Why ‘Templars – The Knights Who Made Britain’?

Basically, it’s about trying, in my own minor way, to remedy an injustice.The British Templars were small in numbers but they achieved extraordinary things, through commitment, focus and setting themselves the most demanding of standards. But, because of the outlandish things they were accused of by the French crown at the end of the crusades, their reputation has been distorted and tarnished beyond all recognition. Their fall was the biggest tabloid story of the Middle Ages.

That’s not to say that I agree with everything the Templars did – there were plenty of them who you would not want to go on a beach holiday with. But, with so many crazy lies and theories in circulation, I thought it would be good to go back to basics and revisit the truth.

The Templars certainly deserved better, particularly in terms of their reputation.

How did the Templars come to play such a pivotal role in English state formation?

There were two very distinct groups of ‘British Templars’ (and ‘British’ is an important distinction…they were very influential at the Scottish court as well as the English one).

One group, the order’s British soldiers in the front-line military arm, had the ‘glamorous’ but dangerous job of fighting in its armies and manning its castle garrisons in the East – these Templar volunteers performed heroic acts of outstanding bravery in the defence of the Holy Land.

But they were supported in their increasingly forlorn endeavours by the less dramatic but vital work undertaken on their behalf by their fellow brothers back in Britain. This other group, the British Templars on the ‘home front’, had the task of running farms, organising financial support and, often more importantly, lobbying the governments of England and Scotland. These were the Templar brothers who sent money and volunteers to aid the war effort and used their influence to ensure that British kings and queens did as much as possible to help the crusading movement.
They weren’t coming over all Mother Teresa: they wanted Britain to be in as good shape as possible to support the crusading movement.

Paradoxically, helping to make the British Isles more peaceful and productive was a consequence of their actions. But it was a by-product rather than a primary goal.

Are there still any Templars who can legitimately trace their roots back to the knights of auld?

Hmm…we have to remember that they were a devout Catholic religious order, reporting directly to the pope, who were accused of crazy things, eventually exonerated but closed down in the early fourteenth century.

The two big clues are the date (they ceased to exist a very long time ago), and that they were a papal order (there is no such papal group now and there hasn’t been one for 700 years). You can draw your own conclusions.

Claims to be a ‘Templar’ say far more about us than it does about the real thing.

None of this stops the conspiracy industry, however. Evidence is not the true arbiter of debate. The Templar mythology has much in common with the recently manufactured discussions about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. The interesting issue is not ‘who wrote Shakespeare?’ (correct answer: he did) but, rather, why would anybody ask the question in the first place.

Let’s take Freemasonry as an example.

The internet is the obvious driver of such conspiracies in our own time. But the tradition of Templar false histories vastly predates it. The eighteenth century was a turning point. Freemasonry had begun to take off. There was a need to explain the origins of the new movement in suitably impressive and mysterious ways. This called for a grand, albeit spurious, backstory – something that linked them, for reasons of snobbishness, with the knightly classes of the Middle Ages. But it also needed to be a story with a whiff of magic, a dash of arcane knowledge and a huge helping of secrecy. The Templars were a perfect match.

In the 1760s, the German Freemasons began to retrofit, for the first time, their supposed links with the Templars. The order, it was claimed, had long been a centre for secret wisdom and profound magical insights. Luckily, just before he was arrested, the last master of the Templars, James of Molay, was able to package up all this information and pass it on to his successor. This new ‘master’ and hence the Templar order itself were thus (in the story at least) the ancestors of modern freemasonry.

We can only guess what James of Molay, a devout papal servant and one of the least imaginative of men, would have made of all this. He would undoubtedly be shocked to hear of a continuing association of the order with blasphemous, occult activity – and the story is, of course, completely unencumbered by evidence.

What are the main Templar sights still to be seen in Britain?

The main one is the ‘New Temple’ – ‘new’ in the sense that it was built in the 1150s, to replace an older structure! It is in London, just off Fleet Street – absolutely beautiful. You can still see the funerary monuments of William Marshal (a Templar associate who later became a full brother on his deathbed) and his sons there.

But the wonderful thing about the Templars is that their presence is still all around us. When I wrote the book, I was mostly sitting at a desk that is walking distance from one Templar preceptory and a short drive from another. And when I go to the library, I am a ten-minute stroll away from a third Templar preceptory. Britain is not big and there were a lot of preceptories. It’s a great excuse to go out and enjoy our heritage.

There is also a strange correlation between beautiful old settlements (where the Templars are over-represented) and interesting pubs….

Were the Templars simply a bunch of posh boys and girls on the medieval version of a gap year or were they more socially inclusive?

