He was a stern, bold man, and he succeeded in it.
He loved money, and was particular in his eating, but he had only leisure to indulge one other passion, and that was his love of hunting.

He carried it to such a height that he ordered whole villages and towns to be swept away to make forests for the deer.

Not satisfied with sixty- eight Royal Forests, he laid waste an immense district, to form another in Hampshire, called the New Forest.

The many thousands of miserable peasants who saw their little houses pulled down, and themselves and children turned into the open country without a shelter, detested him for his merciless addition to their many sufferings; and when, in the twenty- first year of his reign (which proved to be the last), he went over to Rouen, England was as full of hatred against him, as if every leaf on every tree in all his Royal Forests had been a curse upon his head.

In the New Forest, his son Richard (for he had four sons) had been gored to death by a Stag; and the people said that this so cruelly-made Forest would yet be fatal to others of the Conqueror's race.
He was engaged in a dispute with the King of France about some territory.
While he stayed at Rouen, negotiating with that King, he kept his bed and took medicines: being advised by his physicians to do so, on account of having grown to an unwieldy size.