Note: This material was scanned into text files for the sole purpose of convenient electronic research. This material is NOT intended as a reproduction of the original volumes. However close the material is to becoming a reproduced work, it should ONLY be regarded as a textual reference. Scanned at Phoenixmasonry by Ralph W. Omholt, PM in May 2007.
BORN IN BLOOD
THE LOST SECRETS
OF FREEMASONRY
By John J. Robinson
Its mysterious symbols and rituals had been used in secret for centuries before Freemasonry revealed itself in London in 1717. Once known, Freemasonry spread throughout the world and attracted kings, emperors, and statesmen to take its sacred oaths. It also attracted great revolutionaries such as George Washington and Sam Houston in America, Juarez in Mexico, Garibaldi in Italy, and Bolivar in South America. It was outlawed over the centuries by Hitler, Mussolini, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. But where had this powerful organization come from? What was it doing in those secret centuries before it rose from underground more than 270 years ago? And why was Freemasonry attacked with such intense hatred by the Roman Catholic church?
This amazing detective story answers those questions and proves that the Knights Templar in Britain, fleeing arrest and torture by pope and king, formed a secret society of mutual protection that came to be called Freemasonry. Based on years of meticulous research, this book solves the last remaining mysteries of the Masons‑‑their secret words, symbols, and allegories whose true meanings had been lost in antiquity. With a richly drawn background of the bloody battles, the opportunistic kings and scheming popes, the tortures and religious persecution that were the Middle Ages, it is an important book that may require that we take a new look at the history of events leading to the Protestant Reformation.
JOHN J. ROBINSON is a writer with special interest in the history of Medieval Britain and the Crusades. He heads a family trust dedicated to historical research and publication. A business executive, sheep farmer, and ex‑Marine, Mr. Robinson is also a member of the Medieval Academy of America, the Organization of American Historians, and the Royal Oversees League of London. He lives in Carroll County, Kentucky.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: In Search of the Great Society xi
Part 1: THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR
CHAPTER 1: The Urge To Kill 3
CHAPTER 2: "For Now Is Tyme To Be War" 17
CHAPTER 3: "Whether Justly or Out of Hate" 37
CHAPTER 4: "First, and Above All . . . The Destruction of the Hospitallers" 46
CHAPTER 5: The Knights of the Temple 63
CHAPTER 6: The Last Grand Master 79
CHAPTER 7: "The Hammer of the Scots" 99
CHAPTER 8: Four Vicars of Christ 116
CHAPTER 9: "Spare No Known Means of Torture" 127
CHAPTER 10: "No Violent Effusions of Blood" 144
CHAPTER 11: Men on the Run 159
Part 2: THE FREEMASONS
Prologue 173
CHAPTER 12: The Birth of Grand Lodge 175
CHAPTER 13: In Search of the Medieval Guilds 188
CHAPTER 14: "To Have My Throat Cut Across" 201
CHAPTER 15: "My Breast Torn Open, My Heart Plucked Out" 210
CHAPTER 16: The Master Mason 215
CHAPTER 17: Mystery in Language 224
CHAPTER 18: Mystery in Allegory and Symbols 235
CHAPTER 19: Mystery in Bloody Oaths 246
CHAPTER 20: Mystery in Religious Convictions 255
CHAPTER 21: Evidence in the Legend of Hiram Abiff 269
CHAPTER 22: Monks into Masons 277
CHAPTER 23: The Protestant Pendulum 291
CHAPTER 24: The Manufactured Mysteries 305
CHAPTER 25: The Unfinished Temple of Solomon 325
Appendix: "Humanum Genus" 345
Bibliography 360
Index 366
Acknowledgments
Special thanks are due to the Reverend Martin Chadwick, M.A., Rural Dean of Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, who obtained permission for me to use the Bodleian Library and its Radcliffe Camera at Oxford University in England. In that same locale, special thanks must also be expressed to Dr. Maurice Keen of Balliol College, who took time from his crowded schedule for a tutorial session with an amateur American historian. His insights into aspects of the Peasants' Revolt and of the teachings of John Wycliffe and of the Lollard Knights provided fresh starting points for research. The willing assistance of librarians is too often overlooked, so I would like to express appreciation for the helpful attitudes of the staff members of the libraries in Oxford and Lincoln in England, as well as those of New York's Forty-second Street library and the public library of Cincinnati. I was also given most gracious treatment at the county archives of Oxfordshire and at the Lincolnshire County Museum.
Recognition should also be given to a number of Freemasons of various degrees who shared with me not the "secrets" of the order, but rather their understandings of the origins and purposes of the fraternity as expressed to them by Masonic writers and lecturers.
It should be noted that although I received a great deal of generous help, the opinions expressed and the conclusions reached in this book are my own.
As for the contributions of my wife, they are difficult to enumerate. The manuscript was not just typed but reviewed for clarity as well as for accuracy of dates and geography. She assisted infour years of research and enthusiastically discussed the outline and content of each chapter. Her knowledge of French eased that aspect of the research, and most of the sources in England came as a result of the friends and contacts she had made over a period of years as an educator in Oxfordshire.
Finally, a word of explanation about the dedication of this book. J. R. Wallin is not a "Master Craftsman" in the symbolic Masonic sense but is literally a master worker in iron and steel. During working hours his forge turns out decorative iron gates and brackets and furniture, but in his spare time it gives way to his fascination with the medieval period by producing such items as a mace, a dagger, or a jousting helmet. The hours spent with him talking about the Crusades and the Templars helped to keep up my enthusiasm for the project. I chose to dedicate this book to him because I think we should all encourage rare breeds, and there can't be many people left on this earth who spend winter evenings interlocking thousands of handmade loops to create a coat of chain mail.
John J. Robinson Twin Brook Farm Carroll County, Kentucky
Introduction
In Search of the Great Society
The research behind this book was not originally intended to reveal anything about Freemasonry or the Knights Templar. Its objective had been to satisfy my own curiosity about certain unexplained aspects of the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, a savage uprising that saw upwards of a hundred thousand Englishmen march on London. They moved in uncontrolled rage, burning down manor houses, breaking open prisons, and cutting down any who stood in their way.
One unsolved mystery of that revolt was the organization behind it. For several years a group of disgruntled priests of the lower clergy had traveled the towns, preaching against the riches and corruption of the church. During the months before the uprising, secret meetings had been held throughout central England by men weaving a network of communication. After the revolt was put down, rebel leaders confessed to being agents of a Great Society, said to be based in London. So very little is known of that alleged organization that several scholars have solved the mystery simply by deciding that no such secret society ever existed.
Another mystery was the concentrated and especially vicious attacks on the religious order of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, now known as the Knights of Malta. Not only did the rebels seek out their properties for vandalism and fire, but their prior
xii BORN IN BLOOD
was dragged from the Tower of London to have his head struck off and placed on London Bridge, to the delight of the cheering mob.
There was no question that the ferocity unleashed on the crusading Hospitallers had a purpose behind it. One captured rebel leader, when asked the reasons for the revolt, said, "First, and above all ... the destruction of the Hospitallers." What kind of secret society could have had that special hatred as one of its primary purposes?
A desire for vengeance against the Hospitallers was easy to identify in the rival crusading order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. The problem was that those Knights Templar had been completely suppressed almost seventy years before the Peasants' Revolt, following several years during which the Templars had been imprisoned, tortured, and burned at the stake. After issuing the decree that put an end to the Templar order, Pope Clement V had directed that all of the extensive properties of the Templars should be given to the Hospitallers. Could a Templar desire for revenge actually have survived underground for three generations?
There was no incontrovertible proof, yet the only evidence suggests the existence of just one secret society in fourteenth century England, the society that was, or would become, the order of Free and Accepted Masons. There appeared to be no connection, however, between the revolt and Freemasonry, except for the name or title of its leader. He occupied the center stage of English history for just eight days and nothing is known of him except that he was the supreme commander of the rebellion. He was called Walter the Tyler, and it seemed at first to be mere coincidence that he bore the title of the enforcement officer of the Masonic lodge. In Freemasonry the Tyler, who must be a Master Mason, is the sentry, the sergeant‑at‑arms, and the officer who screens the credentials of visitors who seek entrance to the lodge. In remembrance of an earlier, more dangerous time, his post is just outside the door of the lodge room, where he stands with a drawn sword in his hand.[ Traditionally, a “flaming sword;” which guards the tree of Life (Qabbalah???)]
I was aware that there had been many attempts in the past to link the Freemasons with the Knights Templar, but never with success. The fragile evidence advanced by proponents of that connection had never held up, sometimes because it was based
INTRODUCTION xlil
on wild speculation, and at least once because it had been based on a deliberate forgery. But despite the failures to establish that link, it just will not go away, and the time‑shrouded belief in some relationship between the two orders remains as one of the more durable legends of Freemasonry. That is entirely appropriate, because all of the various theories of the origins of Freemasonry are legendary. Not one of them is supported by any universally accepted evidence. I was not about to travel down that time‑worn trail, and decided to concentrate my efforts on digging deeper into the history of the Knights Templar, to see if there was any link between the suppressed Knights and the secret society behind the Peasants' Revolt. In doing so, I thought that I would be leaving Freemasonry far behind. I couldn't have been more mistaken.
Like anyone curious about medieval history, I had developed an interest in the Crusades, and perhaps more than just an interest. Those holy wars hold an appeal that is frequently as romantic as it is historical, and in my travels I had tried to drink in the atmosphere of the narrow defiles in the mountains of Lebanon through which Crusader armies had passed, and had sat staring at the castle ruins around Sidon and Tyre, trying to hear the clashing sounds of attack and defense. I had marveled at the walls of Constantinople and had strolled the Arsenal of Venice, where Crusader fleets were assembled. I had sat in the round church of the Knights Templar in London, trying to imagine the ceremony of its consecration by the Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1185, more than three hundred years before Columbus set sail west to the Indies.
The Templar order was founded in Jerusalem in 1118, in the aftermath of the First Crusade. Its name came from the location of its first headquarters on the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon. Helping to fill a desperate need for a standing army in the Holy Land, the Knights of the Temple soon grew in numbers, in wealth, and in political power. They also grew in arrogance, and their Grand Master de Ridfort was a key figure in the mistakes that led to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187. The Latin Christians managed to hold onto a narrow strip of territory along the coast, where the Templars were among the largest owners of the land and fortifications.
Finally, the enthusiasm for sending men and money to the
xlv BORN IN BLOOD
Holy Land waned among the European kingdoms, which were preoccupied with their wars against each other. By 1296 the Egyptian sultan was able to push the resident Crusaders, along with the military orders, into the sea. The Holy Land was lost, and the defeated Knights Templar moved their base to the island kingdom of Cyprus, dreaming of yet one more Crusade to restore their past glory.
As the Templars planned a new Crusade against the infidel, King Philip IV of France was planning his own private crusade against the Templars. He longed to be rid of his massive debts to the Templar order, which had used its wealth to establish a major banking operation. Philip wanted the Templar treasure to finance his continental wars against Edward I of England.
After two decades of fighting England on one side and the Holy Roman Church on the other, two unrelated events gave Philip of France the opportunity he needed. Edward I died, and his deplorably weak son took the throne of England as Edward II. On the other front, Philip was able to get his own man on the Throne of Peter as Pope Clement V.
When word arrived on Cyprus that the new pope would mount a Crusade, the Knights Templar thought that their time of restoration to glory was at hand. Summoned to France, their aging grand master, Jacques de Molay, went armed with elaborate plans for the rescue of Jerusalem. In Paris, he was humored and honored until the fatal day. At dawn on Friday, the thirteenth of October, 1307, every Templar in France was arrested and put in chains on Philip's orders. Their hideous torture for confessions of heresy began immediately.
When the pope's orders to arrest the Templars arrived at the English court, young Edward II took no action at all. He protested to the pontiff that the Templars were innocent. Only after the pope issued a formal bull was the English king forced to act. In January, 1308, Edward finally issued orders for the arrest of the Knights Templar in England, but the three months of warning had been put to good use. Many of the Templars had gone underground, while some of those arrested managed to escape. Their treasure, their jeweled reliquaries, even the bulk of their records, had disappeared. In Scotland, the papal order was not even published. Under those conditions England. and especially Scotland, became targeted havens for fugitive Templars from continental
INTRODUCTION xv
Europe, and the efficiency of their concealment spoke to some assistance from outside, or from each other.
The English throne passed from Edward II to Edward III, who bequeathed the crown to his ten‑year‑old grandson who, as Richard II, watched from the Tower as the Peasants' Revolt exploded throughout the City of London.
Much had happened to the English people along the way. Incessant wars had drained most of the king's treasury and corruption had taken the rest. A third of the population had perished in the Black Death, and famine exacted further tolls. The reduced labor force of farmers and craftsmen found that they could earn more for their labor, but their increased income came at the expense of land‑owning barons and bishops, who were not prepared to tolerate such a state of affairs. Laws were passed to reduce wages and prices to pre-plague levels, and genealogies were searched to re-impose the bondage of serfdom and villeinage on men who thought themselves free. The king's need for money to fight his French wars inspired new and ingenious taxes. The oppression was coming from all sides, and the pot of rebellion was brought to the boil.
Religion didn't help, either. The landowning church was as merciless a master as the landowning nobility. Religion would have been a source of confusion for the fugitive Templars as well. They were a religious body of warrior monks who owed allegiance to no man on earth except the Holy Father. When their pope turned on them, chained them, beat them, he broke their link with God. In fourteenth‑century Europe there was no pathway to God except through the vicar of Christ on earth. If the pope rejected the Templars and the Templars rejected the pope, they had to find a new way to worship their God, at a time when any variation from the teachings of the established church was blasted as heresy.
That dilemma called to mind the central tenet of Freemasonry, which requires only that a man believe in a Supreme Being, with no requirements as to how he worships the deity of his choice. In Catholic Britain such a belief would have been a crime, but it would have accommodated the fugitive Templars who had been cut off from the universal church. In consideration of the extreme punishment for heresy, such an independent belief also made sense of one of the more mysterious of Freemasonry's Old
xvl BORN IN BLOOD
Charges, the ancient rules that still govern the conduct of the fraternity. The Charge says that no Mason should reveal the secrets of a brother that may deprive him of his life and property.
That connection caused me to take a different look at the Masonic Old Charges. They took on new direction and meaning when viewed as a set of instructions for a secret society created to assist and protect fraternal brothers on the run and in hiding from the church. That characterization made no sense in the context of a medieval guild of stonemasons, the usual claim for the roots of Freemasonry. It did make a great deal of sense, however, for men such as the fugitive Templars, whose very lives depended upon their concealment. Nor would there have been any problem in finding new recruits over the years ahead: There were to be plenty of protestors and dissidents against the church among future generations. The rebels of the Peasants' Revolt proved that when they attacked abbeys and monasteries, and when they cut the head off the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leading Catholic prelate in England.
The fugitive Templars would have needed a code such as the Old Charges of Masonry, but the working stonemasons clearly did not. It had become obvious that I needed to know more about the Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Masons. The extent of the Masonic material available at large public libraries surprised me, as did the fact that it was housed in the department of education and religion. Not content with just what was generally available to the public, I asked to use the library in the Masonic Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio. I told the gentleman there that I was not a Freemason, but wanted to use the library as part of my research for a book that would probably include a new examination of the Masonic order. His only question to me was, "Will it be fair?" I assured him that I had no desire or intention to be anything other than fair, to which he replied, "Good enough." I was left alone with the catalog and the hundreds of Masonic books that lined the walls. I also took advantage of the publications of the Masonic Service Association at Silver Spring, Maryland.
Later, as my growing knowledge of Masonry enabled me to sustain a conversation on the subject, I began to talk to Freemasons. At first I wondered how I would go about meeting fifteen or twenty Masons and, if I could meet them, would they be willing to talk to me? The first problem was solved as soon as I started asking
INTRODUCTION xvll
friends and associates if they were Masons. There were four in one group I had known for about five years, and many more among men I had known for twenty years and more, without ever realizing that they had any connection with Freemasonry. As for the second part of my concern, I found them quite willing to talk, not about the "secret" passwords and hand grips (by then, I already knew them), but about what they had been taught concerning the origins of Freemasonry and its ancient Old Charges.
They were as intrigued as I was about the possibilities of discovering the lost meanings of words, symbols, and ritual for which no logical explanation was available, such as why a Master Mason is told in his initiation rites that "this degree will make you a brother to pirates and corsairs." We agreed that unlocking the secrets of those Masonic mysteries would contribute most to unearthing the past, because the loss of their true meanings had caused the ancient terms and symbols to be preserved intact, less subject to change over the centuries, or by adaptations to new conditions.
Among those lost secrets were the meanings of words used in the Masonic rituals, words like tyler, cowan, due‑guard, and Juwes. Masonic writers have struggled for centuries, without success, to make those words fit with their preconceived conviction that Masonry was born in the English‑speaking guilds of medieval stonemasons.
Now I would test the possibility that there was indeed a connection between Freemasonry and the French‑speaking Templar order, by looking for the lost meanings of those terms, not in English, but in medieval French. The answers began to flow, and soon a sensible meaning for every one of the mysterious Masonic terms was established in the French language. It even provided the first credible meaning for the name of Hiram Abiff, the murdered architect of the Temple of Solomon, who is the central figure of Masonic ritual. The examination established something else as well. It is well known that in 1362 the English courts officially changed the language used for court proceedings from French to English, so the French roots of all the mysterious terms of Freemasonry confirmed the existence of that secret society in the fourteenth century, the century of the Templar suppression and the Peasants' Revolt.
With that encouragement I addressed other lost secrets of Masonry: the circle and mosaic pavement on the lodge room
xvlii BORN IN BLOOD
floor, gloves and lambskin aprons, the symbol of the compass and the square, even the mysterious legend of the murder of Hiram Abiff. The Rule, customs, and traditions of the Templars provided answers to all of those mysteries. Next came a deeper analysis of the Old Charges of ancient Masonry that define a secret society of mutual protection. What the "lodge" was doing was assisting brothers in hiding from the wrath of church and state, providing them with money, vouching for them with the authorities, even providing the "lodging" that gave Freemasonry the unique term for its chapters and their meeting rooms. There remained no reasonable doubt in my mind that the original concept of the secret society that came to call itself Freemasonry had been born as a society of mutual protection among fugitive Templars and their associates in Britain, men who had gone underground to escape the imprisonment and torture that had been ordered for them by Pope Clement V. Their antagonism toward the Church was rendered more powerful by its total secrecy. The suppression of the Templar order appeared to be one of the biggest mistakes the Holy See ever made.
