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jjporBack in the summer of 2007, myself and a couple of like-minded associates, still flushed with the success of our epic daytrip to the Imperial War Museum site at Duxford the previous year (Liverpool to Cambridgeshire and back again in one day, by road - don't try it!) decided that the next obvious step was an expedition to Bovington Tank Museum in Dorset. It ended up being a week-long "experience", a sort of nightmarish, occasionally drunken, parody of the British holidaymaking paradigm. A bit like Withnail & I but without the sparkling dialogue. Or the cake. Or not one, but two Doctors.
I may (or may not) share some tales about it as I post about some of the photographs I took during this week (all I can say is, I hope you all like looking at tanks). For now, get a load of this, taken in the heart of the good old New Forest:
Actually, the three-sided stone (although the memorial that's there now is actually made of iron, and supposedly encases the original stone that stood on the site) is, as I remember it, on the edge of a relatively secluded car park-cum-picnic area just off an extremely busy dual carriageway. There are quite a few trees providing the seclusion, but still it's hard to imagine it now as the sort of place a Norman king would choose for an ill-fated spot of hunting.
William Rufus was the third son of William the Conqueror. When his father died, Rufus got England, his older brother Robert got Normandy and the second son Richard got nothing, because he'd died before his father did - ironically (dun dun dun!) in a hunting accident in the New Forest... So the two royal brothers (egged on by such characters as Bishop Odo of Bayeux, a.k.a. Him Off Of the Bayeux Tapestry, and their younger sibling Henry, soon to be Henry I) alternated between pretending they were happy with this arrangement and fighting for control of both lands, and in the end William Rufus kind of won, but it didn't do him much good because he died (or more precisely was killed) and pretty much everybody (at least, those churchmen who wrote chronicles) considered he probably had it coming, because they didn't like him for a variety of reasons such as being a harsh ruler, continually clashing with the church hierarchy, having a big red face and possibly being gay (which, as you may imagine, medieval churchmen weren't too keen on...or said they weren't, anyway). I am simplifying quite a lot here - it is literally a very, very long time since I read up on the Norman conquest and the decades immediately following.
But the whole thing is shrouded in mystery, as much because it was nearly a thousand years ago as because of the various conspiracy theories surrounding William II's death. The man who shot him, to be sure, jumped on his horse and made off for France before anybody had a chance to ask him whether it was an accident or not - but then again, wouldn't you if you'd just killed the king under any circumstances whatsoever? And then, it's true, William's younger brother Henry quickly moved to seize the royal treasure and get himself crowned in London (pretty much the medieval English equivalents of taking over the television station and the airport as the first moves in your coup) while his dead sibling was still barely cold. But then again, given the history of succession troubles following the Conqueror's death and the generally ruthless and rapacious nature of contemporary power politics, such "indecent haste" could well be seen as just royal best practice. Look what happened when Henry's own daughter and heir Matilda let Stephen of Blois beat her to the punch under similarly fraught circumstances in 1135 - nearly twenty years of anarchic civil war, that's what.
That's a bit unfair on Matilda, though. The main thing going against her, unfortunately, in the eyes of the Anglo-Norman barons who supported his power-grab, was that Stephen was, well, a man...
And then of course, speaking of conspiracy theories, you have the whacko Golden Bough version, where a king dying under obscure circumstances in a locale known (at least in modern times) for its association with witchcraft can only mean some sort of Wicker Man-esque shenanigans to make the crops grow, or something. And, you know, his brother Richard before him too... O.o
The truth is, we can't know at this remove whether it was an accident, an assassination or what. All we can say with reasonable certainty is that the Rufus Stone almost certainly doesn't mark the actual spot where the king died because the particular spot it marks was picked more or less at random during the reign of Charles I, a long long time later. The original stone marker dates to the eighteenth century and the current iron one to 1841. And that is that. Have a look at the other two faces of the monument (and the bird droppings adorning them) if you want to know what else it has to say:
And that's your lot for now.
I may (or may not) share some tales about it as I post about some of the photographs I took during this week (all I can say is, I hope you all like looking at tanks). For now, get a load of this, taken in the heart of the good old New Forest:
Actually, the three-sided stone (although the memorial that's there now is actually made of iron, and supposedly encases the original stone that stood on the site) is, as I remember it, on the edge of a relatively secluded car park-cum-picnic area just off an extremely busy dual carriageway. There are quite a few trees providing the seclusion, but still it's hard to imagine it now as the sort of place a Norman king would choose for an ill-fated spot of hunting.
William Rufus was the third son of William the Conqueror. When his father died, Rufus got England, his older brother Robert got Normandy and the second son Richard got nothing, because he'd died before his father did - ironically (dun dun dun!) in a hunting accident in the New Forest... So the two royal brothers (egged on by such characters as Bishop Odo of Bayeux, a.k.a. Him Off Of the Bayeux Tapestry, and their younger sibling Henry, soon to be Henry I) alternated between pretending they were happy with this arrangement and fighting for control of both lands, and in the end William Rufus kind of won, but it didn't do him much good because he died (or more precisely was killed) and pretty much everybody (at least, those churchmen who wrote chronicles) considered he probably had it coming, because they didn't like him for a variety of reasons such as being a harsh ruler, continually clashing with the church hierarchy, having a big red face and possibly being gay (which, as you may imagine, medieval churchmen weren't too keen on...or said they weren't, anyway). I am simplifying quite a lot here - it is literally a very, very long time since I read up on the Norman conquest and the decades immediately following.
But the whole thing is shrouded in mystery, as much because it was nearly a thousand years ago as because of the various conspiracy theories surrounding William II's death. The man who shot him, to be sure, jumped on his horse and made off for France before anybody had a chance to ask him whether it was an accident or not - but then again, wouldn't you if you'd just killed the king under any circumstances whatsoever? And then, it's true, William's younger brother Henry quickly moved to seize the royal treasure and get himself crowned in London (pretty much the medieval English equivalents of taking over the television station and the airport as the first moves in your coup) while his dead sibling was still barely cold. But then again, given the history of succession troubles following the Conqueror's death and the generally ruthless and rapacious nature of contemporary power politics, such "indecent haste" could well be seen as just royal best practice. Look what happened when Henry's own daughter and heir Matilda let Stephen of Blois beat her to the punch under similarly fraught circumstances in 1135 - nearly twenty years of anarchic civil war, that's what.
That's a bit unfair on Matilda, though. The main thing going against her, unfortunately, in the eyes of the Anglo-Norman barons who supported his power-grab, was that Stephen was, well, a man...
And then of course, speaking of conspiracy theories, you have the whacko Golden Bough version, where a king dying under obscure circumstances in a locale known (at least in modern times) for its association with witchcraft can only mean some sort of Wicker Man-esque shenanigans to make the crops grow, or something. And, you know, his brother Richard before him too... O.o
The truth is, we can't know at this remove whether it was an accident, an assassination or what. All we can say with reasonable certainty is that the Rufus Stone almost certainly doesn't mark the actual spot where the king died because the particular spot it marks was picked more or less at random during the reign of Charles I, a long long time later. The original stone marker dates to the eighteenth century and the current iron one to 1841. And that is that. Have a look at the other two faces of the monument (and the bird droppings adorning them) if you want to know what else it has to say:
And that's your lot for now.