A big ‘No’ to all of that I’m afraid…

There were no Templar women (the brothers were at the cutting edge of medieval warfare, and this was one of the few areas of medieval life where female involvement was kept to a very minimum); they weren’t aware of our moral judgements and played by the rules and mores of their day.

Similarly, this was no ‘gap year’. There were different types of membership but the baseline meant that you had to become a monk, embrace celibacy and subdue your personal desires to the discipline and needs of the order. Almost the definition of an anti-gap year!

There was no social inclusivity either. Just like the vast majority of pre-twenty-first century societies or groups, they had no sense that diversity or inclusivity was valuable or useful. Most of the brothers (volunteers) came from families at the ‘upper-middle’ range of society. But a lack of inclusivity did not mean that they were racially bigoted. Racial identity was by no means as important a signifier as it has recently become. Ironically from that perspective, the main task of the order was to protect the Holy Land and its Arab, Syrian and Armenian inhabitants, most of whom were, of course, still Christian at this point in time.

The key thing from the point of view of a historian is to resist the temptation to superimpose our own obsessions and inflated sense of moral superiority onto the actions of peoples in previous ages.

If you could ask a senior Templar, such as Sir Robert Eddison in the final scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – one thing, what would it be?

Ah, dear Robert! Perfect for that role.

Q. What did you do with the Holy Grail? (other than bury it in Essex and wait for the Detectorists to find it)

The Royston Cave in Hertfordshire, what’s that all about?

I’m not sure I’m afraid. What little I’ve read seems inconclusive. I always assume these kinds of things are nice stories, but without a lot of hard evidence to allow you to draw a proper judgement from. Newspapers often run stories about the discovery of ‘Templar graves’ etc in the silly season (there was an outbreak of that last summer)…but if you look at them you can see that they are, at best, medieval graves with very little that is specifically ‘Templar’ about them.

And that says a lot about the enduring image of the Templars – huge numbers of people want to be associated with them or to ‘find’ objects that are associated with them.

If you could mess up the timeline and become an advisor to the Templars, when would you go back to and what would you suggest?

On a macro level, I’d go back and try to persuade them not to do it. The crusades were unwinnable. The attempt to recover and defend the old Christian heartlands of the Middle East were demographically unsustainable. The west and central Mediterranean (areas such as Spain, Portugal, Sicily, southern Italy and so on) could be recovered as they were closer to the heart of Europe. But the eastern Mediterranean was definitely a bridge too far. Anyone with five minutes’ access to GoogleMaps could tell you that it’s not going to end well.

And, of course, the heroism and commitment of the Templars ironically made things worse – the best outcome, if you had to start the crusades, was that they should come to a swift end. The Templars’ courage and efforts just extended the pain.

How are the Templars understood in the Muslim world?

I think at the moment the brothers are swept up in the broader maelstrom of name-calling that reverberates around the Middle East – ‘crusaders’ and ‘jihadists’ are both misrepresented and caricatured terms now, and that is deliberately exploited for their own purposes by politicians of all cultures and religions.

At the time, however, views were surprisingly measured. We know that the brothers on the ground in the Middle East were fairly well-integrated, both within their own local Arab communities (who were mainly Christians) and with their Muslim neighbours. Lines were drawn, of course, and these were communities at war on an almost perpetual basis – but we know that individual Templars had Muslim friends and close diplomatic relationships with their neighboring states.

Ironically, the brothers were often accused of being too friendly towards their Muslim opponents by crusaders who were newly arrived from the west – in their ignorance of local affairs, they often thought the Templars had ‘gone native’.

What are you currently working on?

I’m just finishing a book entitled ‘Crusader Criminals’, which will be published by Yale this summer.

I’ve had such fun writing it. Everyone one assumes (correctly) that the crusades saw a spike in warfare and military ghastliness. What no one has ever studied, however, is the impact which this influx of violent, armed and disinhibited young men had on civil society and the huge uptick this meant for all aspects of criminality…the crusader states really became the ‘Wild East’.

So it’s a book with an interesting and unusual anthropological background, but also with loads of great stories. A British pirate who saved a king, changed the course of the crusades and, over-achieving as ever, became a saint. Bedouin bandits. Viking crusaders going on mounted lion-hunting expeditions. Murdering monks. Crusader prisoners of war in Cairo who, like Robert Leadam (great middle name) Eddison, stayed behind after the crusades had ended…unlike dear Robert, however, they chose to become gangsters and corner the Egyptian market in illicit alcohol and prostitutes rather than guarding the Holy Grail. You couldn’t make it up.

Anyway, crazy, hilarious stuff!