In return, Freemasonry has been the target of more angry papal bulls and encyclicals than any other secular organization in Christian history. Those condemnations began just a few years after Masonry revealed itself in 1717 and grew in intensity, culminating in the bull Humanum Genus, promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in 1884. In it, the Masons are accused of espousing religious freedom, the separation of church and state, the education of children by laymen, and the extraordinary crime of believing that people have the right to make their own laws and to elect their own government, "according to the new principles of liberty." Such concepts are identified, along with the Masons, as part of the kingdom of Satan. The document not only defines the concerns of the Catholic Church about Freemasonry at that time, but, in the negative, so clearly defines what Freemasons believe that I have included the complete text of that papal bull as an appendix to this book.
Finally, it should be added that the events described here were part of a great watershed of Western history. The feudal age was coming to a close. Land, and the peasant labor on it, had lost its role as the sole source of wealth. Merchant families banded into guilds, and took over whole towns with charters as municipal
INTRODUCTION xlx
corporations. Commerce led to banking and investment, and towns became power centers to rival the nobility in wealth and influence.
The universal church, which had fought for a position of supremacy in a feudal context, was slow to accept changes that might affect that supremacy. Any material disagreement with the church was called heresy, the most heinous crime under heaven. The heretic not only deserved death, but the most painful death imaginable.
Some dissidents run for the woods and hide, while others organize. In the case of the fugitive Knights Templar, the organization already existed. They possessed a rich tradition of secret operations that had been raised to the highest level through their association with the intricacies of Byzantine politics, the secret ritual of the Assassins, and the intrigues of the Moslem courts which they met alternately on the battlefield or at the conference table. The church, in its bloody rejection of protest and change, provided them with a river of recruits that flowed for centuries.
More than six hundred years have passed since the suppression of the Knights Templar, but their heritage lives on in the largest fraternal organization ever known. And so the story of those tortured crusading knights, of the savagery of the Peasants' Revolt, and of the lost secrets of Freemasonry becomes the story of the most successful secret society in the history of the world.
PART 1
THE
KNIG HTS
TEMPLAR
CHAPTER 1
THE URGE TO KILL
In 1347, over a thousand miles from London, the Kipchak Mongols were besieging a walled Genoese trading center on the Crimean coast. Kipchak besiegers were beginning to die in large numbers from a strange disease that appeared to be highly infectious. In what may be the world's first recorded instance of biological warfare, the Kipchaks began to catapult the diseased corpses over the walls.
A few months later, Genoese galleys from the besieged city put in at Messina in Sicily, with men dying at their oars and tales of dead men who had been thrown over the side all along the way. The sailors ignored the efforts of authorities to prevent their landing, and the Black Death set foot ashore in Europe. Carried by ships' rats, it moved onto the continent through the ports of Naples and Marseilles. From Italy it moved into Switzerland and Eastern Europe, meeting the spread through France into Germany. The plague came to England on ships landing at ports in Dorset and spread from there. Within two years it had killed off an estimated 35 to 40 percent of the population of Europe and Britain.
As in all times and places, famine, malnutrition, and the resultant lower immune defenses put out the welcome mat for the epidemic. A change in climate had produced longer winters and cooler, wetter summers, which had shortened and thwarted the growing season. From 1315 to 1318 torrential summer rains ruined crops, and mass starvation followed. Succeeding harvests
3
4 BORN IN BLOOD
were sporadic, but at least the people could survive. Then, in 1340, there was almost universal crop failure, and thousands perished in the worst famine of the century.
Even under what they would have considered ideal conditions, the general population was undernourished. Their diet was chiefly of wheat and rye, with few vegetables and a minimum of meat and milk‑‑partially because, even if they could afford them, there was no refrigeration or other means of preservation. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies in winter were a part of life. Hunting could provide fresh meat, but hunting rights belonged to the manor lords. A beating was a light punishment and death not uncommon for taking a deer, or even a rabbit, from the lord's forests. That so many took the risk speaks to the intensity of the biological craving for fresh food.
Disease generally finds its easiest victims among children, who do not develop a mature immune system until about the age of ten or eleven, and among the elderly, whose immune systems decline with advancing years, and so it was with the Black Death. Although people of all ages and all stations died in the tens of thousands, the very young and the very old dominate the statistics. It was the very opposite of a "baby boom," leaving few young people to enter the work force during the next generation.
The Black Death was not a single disease, but three, and the source of all three was a flea. A bacillus in the blood blocks the flea's stomach. As the flea rams its probe through the skin of its host, preferably the black rat, the bacillus erupts from the flea's stomach and enters the host, introducing the infection. As the rats died off, the fleas took to other animals and to humans.
In one form, the bacilli settle in the Iymph glands. Large swellings and carbuncles, called buboes, appear in the groin and armpits, which give this form of the disease the name "bubonic plague." The term "Black Death" comes from the fact that the victim's body is covered with black spots and his tongue turns black. Death usually comes within three days.
In another form – septicemic ‑ the blood is infected, and death may take a week or more. The fastest death comes from the most infectious form, the pneumonic, which causes an inflammation of the throat and lungs, spitting and vomiting of blood, a foul stench, and intense pain.
No scientific identification was made of the plague diseases at
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR S
the time, nor was anything known of the method of transmission. This permitted all manner of wild theories to be promulgated, of which the most common was that the Black Death was a punishment from God. Some even cursed God for the great calamity, and Philip VI of France took steps to prevent God from getting any angrier than He apparently already was. Special laws were passed against blasphemy, with very specific punishments. For the first offense, the lower lip of the blasphemer would be sliced off. For the second offense, the upper lip would go, and for the third offense the offender's tongue would be cut out.
Groups of penitents sprang up, publicly doing penance for sins that they could not specifically identify, but that were obviously serious enough to anger God to the point of destroying the human race. Only the most severe penance would do to expiate such horrible sin. Self‑flagellation turned into group flagellation as penitents walked the streets, often led by a priest, and beat one another with knotted ropes and whips tipped with metal to lacerate their flesh. Some carried heavy crosses or wore crowns of thorns.
Others found their own answers in uninhibited rites and sexual orgies. Some acted on the theory that since the world was ending shortly every possible pleasure should be indulged; others believed an appeal to Satan was the only alternative, now that they had been abandoned by God.
As always in the Middle Ages, some communities put the blame on the only non‑Christians in their midst, the Jews. Even though the Jews were dying from the Black Death themselves, they were accused of poisoning wells and causing the plague with secret rites and incantations intended to wipe out Christianity. Bloody pogroms were mounted in France, Austria, and especially‑‑as had been the case during the Crusades ‑ in Germany. In Strasbourg over two hundred Jews were burned alive. At one town on the Rhine the Jews were butchered, then their remains were sealed in wine barrels and sent bobbing down the river. The Jews at Esslingen who survived the first wave of persecution thought that their own world was coming to an end and gathered in their synagogue. They set the building on fire, burning themselves to death. Those Jews who weren't killed were frequently expelled, leaving their homes to spread their culture, and often the plague, to other areas. Poland saw its own persecutions
6 BORN IN BLOOD
in scattered areas, but that country was generally much safer than Germany, and German Jews streamed into Polish territory. This was the origin of the Ashkenazic (German) Jewish communities in Poland. They kept their German language, which gradually evolved into a vernacular called Yiddish.
Because of their crowded conditions and almost total lack of sanitation, the towns and cities were hardest hit at first, but as the townsmen dispersed to avoid the plague, they took it with them into the rural areas. As the farmers died off, fields went to weeds, and untended animals wandered the countryside until many of them died the same way their owners had. Henry Knighton, a canon of St. Mary's Abbey in Leicester, reported five thousand sheep dead and rotting in a single pasture. It has been estimated that the population of England when the plague first crossed the Channel was 4 million. By the time it subsided, the population had been reduced to less than 2.5 million.
News of the ravages of the plague in England reached the Scots, who concluded that this decimation of their ancient enemy could have come from no source other than an avenging God. They decided to assist the Almighty in His divine plan and attack the English in their weakened state. The call went out for the clans to gather at Selkirk Forest, but before they could begin their march south the plague struck the camp, killing an estimated five thousand Scots in a few days' time. There was nothing to do but abandon the invasion plan, so the still healthy, with the sick and dying, broke camp to return to their homes. Word of the gathering had reached the English, who moved north to intercept the invasion. They arrived in time to intercept and slaughter the dispersed Scottish army.
Incredibly, while the greatest death toll the world had ever known was in progress, the war between England and France kept right on going, each weakened side hoping that the other side was even weaker. Armies needed supplies, the products of craftsmen and farmers, of whom over a third had died. Armies needed money, and the population and products usually taxed for that purpose were declining. When the plague died out after a couple of years, the world was different than it had been before. It would never be the same again, because the lowest classes of society suddenly experienced a new power.
What had happened was that the one law that can never be bro
7
ken without consequences, the law of supply and demand, was in full force and effect-this time to the benefit of the farmer, the common laborer, and the craftsman. In the recollection of the landowning class, there never had been a time when farm labor or farm tenant supply did not exceed the demand for it. Now the foundations of a way of life that had worked for centuries were beginning to crack. In the dark ages of anarchy the individual had been helpless. The preservation of life itself was the major consideration, and men freely pledged themselves in servitude to a stronger man who would provide them with protection. These strong men pledged themselves to even stronger men, and the result was the feudal system. Men at all levels pledged military service, often for a specific campaign or a specific period, such as forty days a year. The warrior class became the nobility, and they required wealth for war-horses, weapons, and armor. They needed still more wealth, partially in the form of labor, to build fortified places where their followers could come for protection. These gradually grew from moated stockades and fortified houses to lofty stone structures requiring an army of stonecutters, masons, carpenters, and smiths. All this had to be paid for, and although some revenue might be generated by the loot of warfare or the ransom of wealthy captives, the primary source of that wealth was the land, and the labor of the people who worked it.
As the armored horseman came to dominate the field of battle, there came an "arms race" of knights. The pledge of a local baron to his count might now include his obligation to respond to a call to arms by bringing with him anywhere from a single mounted knight to dozens, depending upon the size of his holdings. A knight was expensive to equip and maintain. He needed at least one trained heavy war-horse, a lighter horse for ordinary travel, and more horses for his squire, servants, and baggage. He required personal armor, which was very expensive, as well as some armor for his horse. To support him in all this, in exchange for his services he was provided with land, and the people on that land.
The status of serfs had changed over the centuries. Some were gradually able to become tenant farmers, tilling farmland assigned to them on shares while still making payments to the manor lord in fixed terms of service in the manor fields. Customs varied from one manor to another, but generally the tenant farmer paid in
8 BORN Ir~ BLOOD
many ways for his tenure. On his death, his best farm animal went to the lord as a fee (the "heriot"), and his second‑best animal to the parish priest. Neither he nor any member of his family could marry without permission, which usually required a payment. In addition to his prescribed days of labor for the lord (often two or three days a week), he might be called upon to give extra service without pay, a requirement with the unlikely name of "love‑boon." He was subject to restrictions on gathering firewood, taking wood to repair his house, and even collecting the precious manure that would drop in the roads and byways.
If the manor lord owned a mill, the tenant had to use that mill and pay for the privilege. The same applied to manor ovens, frequently creating a monopoly on the baking of bread. In view of his rights and obligations, the tenant was not a serf, who was a man bound almost in slavery, but neither was he totally free. The greatest barrier to his liberty was the old law that took away his freedom of movement. These tenant farmers were required to stay on the manor to which they were attached by birth, where they lived in a cluster of houses called a "vill" (the obvious forerunner of "village"). For this reason the tenant was called a villein, pronounced almost the same way as the more disparaging term villain which was sometimes applied to him by his lord.
What most dramatically changed the status of many villeins was the manor lord's need for cash rather than a share of a crop that could not easily be transported to market for sale. There were almost no wagon roads, and grain crops could not be economically transported by packhorse, as was done with wool. The king needed cash to fight his French wars, and the nobles needed cash to pay mercenaries and to acquire transportation and supplies on the continent. Villeins began to make deals in which a ha'penny or penny might be given instead of a day's labor and a fixed cash payment in lieu of a share of crops. Their attitudes changed as they found themselves "renting" the land rather than trading their time and muscles for it. They felt free in the absence or reduction of the old customs of humbling servitude.
By the time of the Black Death, many of the English manors were held by the church. Some had been purchased, and many had been gifted. The extensive manorial holdings of the Knights Templar had been conveyed to the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (the Hospitallers) after the Templars were sup
rHE KNIGHlS TEMrL~R g
pressed by Pope Clement V in 1312. All of the monastic orders had manorial properties with thousands of serfs and villeins attached to them. Even the substitution of cash for villein services often didn't meet the lord's or bishop's need for cash, and a prosperous tenant would be permitted to purchase his freedom for a lump sum. Unfortunately, such men usually did not foresee a need for documentation that would stand up in court and so recorded the manumission improperly, or not at all. The attitude of the church was simple: No manumission was valid unless it was a recorded part of a business transaction. Any other act of freeing a villein was treated as embezzlement of valuable church property.
Now the Black Death had taken away a third or more of the work force. With labor shortages, prices went up, especially for the products of a greatly reduced work force of craftsmen. There were far fewer bootmakers, weavers, carpenters, masons, and smiths. There was less money being generated, and it bought less in the face of rising prices.
This was a golden time for the previously oppressed villein. Manors were lying fallow and their owners needed the income. For the first time in his life the tenant farmer's services were in short supply and he could bargain for, and get, a better share of the harvest and generally better living and working conditions. For his spare‑time labor he could get double or triple the wages he was used to. Tenants began to leave their vills for better opportunities, much to the anger of their old landlords.
To put a stop to all this and restore things to comfortable normalcy, the English Parliament passed a Statute of Labourers in 1351. Primarily the statute tried to fix prices for labor at their preplague levels but it contained several extraordinary provisions. The rates for farm laborers were not just spelled out (two and a half pence for threshing a quarter of barley, five pence per acre for mowing, and so on), but, to enforce the rule, farm workers were to sllow themselves in market towns with their tools in their hands so that labor contracts would be made in public, not in secret. The statute forbade any extra incentives, such as meals. Farm contracts were to be made by the year and not by the day. Farm workers were to take an oath twice a year before the steward or constable of their vill, swearing that they would abide by the ordinances. They were forbidden to leave their own vills if
10 BORN IN BLOOD
work was available to them at home at the set prices. If any man refused to take the oath or violated the statute, he was to be put in the stocks for three days, or until he agreed to submit to the new law. For that purpose, the statute ordered that stocks be constructed in every single village in England.
Craftsmen were not overlooked. The statute set wages at three pence per‑day for a master carpenter, four pence for a master mason, three pence per day for roof tilers and thatchers. All producers of products ‑ saddlers, goldsmiths, tanners, tailors, bootmakers, and so on ‑ were to charge no more than their average price during the four years before the plague, and all were to take oaths that they would obey the law. Breaking the oath, and the law, carried an unusual punishment. For a first offense, the overcharger would be imprisoned for 40 days ‑ with the prison term to be doubled for each subsequent offense. Thus a third offense would mean prison for 160 days (40, 80, 160). Under this provision, if a bootmaker could be convicted on nine counts of selling shoes at too high a price, the ninth offense alone would earn him 10,240 days in jail.
Attempts were made to enforce the Statute of Labourers, some vigorous, but essentially it just didn't work. It was trying to suppress a popular black market filled with eager buyers and eager sellers. Actually, the situation got worse. As farm workers and craftsmen left the market place because of death or old age, a smaller pool of new young workers took their places because of the disproportionate rate of infant and child deaths during the Black Death. Inflation continued to climb. Villeins and serfs with no claim to freedom, or who were too closely watched to be able to move elsewhere, could only go about their daily tasks in ever-reduced circumstances because of higher prices for everything they bought. Just as much victims, because they had no bargaining power, were the lower orders of the clergy. The bishops, in order to maintain themselves in a proper state of luxury and to meet the demands of a papal court whose income had been shattered by a rival claimant to the Throne of Peter, refused to increase the stipends of their ordinary clergy. This left the village priests at near‑starvation levels in times of incessant inflation and gave them common ground with their parishioners against great lords, whether temporal or spiritual.
To add to the demand for goods and services, the Hundred
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 11
Years' War had begun in 1337. This war saw the change from great mobs of people struggling in hand‑to‑hand combat, stabbing, cutting, and thrusting at each other, to the use of improved missiles ‑ means by which men could kill each other from a distance. Bows and arrows had been around forever, but were comparatively weak and no threat to the armor‑plated warrior, nor to his position as the invincible "tank" of the medieval battlefield. Before the improved missiles the most effective weapon on the field may not have been the knight, but rather his war‑horse. What today is thought of only as a heavy work‑horse was bred to carry a man and his weight of weapons and armor, as well as the weight of the horse's own armor and its massive horseshoes, which were terrible weapons in themselves. No mob of infantry could withstand that massive bulk crashing into it. For the melee following the charge, the war‑horse was trained to bite and kick.
Then along came the crossbow, presenting the first material threat to the battlefield superiority of the armored knight. Its short compound bow, made of layered wood, bone, and horn, could propel a short thick arrow (or "quarrel") at a speed that would penetrate light armor. Thus the armored warrior, the aristocrat in war or peace, could be killed by an opponent he could not get his hands on ‑ worse, an opponent from the lower classes. It wasn't fair, and if it wasn't fair to the lords, it probably was not in keeping with God's will. A pope went so far as to ban the use of the crossbow by Christians, but the ban had no noticeable effect. Bans on weapons never work because they are always accompanied by the unspoken caveat, "We won't use it unless we absolutely must in order to win."
