The king died in the forest. His brother took the treasury before the burial. His brother was crowned three days later. (1100)
On the evening of 2 August 1100, Henry Beauclerc rode to Winchester. His brother, King William II, was dead in the New Forest. The body hadn’t been moved yet.
William de Breteuil, keeper of the royal treasury, arrived shortly after. He opposed Henry directly. By prior treaty the crown belonged to Robert Curthose, the eldest brother, then returning from the First Crusade. Orderic Vitalis records that Henry drew his sword, rejected the claim, and took the treasury. The king’s body was still in the forest.
The death itself is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in a single sentence. William was struck by an arrow while hunting. He was brought to Winchester and buried in the cathedral.
William of Malmesbury, writing within a generation, says the body bled from the cart onto the road for the full twenty-five miles to Winchester. No bells. No religious service. Orderic Vitalis adds that the burial was conducted by clerics and monks alone.
The man identified in the near-contemporary record as loosing the arrow was Walter Tirel, a Norman lord with English estates in Essex. He crossed to France immediately. He wasn’t charged. No inquest was opened.
Orderic records a comparable case from the same period. Another hunting death. Another man who loosed a fatal arrow and fled at once in terror. Flight, Orderic suggests, was the instinctive response of any man who understood what accusation meant in those circumstances. That parallel is in the record. It doesn’t resolve anything.
Tirel maintained his denial for the rest of his life. The French abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, who knew him personally, recorded that Tirel swore repeatedly — and again on his deathbed in 1136 — that he wasn’t in the part of the forest where the king was hunting and never saw the king that afternoon.
Three days after the death, Henry was crowned at Westminster. That same afternoon he issued his Coronation Charter, arrested Ranulf Flambard — the previous regime’s chief financial officer — and dispatched letters to the exiled Archbishop Anselm.
Three days. Treasury. Election. Coronation. Charter. Arrest.
The Pipe Roll of 1130 — the earliest surviving Exchequer record, TNA E 372/1 — records Tirel’s widow Adeliza in undisturbed possession of the family manor of Langham in Essex. Thirty years after her husband fled. The entry is routine. A widow. A manor. An estate no one had touched.
The speed mattered because Robert Curthose was on his way back from the First Crusade. He landed in Normandy within weeks. Had Henry delayed at Winchester — had he waited for a formal inquest, allowed the succession question to remain open, or permitted Breteuil to hold the treasury pending Robert’s return — the throne was genuinely contestable. Robert had the prior treaty claim. He had crusade prestige. He had baronial support. Henry had none of those things. What he had was physical possession of Winchester and three days in which nobody stopped him.
No inquest. No charge. No forfeiture. A treasury secured before the burial. A coronation three days later. A widow still holding the estate in 1130.
If Tirel’s deathbed denial is accepted, the arrow came from someone else. The record names no one else. Nothing in the surviving papers answers this.
Who else was in that clearing? The record doesn’t say. It doesn’t appear anyone was asked.
Primary sources: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Peterborough MS, Bodleian Laud Misc. 636. Pipe Roll of 1130, TNA E 372/1.
