Wight was once joined to Hampshire; but it is never particular in its dates, and is ever in too much hurry to compare facts. Tradition, as often as not, kills the murderer instead of the murdered; and makes the man who built the place to have been born there. Tradition is, in fact, the history of the vulgar, and the stumbling-block of the half-learned.
We will look at the broader bearings of the case. The first thing which strikes us is the fact that two other very near relatives of the Red King, his brother and his nephew, also lost their lives by so-called accidents in the New Forest. If we are to believe the Chroniclers, his brother Richard met his death whilst hunting there, according to one narrative, by a pestilential blast—surely, at the least, a very unsatisfactory account;[1] though, by another version, from the effects of a blow against a tree.[2] His nephew Richard was either wounded by an arrow through the neck, or caught by the boughs of a tree and strangled—a still more improbable death;[3] whilst, according to Florence of Worcester, he was killed by the arrow of one of his own knights.[4] We will only here pause to notice not only the
- ↑ "Tabidi aëris nebulâ" are the words of William of Malmesbury. (Gesta Regum Anglorum. Ed. Hardy, tom, ii., lib. iii., sect. 275, pp. 454, 455.)
- ↑ Gul. Gemeticensis de Ducibus Normannorum, lib. vii., cap. ix. To be found in Camden's Anglica Scripta, p. 674.
- ↑ This seems to be the meaning of a not very clear passage in William of Malmesbury. Same edition as before, p. 455. Vitalis, however, Historia Ecclesiastica, pars 3, lib. x., cap. xi. (in Migne, Patrologiæ Cursus Completus, tom. clxxxviii. pp. 748, 749), says he was shot by a knight, who expiated the deed by retiring to a monastery, and speaks in high terms both of him and his brother William, who fell in one of the Crusades.
- ↑ Ed. Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 45. Lewis, in his Topographical Remarks on the New Forest, pp. 57-62, is hopelessly wrong with regard to Richard, the son of Robert, a grandson of the Conqueror, whom he calls Henry, and
