I do not here enter into the question of William’s right to make the Forest—about this there can be no doubt—but simply into the methods which he employed in its formation.[13] The earliest Chronicler of the event, Gulielmus Gemeticensis, who has been so often quoted in evidence of William’s cruelty, both because he was a Norman, and chaplain to the King, really proves nothing. In the first place, the monk of Jumièges did not write this account, but some successor, so that the argument drawn from the writer’s position falls to the ground.[14] In the second place, his successor’s words are—“Many, however, say (_ferunt autem multi_) that the deaths of Rufus and his brother were a judgment from heaven, because their father had destroyed many villages and churches in enlarging (_amplificandam_) the New Forest.”[15] The writer offers no comment of his own, and simply passes over the matter, as not worth even refutation. His narrative, however, if it tells at all, tells against the common theory, as he states that William only extended the limits of a former chase. The account of Florence of Worcester is, on the whole, equally unsatisfactory. His mention of the New Forest, like that, by the way, of most of the Chroniclers, does not occur in its proper place at the date it was made—when the wrong, we should have thought, must have been most felt—but is suggested by the death of Rufus, when popular superstition had come into play, and time had lent all the force of exaggeration to what must always have been an unpopular event. Florence,[16] however, speaks in general terms of men driven from their homes, of fields laid waste, and houses and churches destroyed: words which, as we shall see, carry their own contradiction. Vitalis,[17] too, not only declares that the district was thickly inhabited, but that it even regularly supplied the markets of Winchester, and that William laid in ruins no less than sixty parishes. Walter Mapes,[18] who flourished about the middle of the twelfth century, adds further that thirty-six mother churches were destroyed, but falls into the error of making Rufus the author of the Forest, which of course materially affects his evidence. Knyghton,[19] however, who lived in the reign of Richard II., is doubtful whether the number of churches destroyed was twenty-two or fifty-two, an amount of difference so large that we might also reasonably suspect his narrative, whilst he also commits the mistake of attributing the formation of the Forest to Rufus. Now, the first thing which strikes us is that as the writers are more distant in point of time, and therefore less capable of knowing, they singularly enough become more precise and specific. What Florence of Worcester speaks of in merely general terms, Vitalis, and Walter Mapes, and Knyghton, give in minute details down to the very number of the parishes and churches.[20]