The crossbow was not the ideal weapon, because it had two shortcomings. First, the range was short. More important, the crossbow was very difficult to draw. Some had a stirrup for the bowman's foot, to hold the bow to the ground, while the bowstring was attached to a hook, fastened to a strap around the bowman's waist or shoulders. He would crouch down, hook the string, and then use the entire strength of his legs and back to draw the bow to a locked position for firing. This procedure was not only slow but required strength. It required training to draw and to aim. In addition, the crossbow was relatively expensive to manufacture: A peasant subject to feudal military service would not have one lying about the house. The crossbowman became a mercenary.
12 BORN IN BLOOD
It took cash to employ the crossbowman's services, not feudal obligation. At the Battle of Crecy in 1346, the crossbowmen of the French army were a band of Genoese mercenaries. On the other side, the English were about to demonstrate a weapon that immediately overshadowed the crossbow, the so‑called English longbow ("so‑called" because it was actually the product of Welsh ingenuity). The demonstration, that day, of the superiority of the longbow rocked all of Europe. Forget the total death toll; the important item was that over fifteen hundred fully armored French dukes, counts, and knights had fallen in one battle. That single fact changed the course of European society. Previously, knights had expected to be killed, if at all, only by each other. They held the monopoly on warfare, and so on power. Now hundreds of invincible aristocrats had been done in by a handful of the lowest level of commoner with pieces of wood and string in their hands. It changed forever the way the two classes regarded each other. No longer was the feudal levy that called a mob of untrained peasants to war of any account. Archers became professional soldiers, well trained, well paid, and well treated. They became the heroes of the hour, and they were peasant heroes. It may be impossible for us to evaluate the class distinctions that had existed before that time. The armored knights were, to the peasant, invincible, and on such a lofty plane as to be superior creatures akin to gods from another planet. One did not even contemplate standing up to them, and now the gods had dropped a notch. The knight had reason to sit in his hall and stare at the fire with wrinkled brow, and the peasant had an entirely new feeling of his own worth and pride. He might still share that new worth with his fellows in whispers, but the thought once planted continued to grow.
With the changes in the conduct of war, the king more than ever needed feudal obligations to be fulfilled with money, rather than with service. The new professional soldier worked for pay and needed to be supplied with food, equipment, and baggage animals, as well as transportation to the continent. In spite of labor shortages, inflation, and disease, the monarchy would not relent in the pursuit of the Hundred Years' War, which had started in 1337. The only answer was‑‑quite literally‑‑taxes, taxes, and more taxes.
Out of that state of affairs grew a situation that had to cause
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 13
Trouble. The landowners called upon old rights under the law, propounded by lawyers that only they could afford to hire, to take away a man's freedom and that of his descendants. Men who called themselves free were ordered to prove it. Genealogies and parish records were searched to prove that a man's mother or grandmother had been a villein or serf and that he had irrevocably inherited that status. It was the one way to use the law to get cheap and legally bound labor that could not leave for better conditions elsewhere. The only beneficiaries were the landowners. The bigger the landowner, the greater the benefit from the enforcement of villeinage, and the church was the biggest landowner of them all. It had the largest number of serfs and villeins to be held, or forced back from their temporary freedom elsewhere. Bitterness against the church grew among the common people, and the flames of their resentment were frequently fanned by the discontented lower clergy.
An Oxford priest and scholar named John Wycliffe set in motion more, perhaps, than he had intended when he began to preach church reform. He was especially incensed by the corruption of the church and by what he saw as its constant struggle for more power and material trappings, at the expense of the traditional pastoral mission of the church. He saw a direct line of contact between men and God that did not require the services of a priest. He claimed that no one but God had control over men's souls. He said that the king was answerable directly to God and did not need a papal intermediary. One of his most shocking claims, for its day, was that sacraments served by priests who were themselves sinners, and not in a state of grace, were of no effect whatever, and that included the pope. He even went so far as to translate the Vulgate Bible into English, on the grounds that all Christian men and women should have direct access to holy scripture, for in scripture he found perfection and would not question a word of it. However, he pointed out, there is no scriptural mention of a pope.
Such attacks on the church could not go unanswered, and Wycliffe was arraigned on charges of heresy at St. Paul's. That he was not sentenced to death is probably attributable to the London mob that raged in protest. Wycliffe was merely removed from his post and sent down to live in his parish of Lutterworth. He did not curtail his criticism of the church but redirected that criticism
14 BORN IN BLOOD
from the audience of his fellow churchmen to the people, who were of a mind to listen. His followers became wandering preaching priests and took Wycliffe's message to the towns and villages.
More immediately effective on the home front was John Ball, whom the French chronicler Jean Froissart called "a mad priest of Kent." Ball preached against class and privilege, including in the church. He also demanded agrarian reform, insisting that the landholdings of the great barons and of the church be taken away from them and distributed among the people. Since 1360 Ball and his following of priests had roamed central and southeastern England, preaching doctrines of equality of rights and the redistribution or common ownership of property. He was arrested by church authorities a number of times and finally excommunicated. In 1381, at the outbreak of the Peasants' Rebellion, he was in the archbishop's prison at Maidstone in Kent.
There had been hope that the French influence on the papacy would end when Pope Gregory XI returned the Holy See to Rome in 1377. Unfortunately, a large segment of the church hierarchy had not agreed with the move. By that time many of the cardinals were French and much preferred the French base at Avignon. When Gregory XI died the following year, the people of Rome rioted to secure their demand that the new pope be an Italian, and so he was, taking the name of Urban VI. The French cardinals declared the election invalid. They elected their own French pope, who would rule as Clement VII, and returned to Avignon. This was the Great Schism in the church, which was not healed for many years. It became a political schism as well, with the anti‑Roman Clement VII at Avignon supported by France, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, and several German principalities, while the Roman pope Urban VI was supported by the enemies of France: England, Hungary, Poland, and the German Holy Roman Emperor. Each pope excommunicated all of the adherents of his rival, barring them from the sacraments, so that all across Europe every single Christian soul of the time had been damned and placed outside God's protection by one pope or the other. This was not a circumstance to be taken lightly. In one instance pro‑English forces, supporters of the Roman pope, captured a French convent whose members recognized the pope at Avignon. The soldiers and their clerics had no problem agreeing that these poor misguided sisters were totally outside the protection
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 15
of either civil or ecclesiastic law. Accordingly, they saw no deterrent to looting all of the possessions of the convent and raping all of the nuns. By the rules of the day, they didn't even have to mention the event at their next confessions.
And all the time, the war between England and France went on, with both sides starved for the tax revenues needed to support the conflict.
In 1377 a poll tax of fourpence per head had been imposed on all the people in England. In 1379 Parliament came up with a graduated tax based on social status. Both taxes failed, and some of the crown jewels had to be sold to maintain the war with France. In November 1380 the tax was set at one shilling per head, with the extraordinary provision that the rich should help the poor to pay the tax. They did not, of course, and the tax failed.
The English Parliament of 1376 became known to the people as the Good Parliament, primarily because it condemned corruption in the king's government. Addressing bribery, it said that the king's counselors should take nothing from any party to business brought before them except presents of little value, such as small items of food and drink. On the subject of taxation, the members asserted that if the king had loyal officers and good counselors he would be rich in treasure without any need for taxation, especially considering the "king's ransoms" exacted for the release of King David II of Scotland after his capture at the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346 and for King John II of France, captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. They suggested that the men who had bled away those fortunes should be accused and punished.
The Good Parliament also impeached a merchant of London named Richard Lyons, finding him guilty of various crimes of extortion and corruption. It was charged that, as a royal tax collector, he had generously helped himself to funds intended for the royal treasury. It was adjudged that all of his lands, goods, and chattels should be seized by the crown and that he should be imprisoned for life. Instead, Lyons's wealth and his friends secured a royal pardon for him.
The name "Good Parliament" may have been descriptive, but equally so would have been the title, "The Ignored Parliament."
So here we have an England in an incessant state of war, with skyrocketing inflation, attempts to return free men to bondage, a
16 BORN IN BLOOD
Great Schism in the church that found every man in England excommunicated by the Avignon pope, a growing segment of vocally angry priests, and the burden of the highest poll tax ever levied upon the people. The powder keg was filled to the brim. In the spring of 1381, the government accelerated its efforts to collect the tax and the fuse was lit. The explosion of rebellion was just a few days away.
cHArTER 2
"FOR NOW IS TYME
TO BE WAR"
The Encyclopedia Britannica calls it a "curiously spontaneous" rebellion.
Barbara Tuchman, in her fourteenth‑century history, A Distant Mirror, said that the rebellion spread "with some evidence of planning."
Winston Churchill went further. In The Birth of Britain he wrote, "Throughout the summer of 1381 there was a general ferment. Beneath it all lay organization. Agents moved round the villages of central England, in touch with a 'Great Society' which was said to meet in London."
The spark of rebellion was being fanned vigorously, and finally the signal was given. Even though he had been arrested, excommunicated, and even now was a prisoner in the ecclesiastic prison at Maidstone, in Kent, letters went out from priest John Ball and from other priests who followed him. Clerics were then the only literate class, so letters must have been received by local priests and were obviously intended to be shared with or read aloud to others. They all contained a signal to act now, which could put to rest the concept that the rebellion was simply a spontaneous convulsion of frustration that just happened to affect a hundred thousand Englishmen at the same time. This from a letter from John Ball: "John Balle gretyth yow wele alle and doth yowe to
1 7
18 BORN IN BLOOD
understande, he hath rungen youre belle. Nowe ryght and myght, wylle and skylle. God spede every ydele [ideal]. Now is tyme." From priest Jakke Carter: "You have gret nede to take God with yowe in alle your dedes. For now is tyme to be war.'~ From priest Jakke Trewman: "Jakke Trewman doth you to understande that falsnes and gyle have reigned too long, and trewthe hat bene sette under a lokke, and falsnes regneth in everylk flokke.... God do bote, for now is tyme."
One letter from John Ball, "Saint Mary Priest," is worth quoting in its entirety. Even with the medieval English spelling, the meaning will be clear. Lechery and gluttony were frequent points in his accusations of high church leaders. "John Balle seynte Marye prist gretes wele alle maner men byddes hem in the name of the Trinite, Fadur, and Sone and Holy Gost stonde manlyche togedyr in trewthe, and helpez trewthe, and trewthe schal helpe yowe. Now regneth pride in pris [prize] and covetys is hold wys, and leccherye withouten shame and glotonye withouten blame. Envye regnith with tresone, and slouthe is take in grete sesone. God do bote, for nowe is tyme amen."
In all the letters quoted, the emphasis has been added to identify the common signal "now is tyme." More evidence of planning and organization would come.
The violence erupted in Essex, prompted by new and more stringent efforts to collect a third poll tax. The idea of having special commissioners to enforce the tax collection had come from the king's sergeant‑at‑arms, a Franciscan friar named John Legge. That idea would cost him his head a few weeks later.
The commissioners in some instances attacked their duties overzealously. Some were reported to have examined young girls to see if they had engaged in sexual intercourse, as an aid to determining whether or not they were fifteen years of age and so taxable. One man, John of Deptford, was arrested after he struck the tax gatherer who had raised his daughter's dress to see if she had pubic hair, evidence of taxable age.
In some areas the tax collectors were either simply ignored or beaten up by the villagers. A great local lord, John de Bamptoun, set himself up in the town of Brentwood in Essex and demanded that the men of the neighboring towns come to him with complete lists of names and their tax money. Over a hundred men responded to his orders‑‑not to pay the taxes, but to inform him
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 19
that they had no intention of doing so. Optimistically, de Bamptoun ordered his two sergeants‑at‑arms to arrest the hundred villagers and put them in prison. The crowd angrily attacked the royal officers, and de Bamptoun counted himself lucky to be allowed to flee back to London.
In response, the government sent back Sir Robert Bealknap, chief justice of common pleas. Sir Robert came armed with specific indictments and statements signed by jurors. (In those days, jurors were the opposite of independent. They were witnesses, literally those with "wit‑ness" or "possession of knowledge" of the matter at hand, and frequently they were the accusers as well). In spite of Bealknap's ponderous authority, his reception was no better than that previously accorded de Bamptoun. The locals seized the royal party and forced Bealknap to reveal the names of the jurors who had named and sworn against de Bamptoun's assailants. With that information, parties set out to hunt them down. Jurors caught were beheaded and their heads mounted on poles, as examples to others, while those who couldn't be found had their houses burned or pulled down. As for the chief justice, he was berated as a traitor to the king and to the kingdom but in the end was permitted to return to London. Not allowed to go with him were his three clerks, who were recognized as the same clerks who had been with de Bamptoun. They were beheaded.
Meanwhile, in Kent, the county just south of Essex across the Thames, a knight of the king's household, Sir Simon Burley, had come to Gravesend and had leveled against a freeman named Robert Belling the charge that Belling was Burley's serf. He set a fine of three hundred pounds in silver as the price of Belling's liberty. The men of Gravesend were outraged at both the charge and the fine, a sum they declared would ruin Belling entirely. The royal officer responded by having Belling bound and thrown into the dungeon at nearby Rochester Castle. At the same time, a tax commission had arrived in Kent on a mission similar to that of Sir Robert Bealknap in Essex; the Franciscan sergeant‑at‑arms John Legge came armed with specific indictments against a number of people in the county. They had planned to establish the seat of the Kentish inquiry at Canterbury, but were driven off by the local citizenry.
As word of these events spread, the men of Kent began to gather, centered on the town of Dartford. A group of Essex men
20 BORN IN BLOOD
crossed the Thames in boats to join them. Showing not just organization but perhaps discipline as well, the leaders decreed that no men who lived within twelve leagues (about thirty‑six miles) of the sea would be allowed to join their march, because those men might be needed at home to help fight off any surprise French attack on the English coast.
The Kentish mob moved not toward London but away from it, heading east to lay siege to Rochester Castle, where they demanded the release of Robert Belling. After just half a day, and no recorded defense, the constable of the castle opened the gates to the rebels. They released Belling and every other prisoner, then turned south to Maidstone, where they arrived on June 7. There they were joined by more men, including one known as Walter the Tyler. Remarkably, he was immediately acknowledged by thousands of men as their supreme commander and gave his name to the rising: "Wat Tyler's Revolt." Nothing is known of Wat Tyler's prior life, nor of the means by which a supposedly disorganized mob acknowledged his leadership on the very day he arrived.
One of Tyler's first acts was to free John Ball, the "Saint Mary Priest" of York, from the church prison at Maidstone, and Ball became the unofficial chaplain of the expedition from that point forward.
Still moving away from London, Tyler took his force farther east to Canterbury, the seat of the leading churchman in England. That Tyler planned all along for his rude army to march on London is indicated by the rebels' first act upon their arrival at Canterbury on Monday, June 10. Thousands of rebels crowded into the church during high mass. After kneeling, they shouted to the monks to elect one of their number to be the new archbishop of Canterbury, because the present archbishop (who was off in London with the king, who had recently appointed him chancellor of the realm) "is a traitor and will be beheaded for his iniquity," as indeed he was before the week was over. The rebel leaders then asked for the names of any "traitors" in the town. Three names were provided, and the three men were sought out and beheaded. Then the rebels left the town, allowing just five hundred Canterbury men to join them because Canterbury was near to the coast and the balance of the men would be needed in the event of an attack by the French.
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 21
On the same day (June 10) that Tyler took over Canterbury in Kent, the gathering Essex mob sacked and burned a major commandery of the Knights Hospitallers called Cressing Temple. This wealthy manor had been given to the Knights Templar in 1 l 38 by Matilda, the wife of King Stephen. When the Templars were suppressed by Pope Clement V, all of their property in Britain, including this manor of Cressing, was given to the Hospitallers. The church owned one‑third of the land surface of England at that time and suffered greatly at the hands of the rebels, but no single group suffered losses comparable to those inflicted over the next few days on the Knights Hospitallers, who seemed to be on an especially aggressive hit list of the rebel leaders.
The following day, June 11, the rebels in both Essex and Kent turned toward London. Even with the burning, beheading, and destruction of records along the way, their purpose and discipline were such that both groups, upwards of a hundred thousand men, made the seventy‑mile journey in two days, reaching the city at almost the same time.
Warned of the rebels' approach, the fourteen‑year‑old King Richard II moved from Windsor to the Tower of London, the strongest fortress in the kingdom. He was joined there by an entourage that included Sir Simon Sudbury, who was both archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor; Sir Robert Hales, who was both the king's treasurer and the prior of the order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (the Hospitallers); Henry Bolingbroke, who would one day depose Richard and take the throne himself as Henry IV; the earls of Oxford, Kent, Arundel, Warwick, Suffolk, and Salisbury; and other peers and lesser officials, including the chief justice Sir Robert Bealknap, the unsuccessful tax collector John de Bamptoun, and the hated Franciscan sergeant‑at‑arms, John Legge. They all had reason to fear for their lives at the hands of the rebel horde advancing on the city.
On June 12 the Essex men began arriving at Mile End, near Aldgate. Across the river, the Kentish rebels gathered at Southwark, at the south end of London Bridge. Confederates and sympathizers streamed out of London to join them. One Kentish group came through nearby Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames, and sacked the archbishop's palace there, burning the furnishings and all the records they could find. (On that same day, across the river in the Tower, from where he could see the smoke
ZZ BORN IN BLOOD
rising from his palace, the archbishop returned the Great Seal to the king and asked to be relieved of his public duties as chancellor.) Other rebel groups broke open the prisons on the south side of the river, including the ecclesiastic prison of the bishops of Winchester on Clink Street, a location that gave the name "the clink" to prisons everywhere. On smashing open the Marshalsea prison in Southwark, the mob searched for its commander, Richard Imworth, famous for his cruelty. Unable to locate Imworth, they contented themselves, for the moment, with the destruction of his house.
