In 500... (or less)

The Hunting Accident

The facts in the case were anything but cut and dry. The king was dead from an arrow wound, that was the only certain fact.

The truth was out there somewhere, and William de Warenne was charged with finding it on behalf of the king's son.

"And you discovered the king's body, laying in the wood of the New Forest?" de Warenne asked a peasant named Hugo.

"Aye, my Lord," Hugo answered. "His majesty was dead, with the broken shaft of an arrow in his chest."

"No one was near the body? None of the hunting party remained nearby?"

"None, says I," the peasant said. "But he wore the royal cloth and I knew he was someone important, so I told the sheriff."

The sheriff was among the hunting party that day, out with the king in the forest.The investigator had already questioned him; he was in a different part of the wood and heard and saw nothing.

"That was the last of the witnesses," de Warenne said. "Now we deliberate."

The new king, who was in the hunting party that day as well, was in a different part of the wood. He accused a man named Tirel of firing the fatal shot, as Tirel was the only man with the king.

Tirel, of course, denied this. His version of events had the king wounding a stag and giving chase. Tirel claimed he shot at another stag who happened by in the king's absence, and heard the king cry in agony just as he let slip the arrow toward the deer. He turned to look in the king's direction and did not see where his arrow had gone.

The arrow in the king's chest was one of his own, and Tirel admitted the king had given him two of those arrows the night before the hunt. One was missing, the one Tirel claimed to have lost. The king was also missing an arrow, which presumably remained in the wounded deer if Tirel was to be believed.

"It doesn't add up," said Luxley, one of the other members of the commission. "If Tirel is to be believed, he was shooting in the other direction. The arrow could not have turned in mid-air and miraculously traveled so far as to strike the king in the blink of an eye."

"Ridiculous," replied Arlen, a junior member of the group. "The arrow fired by Tirel was indeed the one found in the king's body. No other supposition can be drawn. And you discount the fact that Tirel fled the country immediately, issuing his statement once he was safely beyond the reach of law."

"The murder site tells us all," Luxley said. "We found the tracks of Tirel and the king in the wood. The arrow would have had to dodge branches and turn in flight to have achieved its purpose. I propose there was a second archer, on the wooded hillock."

But the judgment of de Warenne's commission did not agree. It stated: "On the Second of August, in the year of our Lord 1100, his majesty, the king William Rufus, was shot by the lone archer William Tirel. His death was an act of God, for he was wicked in the eyes of the church, and none are found to be culpable."