The Account of Gulielmus Gemeticensis. 23 



I do not here enter into the question of William's right 

 to make the Forest about this there can be no doubt but 

 simply into the methods which he employed in its formation.* 

 The earliest Chronicler of the event, Gulielmus Gemeticensis, 

 who has been so often quoted in evidence of William's cruelty, 

 both because he was a Norman, and chaplain to the King, really 

 proves nothing. In the first place, the monk of Jumieges did 

 not write this account, but some successor, so that the argument 

 drawn from the writer's position falls to the ground. f In the 

 second place, his successor's words are "Many, however, say 

 (ferunt autem multi) that the deaths of Rufus and his brother 

 were a judgment from heaven, because their father had destroyed 

 many villages and churches in enlarging (amplificandam) the 

 New Forest."| The writer offers no comment of his own, and 

 simply passes over the matter, as not worth even refutation. 

 His narrative, however, if it tells at all, tells against the 

 common theory, as he states that William only extended the 

 limits of a former chase. 



* Concerning the King's prerogative to make a forest wherever he 

 pleased, and the ancient legal maxim that all beasts of the chase were 

 exclusively his and his alone, see Manwood A Treatise of the Lawes of the 

 Forest, ch. ii. ff. 25-33, and ch. iii. sect. i. f. 33, 1615. We must remember, 

 too, that, before the afforestation, William not only owned by right of 

 conquest, as being King, the large demesne lands of the Crown in the 

 district, and also those estates of former possessors, who had fallen at 

 Hastings, or fled into exile, but, as we know from Domesday, kept some 

 as at Eling, Breamore, and Ringwood in his own hands. 



f Bouquet. Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France, torn, xi., 

 pref., No. xii. p. 14; and torn, xii., pref., No. xlix. pp. 46-48. Some account 

 of him may be found in torn. x. p. 184, foot-note a, and in the preface of 

 the same, volume, No. xv. p. 28. See also preface to torn, viii., No. xxxi., 

 p. 24, as also p. 254, foot-note a. 



\ De Ducibus Normannis, book vii. c. ix. ; in Camden's Anglica Scripta^ 

 p. 674. 