Messengers went out to the rebels from the king, asking the reason for this disturbance of the peace of the land. The answer came back that the uprising was dedicated to saving the king and to destroying traitors to king and country. The king's reply to this was to ask the rebels to cease their depredations and wait until he could meet with them to resolve all injustices against them. The rebels agreed and asked the king to meet with them early in the morning of June 13 at Blackheath on the Thames, a few miles from London. The men of Kent gathered at the meeting place on the south bank of the river and the men of Essex on the north. The king and his party left the Tower in four barges but only got as far as the royal manor at Rotherhithe, near Greenwich, where Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hales persuaded the party to get no closer to the rebels. Upon learning that the king was not coming to them as promised, the Kentish leaders sent the king a petition asking him for the heads of fifteen men. Their list included the archbishop of Canterbury, the prior of the Hospitallers, Chief Justice Bealknap, and the tax collectors John Legge and John de Bamptoun. Not surprisingly, the royal council would not agree to these demands, and the barges returned to the Tower. Each on their own side of the river, the Essex men moved toward Aldgate and the Kentish faction marched back toward Southwark and London Bridge. For reasons we shall probably never know, Aldgate was undefended, and the Essex rebels simply walked into the city. As much mystery attaches to the approach of the Kentish mob to London Bridge. No attempt was made to man the fortified gatehouse, and the drawbridge was lowered for them to cross.
Moving through the city, the rebels touched nothing until they reached Fleet Street. There they attacked the Fleet prison and
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 23
released all the inmates. They destroyed two forges that the Hospitallers had taken over from the Templars. Some joined a London mob and went to the Savoy Palace of the hated royal uncle, John of Gaunt, pausing on the way only to destroy any houses they could identify as belonging to the Hospitallers. The Savoy Palace itself was destroyed in a mood of rage. Furniture and art objects were smashed, linens and tapestries were burned. Jewels were hammered to powder. Finally the building was set aflame, boosted by the addition of several kegs of gunpowder.
From the Savoy the rebels returned to the Hospitaller property between Fleet Street and the Thames, to buildings leased by that order to lawyers who practiced before the king's court in the adjoining royal city of Westminster. They vandalized and burnt the lawyers' buildings, burnt their records, and killed anyone who registered an objection. They destroyed the other Hospitaller buildings on the property, with one exception. Instead of burning the rolls and records stored in the church where they found them, they went to the trouble of carrying them out into the high road for burning, avoiding any damage to the church itself. One historian goes so far as to say that certain of the mob "protected" the church from damage. This attitude was an anomaly in the midst of an orgy of destruction of church property and church leaders. This property, too, had been taken from the Templars and given to the Hospitallers, and even today that portion of the City of London is known simply as "The Temple." The church that was left unscathed by the rebels had been the principal church of the Knights Templar in England. This attitude toward the old Templar church stands out in marked contrast to the mob's feeling for the grand priory of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell, where they turned next. Still seeking out Hospitaller property for destruction along the way, they arrived at Clerkenwell and embarked upon an effort of total destruction. While the Templar church still stands today, all that remains of the principal Hospitaller church at Clerkenwell is the underground crypt.
Some of the mob went from London into the City of Westminster, where they released all of the prisoners in Westminster prison. Moving back into London, they did the same at the famous Newgate prison, taking chains and shackles to place on the altar of a nearby church.
One group went to the Tower to seek an audience with the
24 BORN IN BLOOD
king. When they were unsuccessful, they laid siege to the Tower. Word was sent out by the rebel leaders to the bands still roving the city that every member of the Chancery and Exchequer, every lawyer, and anyone who could write a writ or letter should be beheaded. Ink‑stained fingers were enough to condemn a man to death on the spot. The church at that time had a virtual monopoly on literacy, so the victims were most likely to be administrative clerics, who also held a near monopoly on what we might now think of as the "civil service" of the king's government.
So far, the king's council had appeared numbed into inactivity, but something had to be done, and finally a plan was agreed upon. It could not be based on force, because they had no force. The weapons they did have were trickery and deceit. Word was cried out in every ward of the City that on the following morning of Friday, June 14, the king and his council would meet with the rebels and that all of their demands would be satisfied. The promise was easily made because there was no intention to keep it. The place selected was the open fields at Mile End, outside the City beyond the Aldgate. It was expected that this move would achieve the initial goal of pulling the rebels out of the City. In fact, most of them did go, but Wat Tyler and his chief lieutenant, Jack Strawe, stayed behind with several hundred men. Their "chaplain," the priest John Ball, stayed with them. The rebel leadership had something more important to do than meet with the king to discuss manumission of villeinage and serfdom.
In those days, the Thames came right up to and inside the south wall of the Tower, so there was direct access by means of a water gate. As the king's party made ready to go to Mile End on Friday morning, the archbishop of Canterbury tried to escape by boat. He was recognized, and the ensuing hue and cry caused his crew to beat its way back through the water gate to the safety of the Tower.
As promised, the king's party left the Tower to meet the rebels at Mile End. Chroniclers tell us that he was accompanied by such dignitaries as the earls of Kent, Warwick, and Oxford, as well as by the mayor of London and "many knights and squires." What they do not tell us is why he was not accompanied by two of his very highest officials, Sir Simon Sudbury, who was the archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of the realm, and Sir Robert Hales, who was prior of the order of the Knights Hospitaller and
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 2 5
the king's treasurer. We shall never know whether they chose to stay behind or were ordered to do so. There is also no record of who spoke for the rebels at Mile End while Tyler, Strawe, and Ball were on a mission more important to them back in London.
At the meeting place all seemed to go well. The rebels asked two things: first, that they should have the right to hunt down and execute all traitors to the king and common people, and second, that no man should be bound to another in serfdom or villeinage. Every Englishman should be a free man. As to the first request, the king agreed that all "traitors" should be put to death, provided that thev were proven guilty under the law. He asked that all such accused be brought to him for trial. As to the request for universal freedom, he had brought about thirty clerks with him, who began speedily grinding out writs of manumission.
As soon as the king was safely out of the City, Tyler, Strawe, and Ball made their move. Incredibly, their plan was to take the Tower of London with a few hundred ill‑armed men. The Tower had been built to be the most secure fortress in Britain, so secure that it housed the royal mint. It was equipped with a heavy gate, an iron portcullis, and a drawbridge. At the time of Tyler's approach, the Tower was manned by professional soldiers, including hundreds of experienced archers. It had leadership and authority in the person of Archbishop Sudbury and, even more so, in the person of Sir Robert Hales, commander of a military order.
Here again, there had to have been collusion and friends on the inside. Tyler and his small band found the drawbridge down, the portcullis up, the gate open. They simply walked into the Tower. No contemporary chronicler refers to so much as a scuMe.
Inside, the archbishop had sung a mass and had confessed the prior of the Hospitallers and others. The rebels found him at prayer in the chapel of the Tower. A priest tried to hold them back by holding the consecrated host in front of them, a practice known to turn aside all manner of demons and evil spirits, but the rebels simply brushed him aside. The archbishop was beaten to the floor and dragged out of the chapel and out of the Tower by his arms and hood. Others dragged out the prior of the Hospitallers, while still others searched the rooms for their proscribed victims. Among these were the Franciscan sergeant‑at‑arms and tax collector John Legge and another Franciscan friar, William Apple
26 BORN IN BLOOD
ton, physician and counselor to John of Gaunt. The capturedmen were all led out to Tower Hill, where a great crowd had gathered. With background roars of approval, the rebels struck off the heads of their special prisoners, which were put on poles and taken to be mounted on London Bridge. As an aid to identifying the archbishop of Canterbury, they took his miter along and nailed it to his head.
After the execution, the rebels and the London mob broke out through the City, looking for additional victims. One man was beheaded simply because he spoke well of Friar William Appleton, whom the rebels had executed at Tower Hill. By the time their fury had abated, the rebels had beheaded about 160 of their enemies. An especially noteworthy target was Richard Lyons, the wealthy London burgess who had been impeached and found guilty of many acts of corruption by the Parliament of 1376. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment, but his influence was such that appeals to the king by his friends had resulted in his being restored to freedom. There was no appeal from the judgment of the rebel mob that pulled him from his house and summarily chopped off his head.
While the rebels roamed the City with their hit list, the rebel leadership mounted another unexplained project of its own. A group was organized and sent out from London by Wat Tyler, commanded by his lieutenant Jack Strawe and apparently guided by Londoner Thomas Farndon. They marched about six miles out of London for the very specific purpose of destroying the Hospitaller manor at Highbury, which a contemporary chronicler said had been "recently and skillfully rebuilt like another paradise."
Word of the rebel violence at the Tower and in the City reached Mile End, and the royal party came back to London. They did not return to the fortress of the Tower but went directly to the king's wardrobe near Castle Baynard, where his clerks continued to execute writs of manumission. Many of the rebels took those writs for themselves or their villages and headed back to their homes.
History gives us no clue as to how or why it was arranged, but agreement was somehow reached that the king would meet again with the rebels at Smithfield on the following day, Saturday, June 15. In the early morning of that day, the king and his party were
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 27
met by the prior and canons of Westminster Abbey, all barefoot, who led them to the abbey cathedral for services, accompanied by a number of curious rebels. The king heard mass at the high altar and left a gift for the abbey. Rebels behind the altar recognized Richard Imworth, the hated tormentor and marshal of the Marshalsea prison, hiding in the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor. When Imworth saw that he had been spotted, he clamped his arms around one of the marble columns of the shrine and cried for mercy. The unmoved rebels pried his arms loose from the column and carried him out to Cheapside, where he was publicly beheaded.
Gradually the rebels gathered to await the king at Smithfield. They lined up on one side of the great open field, while the king's party and its excort lined up on the opposite side, in front of St. Bartholemew's Hospital.
What happened next is usually cited as the result of the insulting behavior of Wat Tyler, but was more likely the result of a plan. Any force grossly outnumbered is likely to give thought to a victory by means of the death of the opposing leader. In any case, Mayor William Walworth was sent over to the rebel side to invite Wat Tyler to meet with the king. Tyler would be far from his men, and he recognized the danger. As a safety measure he demonstrated a hand signal, upon which the rebels should charge forward and kill everyone except the king. Accompanied by just one man carrying a banner, Tyler rode across the broad field.
All of the accounts of what happened during the next few minutes were written from the viewpoint of the government, not the rebels, and most of those accounts were recorded by people who weren't there. It appears that Tyler recited a list of demands to the king that included the repeal of laws of serfdom and of the game laws, the end of men being declared out‑law (outside the protection of the law), the seizure of church property and its division among the people who worked it, and the appointment of just one bishop of the church for all of England.
Putting aside all of the versions of the cause, what happened was that at one point Mayor Walworth drew his baselard (a double‑edged dagger) and struck at Tyler, cutting his neck. Ralph Standish, one of the king's squires, drew his sword and stabbed Tyler twice. Tyler tried to turn his horse back to his own men, but dropped to the ground, mortally wounded.
28 BORN IN BLOOD
The confused mob on the other side of the field could not clearly see what had happened. The young king was said to have cantered over to the rebel side, whether alone or with escorts we don't know, and to have held up his hand. He told the rebels that he would personally be their "chief and captain" and that they could look to him for the accomplishment of all their goals. He told them to meet with him at the fields by Clerkenwell, where the Hospitaller priory was still burning. At this, he rejoined his own group, which quickly moved off toward Clerkenwell, leaving the confused rebels discussing what they should do next. Some went out to pick up their dying leader and take him into St. Bartholemew's Hospital.
It took the rebels about an hour to reach a common decision and to set off for Clerkenwell. During that time, and probably earlier, Sir Robert Knolles, starting with about two hundred retainers of his own, was gathering forces in London to oppose the rebels, their courage undoubtedly strengthened by the news that Wat Tyler had fallen. Mayor Walworth, too, sent out word for every able‑bodied man to grab such weapons as he could and make all speed to Clerkenwell to support the king.
At Clerkenwell the rebels demanded the heads of those who had struck down Wat Tyler. As they argued and demanded, the armed Londoners gathered around and behind them. Finally Sir Robert Knolles could inform the king that six thousand men had gathered to protect him. The rebels at Clerkenwell were outnumbered. The king now demanded that they disperse to avoid punishment for their actions. Seeing their predicament, the rebel band began to break up. The only organized group was made up of men of Kent, led by Jack Strawe and John Ball. They were led out of the City, back over London Bridge, which they had crossed in triumph just three days earlier.
Upon the breakup of the rebels, William Walworth went looking for Wat Tyler. He found him having his grave wounds tended at St. Bartholemew's Hospital and ordered that he be dragged outside, where his head was struck off. Mounted on a pole, it was sent to relace the heads of Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hales on London Bridge.
There in the field, King Richard knighted William Walworth, Ralph Standish, and other burgesses of the City. For London the rebellion was over, but not so outside the city, where the rebellion
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 29
had its expression in dozens of towns, manors, and priories at locations hundreds of miles apart.
While the revolt in London has received most of the attention of history, our quest for evidence of organization requires that we take a brief look at events in other parts of England, where the rebellion went on even after Tyler's death.
On Wednesday, June 12, when the rebels were gathered outside the walls of London, sacking Lambeth Palace and breaking open the Marshalsea prison, a priest named John Wrawe appeared at Liston in Suffolk with a band of rebels, sending out messages of recruitment to nearby towns. His first move was to destroy the manor at Liston belonging to that same Richard Lyons who had been impeached for fraud and corruption by the Good Parliament of 1376 and then pardoned by the crown. (Lyons himself was taken from his townhouse and beheaded by the rebels in London. The attack on Lyons's estate was certainly not mere happenstance.)
Wrawe's next target was Bury St. Edmunds, the largest town in Suffolk. It was totally ruled by the local monastery, which had consistently refused to grant any municipal rights to the craftsmen and traders of the town. The rebels were permitted to enter, after threatening to kill anyone who opposed them. Townsmen were ready to guide the mob to their immediate sack of the homes of officials of the order, including that of the prior, who fled at their approach to the monastery at Mildenhall, about twelve miles away. The next day the prior decided to try to get farther away by boat but found rebels on the riverbank, blocking his escape. He managed to elude his pursuers and make for the woods, accompanied by a local guide. The guide went back to the rebels and informed them that the prior was in the woods, so they circled the area, then gradually closed the ring and found the prior. Taking their prisoner at dawn to Mildenhall, they cut off his head and mounted it on a pole. It became their banner as they marched back to Bury, where they placed the head in the public pillory.
Next came news of the escape route of Sir John Cavendish, chief justice of the realm and chancellor of Cambridge University. His flight was thwarted at the ferry at Brandon, near Mildenhall, when a woman cut loose and pushed off the only
30 BORN IN BLOOD
available boat before Cavendish could get to it. He was seized and beheaded on the spot and his head sent back to Bury to join the head of the prior, already in the pillory. The mob found ghoulish amusement in putting Cavendish's lips to the prior's ear as if in confession, and pushing their lips together to kiss.
Wrawe stayed a week in Bury, forcing the monks to give up records and taking their silver and jewels as bond for a charter of freedom drawn up for the town. During that week he also sent out messengers and envoys to spread the rebellion, who in some cases demanded gold and silver as ransom to save private and church property from destruction. In addition, he dispatched a force of about five hundred men to take nearby Nottingham Castle. Although it was well fortified with high walls and a series of drawbridged moats, there appears to have been no resistance to the rebels, who looted the castle of its portable valuables.
To the north of Suffolk, in the county of Norfolk, the principal leader was Geoffrey Litster, not a "peasant" but a prosperous wool dyer. His second‑in‑command was Sir Roger Bacon of Baconthorpe.
Their first objective was the capture of Norwich, where Litster made the castle his headquarters. Several houses of prominent citizens were sacked and a justice of the peace named Reginald Eccles was dragged to the public pillory, where he was stabbed in the stomach and then beheaded. Sir Roger Bacon took a contingent out of Norwich to the port town of Great Yarmouth, which had angered its neighbors with a charter that required all living within seven miles of Great Yarmouth to do all of their trading in the town, regardless of the opportunities to buy for less or sell at a higher price elsewhere. This must have been a very specific target, because Bacon did not burn the charter. Instead, he tore it in two and sent one half to Litster and one half to Wrawe.
To the west, a band of rebels attacked the property of the Hospitallers at the market town of Watton. From the preceptor they extracted a written forgiveness of all debts to the order, plus a promise of a subsequent money payment in compensation for past transgressions.
While all this was happening, messengers came into Cambridgeshire from London and from John Wrawe in Suffolk, both reporting high levels of success and urging the locals to rise. On June 14 the first rebel attack in Cambridgeshire singled out a
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 3 ~
manor of the Knights Hospitaller at Chippenham. The next day the revolt exploded at a dozen different places throughout the county. Men rode through the county announcing that serfdom had ended. One man, Adam Clymme, ordered that no man, whether bound or free, should obey any lord or perform any services for him, upon pain of beheading, unless otherwise ordered by the Great Society (magna societas). All‑out rage was directed at tax collectors, justices of the peace, and religious landowners. Attacks were made on the religious orders at Icklington, Ely, and Thorney, and on the Hospitallers' manor at Duxford.
On Saturday, June 15, the day Wat Tyler was struck down in London, certain prominent citizens of the city of Cambridge, burgesses and bailiffs among them, rode out with the full approval of their mayor to meet the rebels and plan their common attack on the University. They met the rebels in two groups, the first about fifteen miles from the city, attacking the Knights Hospitallers' manor at Shingay, and the other a couple of miles farther on, destroying the house of Thomas Haseldon, controller to the duke of Lancaster.
The combined forces returned to the city, where a signal for the rising of the town was given by tolling the bells of Great St. Mary's Church. The first religious target was the University, where the mob went to the house of the chancellor, Sir John Cavendish. They had not yet learned of his execution by the rebels at Bury St. Edmunds, so upon finding him not at home they smashed the furniture and anything else breakable.
Next on the list was wealthy Corpus Christi College, to which as many as one out of six townspeople paid rent. Everyone had vacated the college premises in fear of the rebels, who gave themselves over to an evening frenzy of smashing, burning, and stealing.
The next day was Sunday, and some churches tried to have business as usual. A mob broke into Great St. Mary's Church while mass was in progress and carried off records and anything they could find in the way of jewels and silver. They broke into the House of the Carmelites (on the site later occupied by Queen's College) and carried off records and books, which they burned in the marketplace.
