Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/116

Rh 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 relatives 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 believe 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. 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; 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 98