It was on August 2nd in the year 1100 when King William Rufus and his team of noblemen were out hunting deer and wild boar in the New Forest.
The story goes that an arrow was shot, supposedly at a stag, by the Frenchman Sir Walter Tyrrell who was the King’s best archer, but the arrow struck an oak tree and ricocheted off it straight into the chest of the king, puncturing his lung and killing him there and then (depicted in the 1895 lithograph shown right, © expired).

Sir Walter hot-footed it back to Normandy in fear of being charged with the King’s murder, the tale says that he stopped at a blacksmith on the way and had his horse re-shod with backwards facing horseshoes, so as to confuse the chasers!
As it happened, there were no chasers because no-one was particularly upset about the King’s death.

Indeed, there wasn’t even an effort to recover the king’s body by the Crown; a local charcoal burner named Purkis loaded the corpse onto his cart and carried it to Winchester Cathedral, where a somewhat low-key burial was performed.