A grollp of about a thousand rebels left the city to attack the priory at nearby Barnwell. There they pulled down walls and van
32 BORN IN BLOOD
dalized the buildings. Giving vent to specific grievances, theychopped down trees that they had been forbidden to use for firewood or lumber and drained ponds in which they were not allowed to fish.
The rising in Yorkshire requires special consideration, not only because it took place so far from London, but because of the primary involvement of craftsmen and others of the towns. The absence of any material participation of the rural population has even led some historians to the conclusion that the rising in Yorkshire was not really part of the Peasants' Rebellion, even though it occurred at the same time. If there were no peasants, how could it have been part of a peasant rebellion? The truth is that the major impacts of the revolt had come from substantial cooperation between rural and town dwellers, as we have seen at Cambridge, Bury St. Edmunds, St. Albans, and nowhere more than in London itself. That being the case, it appears foolish to say that events involving farmers only were part of the rebellion, but events involving townspeople only were not. Certainly there was communication with the other rebels, and, even more certainly, a high degree of organization in the risings at York, Scarborough, and Beverly.
These three Yorkshire towns are situated like points of an equilateral triangle about forty to fifty miles apart, a great traveling distance in those times. Scarborough is on the sea, and was reputed to be the only safe harbor between the Humber and the Tyne. Beverly, due south of Scarborough, boasted a thriving industry in woolen yarns and textiles. York, to the west, laterally about midway between Scarborough and Beverly, was the largest city in the north and the second largest city in England.
On June 22, 1381, one week after the death of Wat Tyler, royal letters patent were sent to just five towns in the north. These letters called for public mourning for the deaths of Archbishop Sudbury, Sir Robert Hales, and Chief Justice Sir John Cavendish. More important, the letters decreed that the local authorities were to permit no illegal assemblies whatsoever. Three of the five letters went to York, Scarborough, and Beverly. The royal court's fears were totally justified, but the letters arrived too late to prompt any preventive measures‑‑the riots had begun five days before they were written. By Monday, June 17, the rebels in York
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 33
had news of the revolt in London that had started just four days earlier on June 13. On that one day of June 17, 1381, the mob in York attacked the headquarters of the Dominican order, the friary of the Franciscans, St. Leonard's Hospital, and the Chapel of St. George.
A few days later, a former mayor of York named John de Gisburne appeared at Bootham Bar, one of the gates of York, with an armed party on horseback. They forced their way in and joined other rebels in the city. Most interestingly, de Gisburne's men were wearing a "livery" (a uniform item of decoration or clothing common to a group). In this case, it appears to have been a white woolen hood. Similar livery showed up in Beverly and Scarborough, where the records have left us a better description. The livery there was described as a white capuchon with a red liripipe. The capuchon was a common item of medieval clothing, a hood attached to enough cloth to cover the shoulders like a shawl. The point at the back of the hood was often drawn out to a long exaggerated taper, much as the toes of shoes were exaggerated. This long point was the liripipe, which could also end in a tasseled decoration. The livery, then, was a white hood with a red tail or tassel.
It would take about six square feet of woolen cloth to make one hooded shawl. In all three cities we are told that about fifteen hundred of these liveries were used by the rebels. That would require about one thousand square yards of white woolen cloth, plus the decorative red tails. Such material involved a great deal of cost and a great deal of work, more work than could have been executed in a few days in total secrecy. John de Gisburne had brought a supply of liveries with him from outside York to distribute to the rebels in the city, and most likely they came from Beverly, where the principal industry was the manufacture of woolen textile products. We have no idea how they got to Scarborough, where over five hundred men were reported to be wearing them. The presence of this common uniform not only speaks to preparation, but to the involvement of all three towns in some kind of common effort.
Common to all three towns, too, was the swearing of oaths of the "all for one and one for all" type used to seal a fraternal bond.
Another distinctive feature of the Yorkshire risings is the principal target of the violence. Although church property was
34 BORN IN BLOOD
attacked, the antireligious activities were a sideshow to the attacks on the ruling families, the wealthy merchants who comprised oligarchies in each town to the exclusion of the lesser merchants and craftsmen. We read in later indictments that the Scarborough leaders included William de la Marche, draper; John Cant, shoemaker; Thomas Symson, basket maker. In Beverly we find rebel leaders Thomas Whyte, tiler; and Thomas Preston, skinner. In York, Robert de Harom, mercer, was accused as one passing out "liveries of one color to various members of their confederacy."
In his very authoritative Oriental Despotism, Karl A. Wittfogel wrote: "The rise of private property and enterprise in handicraft and commerce created conditions that resulted in social conflicts, of many kinds, among urban commoners. In medieval Europe such conflicts were fought out with great vigor. Not infrequently the social movements assumed the proportions of a mass (and class) struggle which in some towns compelled the merchants to share political leadership with the artisans."
Mr. Wittfogel would have understood exactly what the rebels of York, Beverly, and Scarborough were about. And if the concept of a ruling oligarchy of certain families is a confusing one, one might shed light on it by studying the power structure of county government today in much of the American Southeast.
Although there were dozens of other incidents in England, we shall look at just one more, the revolt against the Benedictines of St. Albans, the largest landowners in Hertfordshire.
Back on June 14, the day the rebels broke into the Tower of London, men arrived at St. Albans saying that they had been commanded to collect all of the able‑bodied men of St. Albans and Barnet. These men were to arm themselves with any available weapons and follow the messengers to London, and they were quickly assembled because the abbot gave his approval as a means to divert the mob away from his own domains. As the men of St. Albans approached London, they came upon Jack Strawe and his band destroying the Hospitaller manor at Highbury. They enthusiastically joined in the fun and then followed Strawe back to London. In the City their leaders met with Wat Tyler to discuss their desire to take the rebellion home to St. Albans. He instructed them as to the manner in which they should seek their freedom from the abbey. They swore to obey his commands explicitly, and
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 35
Tyler in turn told them that if they had any trouble with the abbot, the prior, or the monks, he would march on St. Albans with twenty thousand men to "shave their beards" (cut off their heads).
The Benedictines of St. Albans had held autocratic sway over the town and the countryside for over two hundred years. They were well known for scrupulously guarding every prerogative of the abbey and for zealously collecting every fee and every service due them under the ancient manorial contracts. They could not be expected to voluntarily yield a single point of freedom from manorial obligation to town or tenants, especially under their current abbot, Thomas de la Mare.
The St. Albans mob returned from London to great rejoicing, as they spread the word that the king had freed all serfs and villeins. Messengers went out in all directions, issuing orders from the rebel leader, William Grindcobbe, that all men must arm themselves and gather the next day, Saturday, June 15. Those who refused would suffer death and the destruction of their houses.
On the Saturday, a mob of several thousand men assembled and were administered an oath to be faithful and true to their brothers‑in‑arms. Marching to the abbey, they demanded and gained entrance. Next they demanded the release of all the men being held in the church prison. In freeing the prisoners, they agreed that one was guilty and not worthy of freedom, so they took him out to the mob in front of the abbey gates, where he was beheaded.
About 9:00 A.M. a rider galloped up to the rebels. He was Richard of Wallingford, a substantial tenant farmer on abbey land. He had stayed behind in London to get a letter from the king that would reestablish ancient peasant claims relating to rights of grazing, hunting, fishing, and other freedoms.
Armed with the king's letter, written just that morning, the leaders demanded to meet with the abbott. Reading their letter, the abbott responded that the rights spoken of were very ancient and had been terminated generations ago. He shrewdly maneuvered the leaders into a negotiating posture, while outside the impatient rebels broke fences and gates, tore down walls, and generally vandalized the monastic property. They drained the fish ponds and hung a dead rabbit on a pole as a banner to proclaim
36 BORN IN BLOOD
the end of the strict game laws. Hours went by in debate, until word arrived of the death of Wat Tyler. The attitude of the rebels changed instantly, as did that of the abbot. He pressed his advantage, and with the sure knowledge that Tyler's support column would not be coming, while the royal troops most assuredly would, the rebels caved in, even agreeing to put up two hundred pounds to compensate for damaged property.
The rebels were right. The royal troops were on the way, accompanied by a new chief justice, Robert Tresilian. The new chief justice was out for blood. The announcement came that all writs issued by the king to the rebels were null and void. On June 18 royal letters went out charging all sheriffs to put down the rebels in their districts and charging all knights and nobles to assist in the effort. The government's numbness and shock having now apparently worn off, the counter‑rebel forces, far better armed for battle than their adversaries, set about the task of dispersing the rebels and arresting their leaders. Now was the time for judicial vengeance.
cHArTER 3
~V~
"WHETHER JUSTLY
OR OUT OF HATE"
TCc he time came for the King to punish the delinquents," wrote the monk Henry Knighton. "Lord Robert Tresilian, justice, [who had been appointed to replace the murdered chief justice, Sir John Cavendish] was therefore sent by the King's command to investigate and punish those who had risen against the peace. He was active everywhere, and spared no one, causing a great slaughter. And because the malefactors had attacked and put to death all the justices they could find, including John de Cavendish, and had spared the lives of none of the lawyers of the realm whom they could apprehend, so Tresilian now spared no one but repaid like for like. For whoever was accused before him on the grounds of rebellion, whether justly or out of hate, immediately suffered the sentence of death. He condemned (according to their crimes) some to beheading, some to hanging, some to drawing through the cities and then hanging in four parts of the cities and some to disembowelling, followed by the burning of their entrails before them while the victims were still alive, and then their execution and the division of their corpses into quarters to be hanged in four parts of the cities."
The priest John Ball was captured in Coventry and brought to St. Albans on July 12 to be tried before Chief Justice Tresilian. The trial took place the next day. Ball made no attempt to recant,
37
38 BORN IN BLOOD
expressed no regrets, and admitted to authorship of the letters that had gone out over his name. Tresilian drew upon the whole catalog of execution techniques and sentenced Ball to be hanged, drawn, disemboweled, beheaded, and quartered.
William Grindcobbe, the principal rebel leader at St. Albans, was released on bail with the provision that he use his influence to calm the people. He did the opposite. One speech attributed to him was, "Friends, who after so long an age of repression have at last won yourselves a short breath of freedom, hold firm while you can, and have no thought of me or what I may suffer, for if I die for the cause of the liberty we have won, I shall think myself happy to end my life as a martyr." Which is exactly what he did, as he was summarily recaptured and executed.
Men of St. Albans whose bodies had been left intact, including Grindcobbe, were taken down from the gallows and buried by their friends. A couple of weeks later an angry order came from the king's court, demanding that the bodies be dug up and hanged on public display until they rotted apart.
Off in Norwich, the rebel leader Geoffrey Litster learned of the death of Wat Tyler and the collapse of the revolt in London. In response, he decided to send a delegation to the king, requesting a charter of manumission and pardon for all Norfolk. The mission was ostensibly headed by two hostage knights, Sir William de Morley and Sir John de Brewe, but with them went three of Litster's closest followers, to make certain that the two knights followed Litster's orders. As an extra incentive for the king to look with favor upon their requests, the mission leaders took with them as a royal gift all of the money that they had collected as fines on the citizens of Norwich. On the way, near the town of Newmarket, the delegation had the great misfortune to cross the path of the warlike Lord Henry le Despenser, bishop of Norwich. The young Bishop le Despenser had been at his manor of Burleigh, near Stamford, when he got word of the uprisings in Norfolk. He decided to return to his diocese of Norwich, taking with him eight mounted knights and a small company of archers. As evidence of some military background, he wore a metal helmet, a hauberk, and a fighting sword. He recruited from the local gentry, adding to his force as he advanced. At Peterborough the rebels had demanded charters and writs of manumission and were just starting to ransack the monastery when le Despenser hit
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 39
them with a surprise attack. He ordered a number of rebels killed on the spot and the rest imprisoned. At Ramsey in Huntingdonshire, the bishop's force easily defeated a small group of rebels at the monastery. They were taken prisoner and turned over to the abbot as the bishop pressed on to Cambridge. By now his group had grown to a small army, including many experienced military men, and the Cambridge rebels were quickly brought under control. Unlike the secular reprisals by law, the bishop acted as accuser, judge, and jury. He designated the rebels to be executed and those to be imprisoned.
Leaving Cambridge, le Despenser continued toward his own diocese at Norwich. It was on that leg of his journey that he met the mission to the king that had been dispatched by the rebel leader Geoffrey Litster. The two hostage knights told him of their forced mission under the control of the three rebel leaders, two of whom were in the camp, while the third had gone off to forage for their supper. The bishop ordered the immediate beheading of the two rebel leaders present and sent a detachment to find the third. Once the three heads were mounted on the pillory in nearby Newmarket, le Despenser moved on, his army steadily increasing in size as it was joined by now‑eager recruits.
At Norwich the bishop found that Litster had flown at his approach. Le Despenser went after him and Litster's band made a stand near North Walsham. They were easily overwhelmed by the bishop's army, and among the prisoners taken was Geoffrey Litster himself. The bishop immediately ordered that he be executed by hanging, drawing, and beheading, then personally heard Litster's confession and granted absolution. The bishop then gained the accolades of his fellow ecclesiastics for his mercy and piety as he walked beside the prisoner being dragged by his feet to the gallows, holding up the rebel leader's head so that it wouldn't hit the rocks in the road. (Litster himself, in view of what was about to be done to him, might have considered it more merciful to be allowed to be knocked unconscious by the rocks.)
The rebellion in Norfolk had been put down swiftly and totally, albeit ruthlessly, by the efforts of one angry man, a service that would seem to merit the gratitude of the king's court even though the law of the land had been ignored for a few days. To the contrary, someone (because the king was still not of age) arranged that Bishop le Despenser be impeached two years later, in 1383,
40 BORN IN BLOOD
for his conduct in putting down the rebellion in Norfolk in contravention of the law.
On ~uly 16 writs went out calling for a parliament to convene on September 16, but the meeting was postponed until November 4, 1381. If the Parliament of 1376 deserves to be remembered as the "Good Parliament," the 1381 session could well be memorialized as the "I‑Told‑You‑So Parliament."
The 1376 Parliament had cited corruption in the king's court, bribery, diversion of tax monies, and inept management. The members had warned the royal council that these things must be corrected. They had impeached the London merchant and financier Richard Lyons on a variety of charges of corruption, only to have the sentence of life imprisonment set aside. All of their fears, advice, and actions had been ignored, but now the rebellion had proven their points.
It can only have been with a deep feeling of smug satisfaction that the members of the November 1381 Parliament listened to the charge given to them by the king and his council, as read to them by the speaker, Sir Hugh Seagrave:
"Our lord the King, here present, whom God save, has commanded me to make the following declaration to you. First our lord the King, desiring above all that the liberty of Holy Church should be entirely preserved without blemish, and that the estate, peace and good government of his kingdom should be maintained and preserved as best it was in the time of any of his noble progenitors, the kings of England, wills that if any default can be found anywhere, this should be amended by the advice of the prelates and lords in this parliament." (We can hear a slouched backbencher muttering under his breath, "If you'd kept your bloody ear‑holes open five years ago, you'd know the answers already.")
The parliamentary roll leaves no doubt as to where that parliament laid the blame for the revolt (the word commons refers to the common people, not to a House of Parliament that did not yet exist):
"If the government of the realm was not shortly to be amended, the very kingdom itself would be completely lost and destroyed for all time and, as a result, the lord our King and all the lords and commons, which God, in his mercy, forfend. For it is true that
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 41
there are many faults in said government, about the King's person, and in his household and because of the outrageous number of servants in the latter, as well as in the King's courts, that is to say in the Chancery, King's Bench, Common Bench and the Exchequer. And there are grievous oppressions throughout the country because of the outrageous multitude of embracers of quarrels and maintainers, who act like kings in the country, so that justice and law are scarce administered to anybody. And the poor commons are from time to time despoiled and destroyed in these ways, both by the purveyors of the said royal household and others who pay nothing to the commons for the victuals and carriage taken from them, and by the subsidies and tallages [literally, "cuts," taxes] levied upon them to their great distress, and by other grievous and outrageous oppressions done to them by various servants of our lord the King and other lords of the realm‑‑and especially by the said maintainers. For these reasons the said commons are brought to great wretchedness and misery, more than they ever were before."
Having had its say on the subjects of burdensome taxes and of corruption in the royal court and the legal system, Parliament next turned to the national defense, a major reason given for that taxation:
"One might add that although great treasure is continually granted and levied from the commons for the defense of the realm, they are nevertheless no better defended and succoured against the King's enemies, as far as they know. For, from year to year, the said enemies burn, rob and pillage by land and sea with their barges, galleys and other vessels; for which no remedy has been, nor is yet, provided. Which mischiefs the said poor commons, who once used to live in all honour and prosperity, can no longer endure in any way."
All of which, in the self‑serving opinion of Parliament, was the clear‑cut cause of the rebellion: "And to speak the truth, the said outrages as well as others which have lately been done to the poor commons, more generally than ever before, made the said poor commons feel so hardly oppressed that they caused the said mean commons to rise and commit the mischief they did in the said riot." Then a warning to the king and his council: "And greater mischiefs are to be feared if good and proper remedy is not pro
42 BORN IN BLOOD
vided in time for the above mentioned outrageous oppression andmischiefs."
Parliament had a suggested solution, of course, which reflected its principal objective over the past years: a stronger voice in the central government and greater influence on the selection of men to serve in that government:
"It suggested that the commons can be restored to quiet and peace by removing whenever they are known evil officers and counsellors and putting better and more virtuous and more sufficient ones in their place, as well as removing all the evil circumstances from which the late disturbance and the other mischiefs befell the realm, as said above. Otherwise, all men think that this realm cannot survive for long without greater mischief than has ever befallen it before, which God forbid."
This time Parliament was listened to, and changes were made in key positions. The poll tax was abandoned, and there were no more attempts to create ingenious new taxes. We can find no record of an attack on the person or property of a rank‑and‑file member of Parliament; thus it would appear that to that group, at least, the rebellion was a rip‑roaring success. It got what it had wanted. In fact, it is difficult to dismiss the temptation to conclude that the shadowy Great Society inciting and directing facets of the revolt included members of Parliament.
