A Monk Dreamed The King's Death And An Abbot Sent The Warning By Rider. The King Laughed, Asked If He Was The Sort To Cancel Plans For Snoring Monks, And Rode Out. He Was Dead By Sunset.
On the morning of the 2nd of August, 1100, a knight rode into the king of England's hunting lodge carrying a letter from an abbot. It said a monk had dreamed the king's death, and begged him not to hunt that day. The king read it, laughed, and asked whether they took him for the sort of man who changes his plans because monks snore and dream. He was dead before dark.
The king was William the Second, called Rufus for his red face and his redder temper. He was a hard, clever, blasphemous soldier who had spent thirteen years making enemies of exactly the people who would write his history: he left bishoprics empty and pocketed their income, mocked churchmen to their faces, and cared nothing at all for what the monks of England thought of him. So when the abbot of Gloucester heard that one of his monks had dreamed a vision of the king struck down as a judgment, he did the brave thing, and sent it. A rider carried the letter through the night to the royal lodge in the New Forest, arriving on the very morning of the hunt.
And here the chroniclers add a detail that makes it worse. Rufus had slept badly himself. He had woken in the night from his own dark dream, and had made his attendants stay up with him and keep the lights burning until dawn. So the letter arrived to a man already unsettled. He read it. He laughed at it. He said his line about snoring monks. And then, because he was who he was, he called for his horse and rode into the forest anyway.
The party spread out among the trees in the late afternoon. As the light failed, an arrow loosed by a Norman lord named Walter Tirel went through the king's chest, and William the Second of England died in the New Forest with nobody attending him. Tirel did not stop. He rode for the coast and took ship for France. The dead king's own brother Henry rode straight for the treasury at Winchester and had the crown on his head within three days. Remember who wrote all of this down: monks, about a king who despised them. But the letter came at dawn, and by dark he was on a cart.
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