bottoms; at other times they will stand in a favourite part of some forest stream, or in a drift away over the railway. Blackdown is a favourite shade, being a ridge surrounded by bottoms, where there is plenty of good feed in the driest summers, with abundance of food and water. This district is perhaps the most favoured of any, being haunted by over 600 ponies and cattle, or more than one-tenth of the whole stock run in the forest." This was the district which it was proposed to take as a military rifle range, a proposal which was successfully resisted largely on the ground that the ponies would thus lose their favourite summer haunt.

CHAPTER IV

THE NORTHERN FOREST

Stony Cross-Rufus Stone and the Rufus Legend-A brief for the prosecution of Sir Walter Tyrrell-The view from Stony-Cross Plain-Bramshaw Wood--Malwood-Minstead and its park.

THE great ridge of Stony-Cross Plain divides the northern from the central forest. Along it runs the ancient road from Winchester to Ringwood, and thence to the port of Poole. From its summit the whole of the forest, north, south, and east, is seen in endless waves of woods; and in the deep glen below its eastern shoulder is the spot where Rufus was killed by the arrow of Sir Walter Tyrrell on the evening of the second of August, A.D. 1100. In the monkish stories the death of Rufus became a text, not for the vengeance which comes on the despoiler of the poor, as in the case of the death of the Conqueror's other children on the scene of their father's oppressions, but of the vengeance of God upon the robber of the Church. The fate of the brutal scoffer who mocked at the holy saints, who kept abbeys without their abbots, sees without their bishops, and the very throne of Canterbury itself vacant for three years while he fattened on the incomes of the servants of God, is the theme of ecclesiastical story. It was almost inevitable that this colour should be put on the sudden death of the spoiler by zealous Churchmen. Those who see in the denunciations of the Church, and in the prophecies of an impending requital which were in circulation up to the day of Rufus's death, a motive, which alters the part of Tyrrell from the unconscious instrument to the secret emissary of vengeance, will find some curious circumstantial evidence in an examina

tion of the spot in which the king's body was found, assuming that that now marked as the place where Rufus fell is rightly identified. There is good reason for thinking that in spite of the lapse of time, tradition in this respect is right. The place is close to Malwood, where the king was lodging the night before, and had dined and drunk on the very day of his death.

Malwood has for centuries, probably from the days of Rufus, been the residence of men whose business has been to know and visit every part of the forest in that particular "walk." Those in the house at the time of the king's death must have had knowledge of the spot where the body was found. Even if Purkiss, the charcoal-burner, who drove it in his cart to Winchester, did not mention to the other foresters the scene of so dreadful a discovery, it is almost certain that after the dispersion of the party at the lodge, the flight of Tyrrell, and the desperate ride of Henry to Winchester, in order to seize the succession to the Crown with the blessings of the Church, which had banned his brother, the domestics must have stolen down the hill to look at the body where it lay. The death of princes, even if not followed by the appearance of the caladrus, the ill-omened bird, which, according to the monkish bestiaries, only appeared on earth to bring news of the death of kings, must always be a topic of awe and curiosity to those near the scene, even if fear closes their mouths and prevents them from paying due reverence to the body. The murder of Absalom the beautiful in the wood of Ephraim was known to more than the "captains of the host," though they dissembled all knowledge of the deed. The descendants of the charcoal-burner, who carried the body to Winchester, enjoyed for centuries the rights given them as a reward, among others that of taking all such wood as they could gather "by hook or by crook," dead branches, that is, which have not yet fallen, but might be broken off, though not lopped by axe or bill. Thus the evidence as to the exact place of the king's death does not depend on history, or upon general tradition. concurrent and very coherent though independent set of circumstances. In the first place by the fact which we have glanced at, that by the fixed and unchanging order of the forest there have lived in continued succession, within ten minutes' ride of the place, persons employed for eight hundred years to traverse daily that particular part of the forest, Malwood

It is fixed by a

Walk, in the exercise of the same duty, the supervision of the deer and the wood, men to whom by the very nature of their business every tree, rivulet, and pool is a familiar object, frequently associated with some fact, far less important, such as the death of an eagle, or the leap of a deer, which is a part of the ordinary knowledge of the wood transmitted from one generation of foresters to the next. Secondly, the spot originally marked by an oak tree, was again marked by a stone, set up by Lord Delaware, then warden of the forest, in 1745, which stone was afterwards cased in iron in 1841. If the tree which in 1745 was in such a state of decay that its place was taken by the stone, was the same which was standing at the time of Rufus's death, it must have been more than 650 years old at the time of its total disappearance-not an impossible age by any means, for the fragment in Brockenhurst churchyard probably stood there quite as early, and Gilpin speaks of "a few venerable oaks in the New Forest that chronicle upon their furrowed trunks ages before the Conquest." But the tree may have been a shoot, or sapling or seedling, of the original oak, and still have identified the spot, just as the present "Cadenham oak," which buds at Christmas, marks the site of the old tree.

Taking these considerations as adequate to maintain the truth of tradition as to the exact spot at which the king died, the inferences from an examination of the ground are as follows. The king was shot, not in the wood, but at the very edge, almost at the last tree. Immediately west of "Rufus Stone" the good soil stops, and a very poor, steep, marshy, slope begins, which runs right up to the top of the hill by Stony Cross. Wood does not grow on it now, and never could have grown, for the nature of the soil has not changed, and remains in the same condition for the growth or non-growth of timber, as in the days of the Conquest. Again, the legend says that the king was looking after a wounded deer, "shading his eyes with his hand." Now he would not have needed to shade his eyes had he been in the thick forest, though as the deer would naturally run out of the wood across the open, and the sun was in the west, for it was late on an August day, the account exactly fits the supposition that William was standing where he is said to have stood and gazing after the wounded deer, as it ran out across the Stony-Cross Common, when he received