Its own goals furthered by the revolt, Parliament did not act to satisfy the desires of others. When asked by the king's council if it wanted to abolish villeinage and serfdom, the answer was a vehement no. The same negative response went to William Courtenay, the new archbishop of Canterbury, who asked Parliament for stronger laws for the definition and punishment of heresy.
What the Parliament did do for the rebels in general was to recommend amnesty for all, except for those on a special list and the citizens of the towns of Canterbury, Bury St. Edmunds, Bridgewater, Cambridge, Beverly, and Scarborough. This exclusion of towns was soon reduced to Bury St. Edmunds alone, whose citizens took five years to pay the fine of two thousand marks levied against them. As to individuals, there was a general exclusion from amnesty of those directly involved in the deaths of the archbishop of Canterbury, the prior of the Hospitallers, and Chief Justice Cavendish. A more interesting exclusion was of
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 43
all those who had escaped from prison, none of whom is recorded as being recaptured. The list of names of specific rebels not included in the general pardon totaled 287, of whom 151 were citizens of London. Those not already in prison simply disappeared.
The general amnesty put a stop to the judicial vengeance, so that even with the "bloody assizes" of Chief Justice Tresilian, fewer than 120 rebels were actually executed‑‑fewer than those beheaded by the rebels in London alone on a single day. Except for a few rebels who were summarily executed by avenging swords, such as that of Bishop le Despenser, all were accorded some sort of trial and defense.
Rebel leaders taken now, or already in prison, did not automatically go to the block or the gallows if they had friends to intercede for them. Litster's chief deputy, Sir Roger Bacon, was on the list of those excluded from amnesty but won a pardon, some say at the request of Richard's future queen, Anne of Bohemia. Thomas Sampson, rebel leader at Ipswich, was held in prison for eighteen months, then pardoned. The Somerset leader, Thomas Engilby, was taken and put in chains, only to be pardoned a few months later. Thomas Farndon, whose guilt was unquestioned, had acted as a leader and guide to the rebels in London and had directed them out to the Hospitaller manor at Highbury. Although on the list, Farndon was pardoned in March 1382.
One of the most interesting cases was that of John Awedyn of Essex. He was indicted and found guilty of being "one of the rebels against the lord King in the City of London" and "a captain of the said rebellious malefactors." He, too, was on the list of those excluded from the general amnesty, but on March 16, 1383, he received a full pardon from the king at the request of the earl of Oxford. How much it would help our understanding of the rebellion and the organization behind it if someone had recorded just a bit about who was pressing the buttons of influence, and why.
While Parliament was in session, inquiries and inquisitions were going forward simultaneously. The London sheriffs' inquisitions of November 4 and November 20, 1381, speak strongly to the point of view that the rebels didn't march on London in some sort of instinctive lemming‑march to the capital but were incited, encouraged, and invited to come by residents of London. The records of the inquisition of November 4 state: "Item, the jurors
44 BORN IN BLOOD
declare under their oath that a certain Adam atte Welle, then a butcher . . . and now a provider of victuals to the lord duke of Lancaster, travelled into Essex fourteen days before the arrival of the rebels from that county in the city of London: there Adam incited and encouraged the rebels of Essex to come to London, and promised them many things if they did so."
The same inquisitions make charges against a London alderman, John Horn, fishmonger. Horn was one of a three‑man delegation sent out by the mayor of London to meet with the leaders of the Kentish rebels, both to ascertain their strength and to try to dissuade them from approaching the city. Horn did the opposite. He met privately with the Kentish leaders, apparently to advise them to come ahead. It was after this meeting that the Kentish rebels moved to Southwark at the south end of London Bridge and broke open the Marshalsea prison. Horn also gave the rebels a royal standard he had taken from the guildhall. Somehow he got three of the rebel leaders into London in advance of the mob and entertained them all night in his house, presumably to discuss plans and objectives for the next few days.
Another London alderman and fishmonger, Walter Sybyle, was indicted as Horn's co‑conspirator. Sybyle's ward included London Bridge. He was accused of countermanding the mayor's orders to close the gates and raise the drawbridge, as well as dispersing a crowd that had gathered at the north end of the bridge to prevent the rebels from crossing into the city.
A third alderman, William Tonge, was accused of opening the gate at Aldgate to permit the entry of the Essex rebels. In the indictment, the jurors do admit that they "do not at present know whether William Tonge had Aldgate opened because of his own malice, because he was in league with John Horn and Walter Sybyle, or because he was frightened by the threats of the malefactors of Kent who were already in the city."
Historians have warned us that we should be skeptical of the London inquisitions because they may have been politically motivated. That is a sensible precaution, because every chronicle of the rebellion was politically motivated, if only to the extent of currying favor with the king or the church. The rebels had no diarist or historian to memorialize their side of the story.
Other aspects of the inquisitions, however‑‑not involving highly placed persons like aldermen, and so perhaps less prone to
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 45
political distortion‑‑are equally revealing. Some indictments speak of craftsmen of London going back from London to the towns of their birth to incite their friends and relatives to rebellion. Other men were accused of, and confessed to, being agents or messengers of a Great Society and giving orders in the name of that society. Unfortunately, there is no recorded indication that the inquisitioners, sheriffs, or justices expressed any desire for additional information about this Great Society, which has led some historians to conclude that such a society never existed. Many more historians assert that there certainly was organization behind the rebellion of 1381, but conclude that we shall probably never know the nature of that organization. There are just too many unsolved mysteries. A closer look at some of those mysteries, however, led to the conclusion that the organization behind the rebellion need not remain a total mystery forever.
CHArTER 4
~V~
"FIRST, AND ABOVE
ALL . . . THE
DESTRUCTION
OF THE
HOSPITALLERS"
The first distortion to be dealt with is the role attributed by the chroniclers to King Richard II. When his father, the legendary Black Prince, died in 1376, Richard was declared heir to the throne by his grandfather, Edward III. The following year Edward died, and England had a ten‑year‑old king. A council of two bishops, two earls, two barons, two bannerets, two knights bachelor, and a civil lawyer was appointed to govern the country and to govern the boy king. So long as Richard remained a minor, a new council was to be elected each year. No mention of this allpowerful council is made in any of the accounts of the rebellion of 1381. Instead, the young king himself is made to appear as the major and unilateral force acting for the royal government. None of this rings true, not only because Richard had no royal authority of his own, but also because he just wasn't the Victorian‑storiesfor‑boys hero that we are asked to accept.
46
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 47
A contemporary chronicler, remembered only as the monk of Evesham, has left us a description of Richard that includes the words ". . . arrogant . . . rapacious . . . timid and unsuccessful in Foreign war . . . remaining sometimes till morning in drinking and other excesses that are not to be named" and, perhaps most important to our evaluation, "abrupt and stammering in his speech." Richard was so afraid of the council of regents that not until he was twenty‑three years old did he muster up the necessary spirit to make the simple assertion that, as he had long since come of age, he should rule as king. This is the man we are asked to believe acted with such astonishing courage and charisma at age fourteen. We are told that he cantered up to the rebel mob that had just seen its leader struck down and with a clear voice took control of the situation by volunteering to be the rebels' chief and champion. He gave the orders to arrange the meeting at Mile End to get the rebels out of London. He personally commanded the army of retribution in Essex. He decided to pardon the rebels. The ruling council apparently played no role, exercised no authority, made no decisions.
Not likely. What has been saved for us as "history" is the chronicle of events by writers opposed to the rebels, writers whose careers would be enhanced (or at least secured) by currying favor with the monarchy. Anyone actually working behind the scenes would have been pleased to let the boy have the credit.
Behind the scenes? Consider the meeting at Mile End. Was it really set up to get the rebels out of London? If so, it didn't succeed, because a substantial organized band stayed in the City, as did the principal leaders Tyler, Ball, and Strawe. They had something to do that was obviously more important to them than a meeting with the king to discuss grievances. They stayed away from that meeting to take the Tower. It is entirely reasonable to speculate that the meeting at Mile End was arranged not to get the rebels out of the City, but to get the king out of the Tower. A key to the arrangements was to have the archbishop of Canterbury and the prior of the Hospitallers not go with the king, but stay behind in what they would have believed was total security. Somehow they were influenced to decline to go, or were ordered to stay. The archbishop may have been relieved of his duties as chancellor, because he had been allowed to attempt his escape by river that morning, but what of Sir Robert Hales?
48 BORN IN BLOOD
He was not just the chief administrator of a military monastic order, but a famous battlefield leader and personal fighter. In 1365, as bailiff of Egle, he had led a Hospitaller force in a great Crusader battle at which he became known as "the hero of Alexandria" for his feats of valor in a great victory that left twenty thousand Moslems dead. Sir Robert was the most experienced fighting man in the king's entourage. He should not only have been part of the king's bodyguard, he should have commanded it. So why did he let his youthful king ride out to meet thousands of bloodthirsty rebels, choosing rather to stay safely behind the massive walls of the Tower? It all smacks of stagecraft, and at the highest levels.
If that conclusion appears too speculative, consider Tyler's entrance into the Tower. A few hundred men could have held the Tower for weeks, even months, against a mob with no missilethrowers or siege engines, especially if those few hundred were led by an experienced military man like Hales. Tyler knew that he didn't have time to build a siege tower or a "cat" housing a battering ram. There was a much easier way: make arrangements guaranteeing that the drawbridge would be down and the portcullis up. Have control of the gates so that the rebels could walk right in. No chronicler tells us of any fight at the gate, or of resistance of any kind. No one has even tried to speculate as to how such a remarkable feat of arms could be.
There is also the mystery of why Tyler wanted to take the Tower in the first place. In any ordinary revolt, the seizure of the most powerful fortress in the area would have been the high point, militarily. The leader would have immediately made it his headquarters, his base of operations from which he could threaten all the surrounding area. That was clearly not Tyler's objective. When the executions were over, he had no more use for the place. As he left, he told the garrison that they could now close the gates and raise the drawbridge. The objective was not the Tower, but the deaths of a few men in it.
When the meeting was over at Mile End, the king did not come back to the Tower but was escorted to the building that housed his wardrobe (his personal staff, not his clothing). It was a substantial building but not a fortress. Richard had been neatly removed from the firing line to assure his personal safety. In fact, since his counselors ruled him, and not the other way round, Richard's itin
50 BORN IN BLOOD
White, tiler, and Henry de Newark, late chamberlain were not tobe found within the liberty of Beverly after the receipt of this writ: on account of which we cannot execute the intentions of this writ in the said matters." They were gone, but to where? Was each of these hundreds of fugitives completely on his own, or was there help available to him? An intriguing aspect of this mass disappearance is that it was not unlike the mass disappearance of the Knights Templar seventy years before. Both were groups already condemned, wanted by church as well as by lay authorities, and in immediate need of clandestine sources of food, lodging, new identities, and safe houses. It would be remarkable indeed if unassisted they found dozens of separate, unrelated pockets of safe help, among men willing to risk life and limb (literally) to provide for them. On the other hand, if there was a Great Society of men sworn to mutual support, one of its functions would have been to provide all the help required to brothers on the run or in hiding. The fact is that there is no record that any one of the condemned men was ever captured, so it is reasonable to assume that protection was available to them from someone, somewhere, somehow.
While all this was happening, the church seemed to turn its back on the whole concept of the rebellion, as though to pretend that it hadn't happened. The new archbishop of Canterbury, William Courtenay, did not go after the rebels. He went instead for the Oxford don and priest John Wycliffe and his followers. Courtenay did not ask Parliament for stronger efforts to find and punish the rebel leaders who had vandalized church property and murdered his predecessor. What he did demand was stronger laws to seek out and punish heresy. Recent historians have postulated that John Wycliffe and his criticisms of the church had little to do with the outbreak of the rebellion. Archbishop Courtenay would have disagreed with them. Harassed to the end by the church he wanted to purify through the elimination of nonscriptural sacraments and doctrine, John Wycliffe died in 1382. His ideas, however, lived on, so that at the Council of Constance, thirty‑five years after his death, it was ordered that Wycliffe's remains be dug up and burned for heresy.
We have already seen the effects of the agitation and leadership provided the rebels by the lower orders of the clergy, especially parish priests like John Ball, John Wrawe, and their followers, as they moved against wealthy monasteries and church‑approved
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 51
serfdom. What Archbishop Courtenay may have seen or sensed was that something much bigger than a riot of rustics and tradesmen had happened in England. It was not the throne of England that concerned him, but the Throne of Peter, and that throne had felt the first tremor of an antichurch attitude that would smolder underground in England until it erupted as the Protestant Reformation.
The overriding mystery of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, of course, is the organization that lay behind it. Most historians now agree that there was indeed organization and planning over a wide area of England, but none has cared to speculate on just what the source of that organization could have been. Was it marshaled just for the rebellion, or had it existed for some time before 1381? Did it stop at the end of the rebellion, or was there some residual or ongoing association that might have had a bearing on religious and political disturbances in Britain over the years ahead? Was it one organization or simply an informal once‑in‑alifetime communication among hastily assembled groups?
Consider this item from a royal letter of July 23, 1381, to the sheriffs and bailiffs of an administrative unit of the county of Cheshire called "the hundred of Wirral," over 150 miles from London: "From the evidence of trustworthy men we have learnt that several of the villeins of our beloved in Christ the abbot of Chester have made certain assemblies within the area of your jurisdiction; and they have gathered in secret confederacies within the woods and other hidden places in the said hundred. They have held secret counsels there contrary to our recent proclamation on the subject." Even in such a relatively remote local area such "secret confederacies" would require planning. Someone has to select a meeting place. Word must go out, in total secrecy, notifying those attending of time and place of the meeting. Screening must be carried out to determine who may be trusted, because anyone attending could inform on the whole group: Each man is trusting the others with his life and property. Care must be taken for the participants to approach the meeting by various routes to avoid suspicion. Cover stories must be invented to be employed by families and neighbors in the event that suspicion is aroused by a number of absences at one time. Sentries or guards must be posted to alert the group to the approach not only of authorities but of anyone who might subse
52 BORN IN BLOOD
quently yield to the innocent temptation to tell others of the oddcircumstance of coming upon an assembly of men in the deep woods. Someone must set the agenda for the meeting and decide~ alone or with one or two other leaders, that the matter at hand is important enough to run the risk of a meeting.
It is obvious that to organize and operate a secret society in just one section of a remote rural area would require organization, planning, and discipline. Now expand those requirements to a national or regional level and one can begin to appreciate the vast amount of planning and ingenuity necessary to implement even a working system of communication. Who initiates the communication? Who delivers it? If all delivery was made on foot it would take forever. On the other hand, if on horseback, we are not looking at a "peasant" society.
Another problem with messengers is recognition. How does one know that a messenger is not a spy? The usual method is with body signals, items of clothing or decoration, and catechism. "Have you traveled far?" "Not as far as I must, but far enough for one day." "A long journey brings a fierce hunger." "Yes, and of more than one kind. My stomach hungers for food, but my tired bones hunger for a soft bed." In the Chinese secret societies, such a catechism of identification might, in certain dangerous circumstances, wind its way through fifty different questions and answers. Signals can pass by how the hands are used to hold a cup or how the fingers are held when a kerchief is used to wipe one's brow. (As we shall see later, Scotland's heroic Sir William Wallace was identified for arrest by an informer's reversing a loaf of hread on the tavern table.) The important point about all such means of identification and communication is that they must be understood by both parties. To have them known in a number of~ geographic locations takes something far more complex: It takes standardization, which in turn requires an autocratic leadership to dictate the standards or, in the case of a more democratic form, a meeting of the minds of a group of leaders, a ruling body empowered to set standards of passwords, signals, recognition, and so on. Especially is this true if a member is frequently expected to meet and help, or meet and obey, a total stranger. Practicalities point to the probablity of a ruling council or committee, which in the case of the Great Society seems most certainly to have been based in London.
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 53
Does this mean that the society had widespread individual membership with just one chapter or base in London? That's hardly likely, in view of those times of very difficult travel. Its contacts in the towns would more likely have been cells or chapters made up of residents of those towns. Even more important, those contacts or members would have to have included persons of some influence in their respective areas. To have a mass rebellion and to be able to order all those within thirty‑six miles of the sea to remain at home meant more than mere organization: It meant orders given by people who expected to be obeyed. In a time of miserable communications, the march on London took advance planning, leadership, and a superior clandestine system of message generation, both to set a day to move and then to actually motivate one hundred thousand men to rise in contravention of the law. That kind of action would have required what cultural anthropologists call a "war dance" phase. That's the time and energy needed to coordinate and spread the information (or disinformation) and propaganda necessary to work a group into a frenzy‑‑to get a large group into the mood to act, even to kill. In our time the "war dance" that marshals a people to start a revolution, or to back a national war effort, is a fast multimedia exercise drawing on newspapers, radio, television, and public‑relations consultants. In the fourteenth century none of those things existed: Virturally all communication was local and, in an illiterate society, by word of mouth. The pulpit was one source of group communication, and certainly the disgruntled lower orders of the clergy, including John Ball and his followers, did their part to stir unrest in the three medieval gathering places: the church, the tavern, and the market.
All this is not to say that the Great Society "created" the Peasants' Rebellion. The Great Society, whatever it was, did not bring on the Black Death. It could not have been responsible for the attitude of the church toward the freedom of the people on its lands, nor for the war that brought the need for extra taxation. Revolutionary leaders rarely create the ills that cause revolution; rather, they opportunistically use them, articulating the issues for the distressed people (and not always accurately), focusing blame, painting pictures of the better life possible, stirring the pot to the boiling point. Their hope is to turn distress and frustration into anger, to turn anger into action, then to provide the plans and
54 BORN IN BLOOD
leadership to divert and direct that angry action, with a view to taking ultimate control. We have seen this pattern used effectively and often in recent history. Unfortunately, Wat Tyler was cut down before his demands were made clear, so we may never be able to clearly pinpoint the goals of the Great Society, or its true leadership.
