98 The New Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



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 rela- 

 tives 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 beHeve 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 ;* though, 

 by another version, from the effects of a blow against a tree.f 

 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 ;t whilst, according to Florence 

 of Worcester, he was killed by the arrow of one of his own 

 knights. § We will only here pause to notice not only the 



* " Tabidi aeris nebula " are the words of William of IMalmesbury. 

 (Gesta Regum Anglorum. Ed. Hardy, torn, ii., lib. iii., sect. 275, pp. 454, 



455.) 



f Gul. Gemeticensis de Ducibns Normannorum, lib. vii., cap. ix. To be 

 found in Camden's Anglica Scripta, p. 674. 



J This seems to be the meaning of a not very clear passage in William 

 of IMalmesbury. Same edition as before, p. 455. Vitalis, however, His/oria 

 Ecclesiastica, pars 3, lib. x., cap. xi. (in Migiie, Patrologim Cnrsiis Com- 

 pleius, tom. ftlxxxviii. 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 Remarhs 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 



