Evelyn Lord.  The Knights Templar in Britain.  London: Longman, 2002. ISBN 0582472873 Price £20.00.

The historical facts of the Knights Templar have yet to escape the shadow of Brian de Bois-Guilbert or the fantastical origins ascribed to the Freemasons.  Evelyn Lord faces the on-going difficulty in her monograph.  She takes these legacies to task in several places, but her most effective tactic is this study’s concentration on the mundane activities of the Templars as landowners and caretakers of properties across the British Isles.  This in fact is the focus of Lord’s analysis - to understand the Templars as participants in, and developers of, the British countryside and economy.  With this approach, she examines the very aspects of the Templars that Thomas Parker veered away from in his earlier The Templars in England.[1]  What Lord then presents is a picture of the quite ordinary, down-to-earth practices of the Order in Britain as it strove to meet its extraordinary rasion d’être, financing the defense of the Crusader principalities.

As a military study, Lord has surprisingly little to present here, which is altogether to the point.  She stresses that, romantic images aside, the archaeological evidence has produced no Templar castles in the British Isles; even though many of the preceptories had some defenses, these were rather secondary to the primary agricultural functions of the Templar properties (25).  The nature of the membership in Britain is even more telling.  At the time of the 1308 arrests, most of the full members taken into custody were rather elderly or infirm.  Lord notes that this reflects the recruiting efforts of the Templars, which would encourage younger members to travel to the theaters of war.  The older members, therefore, were perhaps knights come back for quietude after a life of campaigns.  Only in the few estates along the Welsh border, where nearby hostilities were more possible, did she find any younger members (18, 113, 130).

Two passages from Lord are worth quoting at length, demonstrating as they do the character of the Order as she has culled it from the scattered records.

Although in popular imagination, fueled by Sir Walter Scott, Templar knights thunder about the countryside fully armored on war horses, this was not the case. In the west the members of the Order were monks adhering to their vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, observing silence within the preceptory precincts, and hearing the offices throughout the day and night.(108)

And a bit further on:

Thus, to answer the question how did the Templars fit in with the rest of society, we have to piece together the evidence from what little we have. They were manorial landlords and held manorial courts, just as any other lord of the manor. They collected rents and demanded labour service and gifts from their tenants, just as an other manor did, and they employed professionals and servants to look after their livestock. Other landholders did the same. The were often involved in disputes with their neighbors about trespass, damage and illegal enclosure, but this was normal in the medieval countryside. (109)

Lord proposes that it was the quite typical successes of the Templars in developing their estates that led to a resentment by their neighbors.  From the initial grants in the 1130s up through the heyday of royal patronage under Henry III, the Templars typically received less-than-optimum lands.  The burden then was upon them to develop marginal territories, create and sponsor fairs, and above all, ensure that all productivity could be transmuted into easily transferrable wealth.  Through comparison of the 1185 Inquest with sporadic, later references to the same properties, Lord shows (at least in the infrequent places that allow comparison[2]) that the Templars consistently increased the overall value of their holdings.  Two seemingly contradictory details sharpen the focus of this picture: first, the startling paucity of possessions available to be seized by royal agents in 1308, and second, the general disrepair of a great many buildings, even on the wealthiest manors.  All told, it testifies to the order’s adherence, even in decline, to its original mission in the west (43, 99, 130-1).

There are further gems scattered throughout: analysis of the diet of both Templars and tenants on the estates, the mobility of tenants between Templar manors, role in urban development, and of course, their reliability in handling, transferring, and safeguarding the monies of many patrons.

If a complaint must be made of this study, it centers on the critical apparatus.  I remain unsure whether a typo is at fault in a reference to the Pipe Roll of 1218 when the rest of the paragraph deals with Henry III’s finances in 1241-42.  More troubling than that, however, were the repeated instances of new material with no documentation.  This is more than petty carping; Lord presents parts of British society that rarely receive scholarly attention, and there are surely going to be students of this topic who would dearly love to follow the trail she has otherwise cleared quite well.

[1]Thomas Parker, The Knights Templars in England (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1963), p. 17: “...it should be pointed out that the many tenants of the Templars, who were in no sense members of the order...are properly excluded from consideration here.”

[2]Again, Lord covers ground eschewed by Parker, who begged off from looking at the Pipe Rolls of Henry III, Edward I, or Edward II “since they as yet exist in manuscript form only...”  Parker, p.143, n.134.