Before moving on, one point should be made for the sake of clarity. There is no indication that there was ever an organization called the Great Society. It was simply referred to as a great society, and no one has ever put a name to it. However, it is extremely difficult to discuss or even think about a group with no label. We've seen that in our own time as the press finally realized that the Italianate branch of organized crime in America, which includes more than a fair share of Calabrians and Neapolitans, could not truthfully be called "Mafia" becausc the Mafia is a purely Sicilian phenomenon. For a while they tried "the Syndicate" and even "the Combination," but those terms didn't work. Then a wiretap picked up a conversation in Italian that referred to the criminal society as "our thing" (in Italian, la cosa nostra). The press pounced on a term that would finally fill the label vacuum, and they still won't let go. Of course, they keep the term in Italian, because it would look a bit sil]y to report that "the FBI has just arrested Angelo Pigliacelli of Jersey City, a reputed boss of Our Thing." Similarly, we are required by both convenience and necessity to use the term "Great Society," knowing that it did not bear that name, until someone tells us what the real name was.
In searching for the true nature of the Great Society, there was not much to go on. There is no of ficial record of any secret society in medieval England, with the exception of the Lollards, the adherents to the teachings of the heresiarch priest John Wycliffe, who expounded his criticisms of the church both before and after the rebellion. John Ball was said by some to be a follower of Wycliffe, but Ball's preaching predated Lollard activity. However, in a published confession of John Ball the statement is made that there was a "secret fraternity" of the followers of Wycliffe traveling throughout England, spreading his beliefs. Historians agree that this "confession" is a later product and not the scaffold confession of Ball. It is interesting, however, in that Lollardy indeed was subsequently driven underground and did exist for a couple
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 55
of centuries in secret cells all over England, which have never clearly been identified or described.
There has been another well‑known secret society in Britain, the Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Masons. However, no documentation exists to suggest that Freemasonry was active at the time of the rebellion (as none exists to indicate that it wasn't). The Masonic writers who began extolling the virtues of their fraternity after it came out of the world of secrecy into public view in 1717 frequently took jet flights into fantasy land. They variously claimed as Masonic members and Grand Masters such noteworthies as Adam, Noah, Pythagoras, Achilles, and Julius Caesar, claiming existence from "time immemorial." More sober heads backed off the Creation and the Flood and asserted that King Solomon had actually been the first Masonic Grand Master and his Temple the first Masonic edifice. In the mellowing of time Masonic historians tended to bring their founding forward, to cite their beginnings in medieval guilds of stonemasons, c~urrently the most widely accepted theory of the origins of the Fraternity.
The first indication that Freemasonry might have been related to the rebellion was the name of the leader, Walter the Tyler. He exploded into English history with his mysterious uncontested appointment as the supreme commander of the Peasants' Rebellion on Friday, June 7, 1381, and left it as abruptly when his head was struck off eight days later on Saturday, June 15. Absolutely nothing is known of him before those eight days. That alone suggests that he was not using his real name. Historians have suggested that his name probably indicates that he was a roof tiler by trade, which, based on his obvious military experience and leadership abilities, is not very probable. But if he had indeed adopted a pseudonym, why would he call himself a "Tyler"? Freemasons reading this will already see the point. The Tyler is the sentry, sergeant‑at‑arms, and enforcer of the Masonic lodge. He screens visitors for credentials, secures the meeting place, and then stands guard outside the door with a drawn sword in his hancl. If the Great Society was in any way connected with Freemasonry, "Tyler" would have been the only proper Masonic title for the military leader who would wield a sword and enforce discipline. It was, admittedly, a tenuous connection.
Another possible but equally tenuous Masonic connection was
56 I~ORN IN BLOOD
the highly organized liveried risings in Yorkshire, especially in the city of York. When four London Masonic lodges decided to go public in 1717, they met on June 24, the day dedicated to their patron saint, John the Baptist, and elected a Grand Master for their new Grand Lodge. The Masons at York were incensed at this unilateral decision on the part of London Masons to throw off their ancient veil of secrecy and at the Londoners' presumption that they could set themselves above all the Masonic lodges in England. The lodge at York considered itself to be the oldest lodge in the country, dating back to the seventh century and the building of York Cathedral. In 1725, the York lodge decided to assert itself and formed its own "Grand Lodge of All England." Much later, in 1767, the York Grand Secretary wrote that "this Lodge acknowledges no Superior, that it pays homage to none, that it exists in its Own Right, that it grants Constitutions, and Certificates in the same Manner, as is done by the Grand Lodge in London, and as it has from Time Immemorial had a Right and use to do."
York occupies a very special place in Freemasonry, especially in the United States, where many Masons believe that York Masonry is the purest and most ancient form of Masonry.
Another cloudy Masonic relationship found in the rebellion was the rage to be free, to end all serfdom and villeinage. One of the ancient Landmarks of Freemasonry is that a Mason must be a "free man born of a free mother." If a lawyer proved that a free man who was a Mason was no longer free that man might have had to relinquish his Masonic membership. It was noted with interest that by the late fifteenth century virtually every man in England was free. The existence of free status as a requirement for Masonic membership indicated that Freemasonry was already an ancient organization when it revealed itself in 1717. As interesting as all this was, however, it did not present any strong evidence that the Great Society was Freemasonry or a precursor of it. More direct and dramatic evidence lay in another direction, with an organization well documented as having existed before the Peasants' Rebellion, but believed to have completely passed away.
The first glimmer of that evidence was the especially vicious rebel attacks on the Knights Hospitallers, including the murder of their prior, Sir Robert Hales. Consider the case of George de Don
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 55
of centuries in secret cells all over England, which have neverclearly been identified or described.
There has been another well‑known secret society in Britain, the Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Masons. However, no documentation exists to suggest that Freemasonry was active at the time of the rebellion (as none exists to indicate that it wasn't). The Masonic writers who began extolling the virtues of their fraternity after it came out of the world of secrecy into public view in 1717 frequently took jet flights into fantasy land. They variously claimed as Masonic members and Grand Masters such noteworthies as Adam, Noah, Pythagoras, Achilles, and Julius Caesar, claiming existence from "time immemorial." More sober heads backed off the Creation and the Flood and asserted that King Solomon had actually been the first Masonic Grand Master and his Temple the first Masonic edifice. In the mellowing of time Masonic historians tended to bring their founding forward, to cite their beginnings in medieval guilds of stonemasons, currently the most widely accepted theory of the origins of the fraternity.
The first indication that Freemasonry might have been related to the rebellion was the name of the leader, Walter the Tyler. He exploded into English history with his mysterious uncontested appointment as the supreme commander of the Peasants' Rebellion on Friday, June 7, 1381, and left it as abruptly when his head was struck off eight days later on Saturday, June 15. Absolutely nothing is known of him before those eight days. That alone suggests that he was not using his real name. Historians have suggested that his name probably indicates that he was a roof tiler by trade, which, based on his obvious military experience and leadership abilities, is not very probable. But if he had indeed adopted a pseudonym, why would he call himself a "Tyler"? Freemasons reading this will already see the point. The Tyler is the sentry, sergeant‑at‑arms, and enforcer of the Masonic lodge. He screens visitors for credentials, secures the meeting place, and then stands guard outside the door with a drawn sword in his hand. If the Great Society was in any way connected with Freemasonry, "Tyler" would have been the only proper Masonic title for the military leader who would wield a sword and enforce discipline. It was, admittedly, a tenuous connection.
Another possible but equally tenuous Masonic connection was
56 I~ORN IN BLOOD
the highly organized liveried risings in Yorkshire, especially in the city of York. When four London Masonic lodges decided to go public in 1717, they met on June 24, the day dedicated to their patron saint, John the Baptist, and elected a Grand Master for their new Grand Lodge. The Masons at York were incensed at this unilateral decision on the part of London Masons to throw off their ancient veil of secrecy and at the Londoners' presumption that they could set themselves above all the Masonic lodges in England. The lodge at York considered itself to be the oldest lodge in the country, dating back to the seventh century and the building of York Cathedral. In 1725, the York lodge decided to assert itself and formed its own "Grand Lodge of All England." Much later, in 1767, the York Grand Secretary wrote that "this Lodge acknowledges no Superior, that it pays homage to none, that it exists in its Own Right, that it grants Constitutions, and Certificates in the same Manner, as is done by the Grand Lodge in London, and as it has from Time Immemorial had a Right and use to do."
York occupies a very special place in Freemasonry, especially in the United States, where many Masons believe that York Masonry is the purest and most ancient form of Masonry.
Another cloudy Masonic relationship found in the rebellion was the rage to be free, to end all serfdom and villeinage. One of the ancient Landmarks of Freemasonry is that a Mason must be a "free man born of a free mother." If a lawyer proved that a free man who was a Mason was no longer free that man might have had to relinquish his Masonic membership. It was noted with interest that by the late fifteenth century virtually every man in England was free. The existence of free status as a requirement for Masonic membership indicated that Freemasonry was already an ancient organization when it revealed itself in 1717. As interesting as all this was, however, it did not present any strong evidence that the Great Society was Freemasonry or a precursor of it. More direct and dramatic evidence lay in another direction, with an organization well documented as having existed before the Peasants' Rebellion, but believed to have completely passed away.
The first glimmer of that evidence was the especially vicious rebel attacks on the Knights Hospitallers, including the murder of their prior, Sir Robert Hales. Consider the case of George de Don
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 57
nesby (Dunsby) from Lincolnshire. He was arrested over two hundred miles from home, and confessed to being a messenger of the Great Society. Is it simply coincidence that at his hometown of Dunsby, back in Lincolnshire, the tenants went on strike and refused to pay their tithes to the local Hospitaller manors? Or take the case of the destruction of the recently rebuilt Hospitaller manor at Highbury. Right in the middle of dramatic events in London, in the midst of all of the church property they could ever hope to wreak vengeance upon, Wat Tyler chose to send his principal lieutenant and a band of rebels on a mission outside the city. They had to walk six miles just to deliberately destroy that one Hospitaller property at Highbury, then march back to rejoin Tyler. At Cambridge, officials of the city, with the approval of the mayor, rode out to join a rebel band at Shingay, a Hospitaller manor that they were burning, and then all went back to Cambridge together to attack the University. Why should the city rrlen ride ten miles out into the countryside to watch rebels burn a Hospitaller manor? Why didn't they just wait for the rebels at home? Or did they meet by arrangement to plan their unified attack, in circumstances under which a meeting concurrent with the destruction of a Hospitaller property would be of some significance to them?
All of the religious orders owned properties in London, but only the Hospitaller property was deliberately sought out for destruction, and not just the major establishments at St. John's Clerkenwell, and the "Temple" area between Fleet Street and the Thames. The chroniclers state that the rebels sought out every Hospitaller house and rental property to smash or burn it. For that purpose native Londoners had to have been involved, not just to identify such property but to lead the rebels to it; at that time London streets were not marked by sign posts, and not until hundreds of years later would London have a system of nurnbered buildings. The rebels even smashed two forges in Fleet Street that the Hospitallers had taken over from the suppressed Templars. Perhaps indicating the intensity of the bond between the rebel leadership and leading citizens of London, records indicate that twenty years later the Hospitaller order was still trying unsuccessfully to rebuild those two forges in the face of opposition from certain citizens of London.
In all of the destruction in London, why did the rebels not burn
58 BORN IN BLOOD
the records stored in the Hospitaller church off Fleet Street right where they found them? Why go to all the trouble of carrying boxes and bundles out of the church to the high road, away from the building, unless it was to avoid the risk of damage to the structure? How was this church different from any other property? Only in that it had been the principal church in Britain of the Knights Templar, consecrated almost three hundred years earlier, in 1185, by Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem. The manner of its consecration alone didn't set it apart, however, because the patriarch had also consecrated the Hospitaller church at Clerkenwell in 1185, during the same month that he had dedicatecl the Templar church; yet no consideration was given by the rebc ls to protecting the church at Clerkenwell.
The highly organized rebels at York, Scarborough, and Beverly, who were townsmen, not "peasants," had displayed a common livery. This was a white hooded shawl with a red decoration, reportedly worn by about five hundred men at Beverly alone. Certainly these were not run off the night before on the neighborhood Singer; their existence bespeaks formal, organized leadership and decision making, not to mention the availability of funds. It may be pure coincidence that red and white were also the Templar colors: a red cross on a white mantle.
Most haunting of all was a single sentence from the deathbed confession of Wat Tyler's principal lieutenant, Jack Strawe. According to the account of Thomas Walsingham, a monk of St. Albans, Strawe was captured and taken to London, where he was sentenced to death by the mayor. Before the sentence was carried out, the mayor promised Strawe a Christian burial and three years of masses to be said for his soul if Strawe would confess the true purpose of the rebellion. In that confession, it is reported that Strawe said, in part, "When we had assembled an enormous crowd of common people throughout the country, we would suddenly have murdered all those lords who could have opposed or resisted us. First, and above all, we would have proceeded to the destruction of the HospitalleTs." (Emphasis added.) Strawe did not explain this special hatred for the Hospitallers, and there is no record that anyone ever asked. If there was an organization stirring up rebellion, at least one purpose was made clear, "the destruction of the Hospitallers." What organization, or even what segment
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 59
of society, could have sought such total annihilation of that highly respected order of military monks? There was only one.
The Knights Templar had been officially abolished by Pope Clement V in 1312, after the knights had suffered almost iFive years of imprisonment, torture, and death at the stake. Almost all of their property in Britain had been given to their great rivals, the Knights Hospitaller. The Templars certainly had reason to hate both the Holy See and the Hospitaller order. They would have completely approved the destruction of the Hospitaller property, would have approved the execution of Sir Robert Hales, grand prior of the Hospitallers in England, and would have approved as well the sparing of their own central church. As to the Holy See, which had whipped and racked and burned their brothers, they would probably have agreed with the rebels as they ignored the rights of sanctuary, brushed aside the Holy Sacrament, and cut the head off the archbishop of Canterbury.
One notable exception to the apparent concentration on the properties of the Hospitallers was the especially vicious attack on the Benedictine monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, led by the rebel priest John Wrawe. Here the head of Chief Justice Cavendish was taken to be played with as a puppet with the head of the prior, John de Cambridge. Those two were joined by the head of another monk, John de Lakenheath, who had been in charge of the monastery's properties. The rebels also searched for another monk, Walter Todington, hoping to put his head with the others, but couldn't discover his hiding place.
As the general amnesty was ultimately defined, it excluded only the citizens of Bury St. Edmunds, because of the particuLIrly bloody events there. At first there appears to be no connection between those events and any possible secret society. There seems to be no possible connection with the Templars, either, until the chronicles of the abbey are consulted. They document a firm base for violent Templar anger, quite apart from any reference to the Hospitallers.
A translation of the original chronicle, with its accusations against the Templars, is provided by Antonia Gransden, who edited The Chronicle of Bury St. Edmunds 1212‑1301. The words speak well enough for themselves: "On the vigil and on the day of Palm Sunday the Christians and the infidels met in battle
60 BORN IN BLOOD
between Acre and Safed. First eight emirs and eighteen columns of infidels were killed, then eventually the infidels were victorious, but not without very great loss of men. The ChTistian army was very nearly wiped out by the sedition of the Templars. " (Emphasis added.)
This report, written in 1270, was based on the attack of the Egyptian army on the Templar castle of Safed four years before. The new sultan was a brutal and treacherous Kipchak warrior named Baibars Rukd ad‑Din, who had taken the throne by murdering the former sultan. When his attacks on the castle failed, he offered free escape and pardon for all Turcopoles, the native‑born troops who comprised the major part of the garrison, and they began to desert in numbers. Stripped of their support, the Templars sent one of their Syrian‑born sergeants, Brother Leo, to negotiate with Baibars. Leo returned with the good news that all of the Templars were free to leave, with a guarantee of safeconduct through the Egyptian lines. The Templars had not yet learned the character of their enemy, and accepted.
As soon as Baibars had taken control of the castle and the Templars, he gave them that night to decide whether they would choose conversion to the Islamic faith, or death. In the morning they were lined up outside the castle gate to announce their decisions. Before they could speak, the Templar commander of the castle called out to them to choose death rather than abandon their Christian faith. He was promptly seized, stripped, and skinned alive in front of his brother Templars. Unshaken by the screaming and the blood of their leader, the Templars to a man chose death rather than give up the cross. They got their choice, as Baibars ordered their immediate beheadings.
That is the story of the loss of the castle of Safed and the martyrdom of the Templars as it actually occurred, and as it must have been recounted to every new Templar as an example of the piety and sacrifice of his predecessors. Somehow the story was turned and twisted by the time it was accepted and recorded by the Benedictines at Bury St. Edmunds. Accusing the martyred brothers of Safed of treason would have boiled the blood of any Templar who learned of it. Nor was it the only accusation against the Templars in the chronicles of Bury St. Edmunds.
The other anti‑Templar item in the chronicles appears to be not so much an accusation as a final judgment: "Hugh of
THE KNlGHTS TEMrLAR 61
Lusignan, King of Cyprus, his son and others of his household were killed by poison by the knights of the Temple."
There is no doubt that for the greater part of his reign, Hugh III of Cyprus was at odds with the Templars, seizing their property and at one point even accusing them of arranging a Moslem raid on his troops. Hugh wanted to establish supremacy over the mainland by asserting his controversial claim to the kingdom of Jerusalem, and it was public knowledge that the Templars were opposed to his ambitions. However, there is no historical basis for the accusation that they poisoned King Hugh and his sons. Hugh died on March 4, 1284, and his eldest son, Bohemond, had died the previous November. His frail second son, John, inherited his crown and, upon John's death, the crown passed to Hugh's third son, Henry. But back in England, at the Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, the scribes wrote that the Templars were guilty of the mass murder of the king, his heir, and members of his household.
There was indeed a Templar connection, and should there have been an unleashing of Templar vengeance under cover of the Pcasants' Revolt, Bury St. Edmunds would have been a primary target.
