was harsh and venal leading to his murder(?) ascribed to Walter Tirel during a hunting trip.  Never married, no children. Left throne to his younger brother, King Henry I. [Funk & Wagnals]

!Notorius homosexual. Despite his basic good nature, his love for his parents, the decency of his behaviour in war, and his reputation for honour and straightness, he was a mocker of all sacred things; and this profanity together with his homosexual tastes gave him a black reputation in ecclesiastical circles. There was an evil self-conscious flamboyance in Rufus which the conventional found deeply disturbing.  He even shocked those bred in his father's thrifty household with his reckless, and sometimes senseless, expenditure. As a soldier and ruler he was on a par with his father.  There was the same grit and ambition. He was a stout man, red in face, choleric, with rolling blue eyes, and a passionate, stuttering speech; undiginified, a bit of a buffoon, but no fool underneath. Men learned not to underrate this young bull. [William I and the Norman Conquest]

!His exactions of money, his unfair use of church revenues, and the cruel, unjust treatment of his subjects, made him very unpopular.  His most serious trouble was the result of a quarrel with Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, who wished to go to Rome to receive the emblems of his office from the pope. [Outline History of Mankind]

In the popular imagination, the New Forest is more closely linked with the Conqueror's second son, William II, known as 'Rufus'. His reign was largely preoccupied with campaigns in Scotland and Wales, and with the effort to wrest control of Normandy from his elder brother. But during a hunting expedition in the New Forest on 2 August 1100, this reputedly depraved and irreligious man met an early death.
  In his "Gesta Regum Anglorum" the 12th century historian William of Malmesbury writes of the dream-portents that warned Rufus of a bloody end. Malmesbury goes on to tell how an arrow loosed at a stag in the evening light by the king's hunting companion, Walter Tirel, accidentlly pierced the king's breast. Though Rufus broke off the shaft, he died instantly when he fell to the ground, driving the head deeper home.
   In the damp glade near the road at Canterton, the Rufus Stone marks the site of an ancient oak tree off which Tirel's arrow is said to have glanced. Encased for protection inside an iron monument since 1841, the stone records how the slain king was 'laid in a cart belonging to one Purkis and drawn from hence to Winchester and buried in the cathedral church of that city.' But the untimely death of a public figure rarely goes unattended by conspiracy theories, and this one is no exception. ["The Ancient New Forest" by Lindsay Clarke, BRITISH HERITAGE, Oct/Nov 1998]

Brough Castle was built about 1090 by King William II on the site of a Roman Fort (Verterae, the outlines of which are still just visible), to the south of the town of Brough, and approchaed through the village of Church Brough. [Castles in England. Brough Castle, Cumbria the Lake District <www.cumbria1st.com/History/brufcas.htm]

[1748129.ged]
Custom Field:<_FA#> Ruled 1087-1100
Custom Field:<_FA#> Never Married