William Rufus's death is one of the best documented and most genuinely debated incidents in early English royal history, the king's demise while hunting in the New Forest on 2 August 1100, struck by an arrow reportedly loosed by his companion Sir Walter Tirel, recorded by multiple medieval chroniclers, several of whom noted the curious speed with which William's younger brother Henry rode to secure the royal treasury at Winchester and have himself crowned king within days, fuelling persistent historical speculation, never proven, that the killing may not have been purely accidental.
The Rufus Stone itself, first erected in the eighteenth century and later encased in cast iron to prevent souvenir hunters chipping away at it, marks the traditionally accepted site of the killing, giving this legend an unusually concrete and still-visitable physical monument compared with most of this register's other historical ghost traditions, even though the stone's precise location relative to the actual 1100 event has itself been a matter of some historical debate.
The detail of William's body being dragged, rather than ceremonially carried, to Winchester for burial reflects the genuinely undignified and hurried nature of his actual funeral arrangements as recorded by contemporary chroniclers, his death being treated with notably less reverence than might be expected for a reigning king, a historical detail that gives the ghost story's own emphasis on his body's rough treatment an unusually well founded basis in the documented medieval record.
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