Was King William II Murdered In The New Forest?

Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com - Some historical mysteries cannot be easily solved. One of them involves King William II, who died under mysterious circumstances. Historians are still debating what happened on August 2, 1100, in the New Forest. Was King William II shot by accident or murdered?

Most likely, King William II (1056 – 1100) was known as Rufus the Red for his red hair and hot temper. King William II was the third son of William the Conqueror.

Left: William II of England, Credit: Matthew Paris, Public Domain - Right: Death of William Rufus, lithograph by Alphonse de Neuville, 1895, Credit: Public Domain

Few people mourned him when Rufus the Red died, leading historians to believe he was not very popular. According to Frank Barlow, an English historian known particularly for biographies of medieval figures, Rufus the Red was "a rumbustious, devil-may-care soldier. He was without natural dignity or social graces, with no cultivated tastes and little show of conventional religious piety or morality—indeed, according to his critics, addicted to every kind of vice, particularly lust and especially sodomy."

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