If the leadership and its "bending" of the angry mob in the direction of certain goals was inspired by a desire for Templar revenge7 the rebellion may not have been the failure that history has labeled it. Certainly, if the goal was to wreak vengeance on the three great enemies of the Templars‑‑the Hospitallers, the church, and the monarchy‑‑a degree of success is obvious. Yet as Templar‑oriented as the rebel targets might appear, it just did not seem practical that the Great Society that steered parts of the rebellion could be based on an order abolished sixty‑nine years earlier. A Knight Templar twenty‑one years old at the time of the supression would have been ninety years old at the time of the rebelliom The Templar connection would have to have reached down into the second and third generation. A Templar connection would mean that the Great Society was not just an underground group organized to foment or cash in on this rebellion of 1381, but rather was a secret society that had been in existence for almost seventy years. Was such a thing possible?
It was apparent that some kind of loose organization or group of sympathizers must have been working for the Templars at the
62 BORN IN BLOOD
time of their arrest in England by Edward II because so many had escaped arrest and had disappeared so effectively. A royal dragnet assisted by the religious orders had turned up just two fugitive Templars in England and one in Scotland. In addition, a number of them escaped from their imprisonment, which undoubtedly had required help from inside or outside, or both. Then, too, the arrests in England had come three months after the arrests in France, providing ample time to make preparations. Some kind of loose mutual assistance organization might have been hastily thrown together at the time, but for it to have stayed alive and functioning for seventy years would have required that the usefulness, or need, for that underground mutual protection society extend beyond the life span of the original fugitive members. There would have had to be a common goal, a common fear, or a common enemy to motivate such longevity. If indeed the Great Society had Templar origins, perhaps clues to that common bond could be found in the organized activities associated with the Peasants' Rebellion. To seriously pursue the prospect of a Templar connection, it would be necessary to take a fresh look at the history and workings of this militant order of monks that had been born in the First Crusade.
This meant turning away from any further speculation of the involvement of Freemasonry but, as it turned out, not for long.
CHArTER 5
~V~
THE KNIGHTS OF
THE TEMrLE
After a year of battling their way south through Nicaea and Antioch, the Christian warriors of the First Crusade found themselves before the great walls of Jerusalem on June 7, 1099.
Upon the approach of the Crusaders, the Egyptian governor of Jerusalem destroyed or poisoned the water wells around the city and drove away the flocks surplus to his own needs. All of the Christians in the city were told to leave, not just as an act of mercy but to place the additional burden of their needs for food and water on the invaders. One of the ejected Christians was Gerard, master of the Amalfi hostel in the city. He immediately approached the Christian leaders to share all he knew of the layout and the defenses of Jerusalem. His intelligence was most welcome.
No one had warned the Crusaders about the heat, particularly unbearable to men who had to wear clothing under armor, with no shade to keep the sun from beating down on that armor all day long. No one had told these men, used to the heavily forested areas of Europe, that there was no timber around Jerusalem for the construction of siege engines. The material had to be brought from the coast or from the forests of Samaria, requiring as many as sixty Moslem prisoners to carry a single beam. They had not expected a twelve‑mile round trip for water for themselves and
63
64 BORN IN BLOOD
their animals. Then, after six weeks of agonizing physical discomforts, magnified by deficiencies in food and water, word came from Cairo that the Egyptians were marshaling a large army to relieve the city. Despair and panic ran through the Christian army.
As if in answer to their prayers, a priest in the Christian camp reported that he had a vision that had revealed the conditions under which the Crusaders would be granted the victory. First, they were to put aside all sinning, all selfish ambitions, and all quarrels among themselves. Next, they were to fast and pray for three days. On the third day they were to process in humility with bare feet around the walls of God's holy city. With all of these conditions met, God would grant them the victory within nine days. The vision was accepted as valid, and the leaders ordered the entire army to comply. After two days of fasting the entire army shed their footwear and began the two‑mile walk around the city. Up on the walls, the Egyptian defenders looked down on the Crusaders with shouted taunts and laughter, urinating on crosses held up in view of the penitent marchers.
Fortunately, the prophecy was helped along by a surge of activity to complete three siege towers. To roll them up to the walls at the selected positions, it was first necessary to fill in portions of the great ditch or dry moat in front of the wall. This was done, but at great cost from the constant barrage of stones and sulfurous Greek fire dropped on them by the defenders on the wall. By the evening of July 14, the army was ready and began to roll the giant siege towers into position. Raymond of Toulouse positioned his tower at the wall first but could not get his men across the bridge from the tower to the wall. Godfrey de Bouillon had his tower against the north wall by morning and dropped the bridge to the top of the wall. Hand to hand combat went on for hours, but by noon Godfrey had men on the city wall. Other men beat their way over the bridge to support them, and soon Godfrey commanded enough of the wall to permit the safe use of scaling ladders to bring more and more men to him. When he had a large enough party, he sent them to open the Gate of the Column, and the main Crusader force poured into the city. Jerusalem had been taken on the ninth day, as the prophecy had promised.
Seized by a frenzy of vengeful blood lust after weeks of suffering outside the walls, the victorious Crusaders poured through
~HE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 65
the streets, breaking open houses, shops, and mosques to butcher every man, woman, and child they could find.
One of the reports to the pope read, "If you would hear how we treated our enemies at Jerusalem, know that in the portico of Solomon and in the Temple our men rode through the unclean blood of the Saracens, which came up to the knees of their horses."
Word spread that the local Moslems sometimes swallowed their gold as the surest way to hide it, and disemboweling thereafter became a common practice in the search for plunder.
Hoping to avoid the maniacal slaughter, Jews crowded into their principal synagogue to give notice that they were not Moslems. The Crusaders burnt down the synagogue, killing them all.
Raymond of Aguilers, writing about the mutilated corpses that covered the temple area, quoted Psalm 118: "This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it."
And so the stage was set for that strange blend of piety, selfsacrifice, blood lust, and greed that marked the history of the Christian kingdom of the East for two centuries to come.
An interesting aftermath of the First Crusade lay in the treatment of the little order that had run the Amalfi hostelry for pilgrims. In gratitude for their information and assistance, and in the flush of victory, the monks were rewarded with gifts of treasure and grants of land. They were able to expand their operations under the enthusiastic sponsorship of the new Christian rulers. By about 1118, their new prior, a French nobleman, decided that they should do more than just provide lodging and care for pilgrims; they should accept knights into their order and have a military arm that would fight for the Holy Land. They changed their name to the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem and applied to the pope for a constitution or Rule of their own, which was granted. With their new wealth and importance, they felt that they had outgrown their patron saint, St. John the Compassionate. They declared that their patron saint would now be St. John the Baptist.
In that same year, another order was founded in Jerusalem that would rival the Hospitallers in numbers, in wealth, and in power.
The support given by Baldwin I to the newly reorganized order of the Hospitallers of St. John may have inspired one Hugh de Payens, a vassal of the count of Champagne. In 1118, de Payens
66 BORN IN BLOOD
petitioned King Baldwin II, on behalf of himself and eight other knights, for permission to establish themselves as a new religious order. To the patriarch of Jerusalem they had made vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Unlike the Hospitallers, who operated hostels and hospitals in the Holy Land, this new order would devote itself totally to the military protection of pilgrims to the holy places. They sought permission for, and were granted, quarters for their new order in a wing of the royal palace in the temple area. This was the former mosque al‑Aqsa, said to have been built on the site of the original Temple of Solomon. From this location the group took its name: The Poor Fellow‑Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. Over the centuries to come they would be referred to as the Order of the Temple, the Knights of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and a number of other variations. Two things remained standard, however: Whatever the form of their name, it was always based on the Temple of Solomon, and it always took second place to the popular name they bear still, the Knights Templar.
The new order apparently did very little in the first nine years of its existence, and there is no record that it even took in new members. Then in 1127 it seems to have decided to break out. In that year, King Baldwin II wrote a letter to Bernard (later St. Bernard), abbot of Clairvaux and the most influential churchman of his day, sometimes referred to as "the Second Pope." Baldwin asked that Bernard use his considerable influence with Pope Honarius II to obtain papal sanction for the new order of Knights Templar and asked him to establish a Rule for the life and conduct of its members. Bernard responded favorably.
The order, in the beginning, seems to have been little more than a private club formed around the count of Champagne. All of the founding Templar Knights were vassals of Champagne. Hugh de Payens was his cousin. Andre de Montbard, who was to become the fifth grand master, was an uncle of Bernard, who was himself from Champagne, while Pope Honarius had been a Cistercian follower of Bernard. The pope selected the capital of Champagne, the city of Troyes, as the meeting place for a council to review the Templar requests. The first gift of land granted to the Templars was at Troyes, and it was there that they established their first preceptory in Europe.
Bernard did contact the pope with Baldwin's request, backing
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 67
it with all the approval and encouragement he could bring to bear. When Hugh de Payens and five other Templars arrived in Rome, they were made welcome by the pontiff. The pope did call for a council to be held the following year at Troyes, in Champagne, and instructed the Templars to be present there. Bernard could not attend in person, but he wrote setting forth his excitement about the prospects for the new order. He gave his reasons for asking the council to grant the order official recognition, calling for the establishment of a Rule, for which he would offer his personal assistance. Bernard's fame was based upon his great success as a reformer and propagator of the monastic life, and his position was so well established that any project approved by him could hardly be rejected by the church or the laity. Bernard helped to devise a Templar Rule based upon that of his own Cistercian order, which in turn had been based on the much older Benedictine Rule.
To understand the nature of the Templar order, it is important to see it as a monastic order of monks and not as an order of chivalry. Templars were religious at a time when monks were generally regarded as better than the secular priests and much closer to God. St. Bernard himself said, "The people cannot look up to the priests, because the people are better than the priests." Today the Roman Catholic church has well‑organized lines from the Holy See through the bishops to the secular clergy, and contemporary monastic orders may appear somewhat less than absolutely necessary to the structure, except when they perform certain specialized tasks such as teaching or healing. It is difficult, then, for us to comprehend how central the monastic orders were to the church; they even supplied it with popes, particularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The monastic life had begun early in Christianity as an individual effort. The man frustrated with the worldliness about him, consumed with the desire to live the life that he believed God expected of him, would simply wander off by himself. This was the age of the ascetic hermit, a movement that seems to have taken hold first in Egypt. A preoccupation was to fight off all desires of the flesh and all impulses to materialism. Through the biography written by Bishop Athanasius we know most about a monk named Anthony, who opted for the life of a religious hermit late in the third century. Although he lived in the hot Egyptian
68 BORN IN BLOOD
desert, Anthony wore a hair shirt for the rest of his life, under leather clothing. He never bathed, and he fasted to the brink of death. His greatest temptations arose not from abstinence from creature comforts, but from sexual desire. He reported that the Devil appeared to him at night in the form of sensuous women, tormenting him until he screamed out loud. He sought ever more painful ways to torture his body to purge it of sinful thoughts. This all‑out effort to please God made Anthony a near‑saint during his lifetime, and pilgrims flocked to see him and to seek his advice. The most famous hermit of all, of course, was the Syrian ascetic Simeon Stylites, who built a pillar sixty feet tall and lived on top of the column for thirty years until his death, fed by followers and pilgrims, who presumably also made some contribution to rudimentary sanitation.
The church did not stop such extremists but did not encourage them, either. Rather, the church's influence was directed toward community living, with the solitary hermitlike existence partially preserved through having the monks occupy private cells for personal devotions, meditation, and rest. This was combined with some communal activities, however, such as celebrating mass, reading of offices, group prayer, eating, and working. Citizens who admired the monks and even envied them, but who could not bring themselves to their level of personal sacrifice, could share in their sanctity by founding and supporting a monastery or by giving gifts of land and other valuables to existing houses. Most of the early houses were totally independent units, comprised of an abbot and twelve monks, emulating the twelve disciples of scripture.
Perhaps the most influential man in this early monastic era was Benedict of Nicosia. Unable to tolerate the vice and corruption of Roman life, Benedict fled to the hills nearby and commenced a life of abject poverty and fierce self‑punishment. Gradually his fame spread, and young men came to him both as pilgrims and as volunteers to share his faith and conduct. He began to organize communities for these disciples, which culminated in his founding of the monastery at Monte Cassino about A.D. 530. Its bombing and restoration during and after World War II have been well documented, and it still sits perched on a commanding hilltop south of Rome.
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 69
More important than the monastery itself was the Rule that Benedict created for the monks who followed him. This Benedictine Rule became the foundation model for a number of monastic orders that followed, such as the Cistercians, whose Rule in turn became the basis of the Rule created for the Knights Templar. The Benedictine Rule's central theme was embodied in the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, all rigorously enforced. For first offenses, the Rule called for verbal rebuke and solitary confinement, heavily supported by prayer. If this did not cause the monk to abandon his willful ways, his abbot was authorized to use the whip. If his errors could not be beaten out of him, the monk could then be expelled from the order. Although the monks worked to be as self‑sufficient as possible, their primary obligation was service to God through devotions and charity. The monks, because they lived according to a Rule (regula), became known as the "regular" clergy. Priests, who were free to move about in society (saeculum), became known as the "secular" clergy. As the church became increasingly worldly and materialistic, the monastic "regular" clergy appeared far holier to the general population, which contributed to the monks' influence and position of trust. The soft braided belt worn by monks and friars now appears to be just an item of their habit, but in the early days of the monastic orders everyone knew that the coarse rope around a monk's waist was for self‑flagellation, to drive out sinful thoughts and urges.
Of course, worldliness crept into the monasteries as well, as the gifts of land and gold enabled them to have tenants and serfs on their property, and eventually the monastic system itself called out for reform. The call was answered most dramatically by Bernard of Clairvaux. In 1112, Bernard joined the relatively new Cistercian order at the age of twenty‑one. He soon became the abbot of Clairvaux and founded no fewer than sixty‑five daughter houses. He was a brilliant speaker, a persuasive writer, and was said to have lived a blameless life according to the strict Cistercian Rule.
Bernard was just twenty‑eight years old when the Council of Troyes asked him to help create a Rule for the Templars. He did more than that. He became their most vocal champion, urging that they be supported with gifts of land and money and exhorting men of good family to cast off their sinful lives and take
70 BORN IN BLOOD
up the sword and the cross as Templar Knights. Bernard also succeeded in establishing a form of recruitment that may have infused the Templars with freethinkers throughout their entire existence. Service in the order7 which coupled adherence to strict monastic vows with the constant threat of mutilation or death on the holy battlefield, was enough penance to compensate for any sin. Murderers, thieves, fornicators, and even heretics were welcomed, provided they renounced their former sinful ways and embraced the order's sacred vows. During the years of the Albigensian Crusade in southern France, a number of self‑avowed penitent Cathar heretics were taken into the order. It is impossible to evaluate the influence such men had in the secret enclaves of the order, but it would be foolish to think that they had none.
Bernard exhorted all young men of noble birth to join the Templars and called upon all Christians to support the order with generous gifts. The king of France responded with grants of land, as did a number of his nobles. Traveling on to Normandy, Hugh de Payens met there with King Stephen of England. As the son of Stephen of Blois, a hero of the First Crusade, the English king quickly avowed his support. He gave the Templars substantial gifts of money and made arrangements for them to carry their recruiting efforts to England and Scotland. There they not only received gifts of gold and silver but also were presented with productive manors, which were to provide a continuing stream of income. Stephen's wife, Matilda, contributed the valuable manor of Cressing in Essex (the same manor of Cressing Temple that was transferred to the Hospitallers and later smashed by the English rebels in the Peasants' Revolt).
Hugh de Payens had departed Jerusalem as one of a group of just nine knights bound together in an obscure, unofficial order. He returned two years later as grand master of an order responsible only to the pope and possessed of gold, silver, and landed wealth, with three hundred knights sworn to stand and die if their master so ordered.
All the time, the work on their Rule was moving forward. It could not be just like any other monastic Rule because the Templar life would require travel, military training, and participation in battle, activities little known to the other monastic communities. First came the three basic monastic vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Chastity took count of both sexes. No Tem
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 71
plar was to kiss or touch any woman, not even his mother or sister. Even conversation with any woman was discouraged, and often forbidden. Templars wore sheepskin drawers that were never to be removed. (The Rule ordered that Templars should never bathe, so the ban on the removal of drawers was seen as support for the prohibition of sexual activity.) No Templar was to allow anyone, especially another Templar, to see his naked body. In their dormitories, lamps burned all night to keep away the darkness that might permit or encourage homosexual practices, a constant concern in all‑male societies, including monasteries.
In keeping with his vow of poverty, Hugh de Payens gave all of his property to the order, and the other founding Templars soon followed suit. If a new Templar recruit did not have property to contribute, he was expected to come with a money "dowry." Once a Templar, he was permitted to keep no money or other valuables, not even books, in his personal possession. If loot was taken, it went to the order. This Rule was so important that if, upon his death, it was learned that a Templar had money or property of his own, he was declared outside the order, which precluded Christian burial.
Instant obedience to his superiors was required of every Templar, and since the order was responsible to no one but the pope, it essentially created its own system of punishments, up to the death penalty, for disobedience. For example, a penitential cell only four and a half feet long was built into the Templar church in London, and in that cell the brother marshal (military commander) for Ireland was confined for disobedience to the orders of the master. Unable to stand up, unable to stretch out, he was kept in the cramped stone cell until he starved to death. In no way were the Templars to be bound by the laws of the countries in which they might reside from time to time. Only their own Rule governed their conduct, and only their own superiors could discipline them.
Templars were allowed no privacy, and if a Templar received a letter it had to be read out loud in the presence of a master or chaplain.
On the battlefield the Templars were not permitted to retreat unless the odds against them were at least three to one, and even then they had no right to retreat unless ordered to do so. If it happened that under oppressive odds, with the right to retreat
72 BORN IN BLOOD
according to their Rule, the field commander told them to stand and fight until the last Templar was dead, that order was to be obeyed. Men who joined the Templar order fully expected to die in battle, and most of them did. There was little point to individual surrender in the field because the Templars were forbidden to use the funds of the order to ransom any Templar taken prisoner. As a result, Templars taken in battle were often summarily executed by the enemy.
The order was divided into three classes. The first class was the full brothers (the "knights"), who had to be free and nobly born. Their distinctive garb was a white mantle, to which was added later a red eight‑pointed cross; the mantle signified the new white life of purity entered into by each knight. The second class, generally called sergeants, was drawn from the free bourgeoisie. The sergeants acted as men‑at‑arms, sentries, grooms, stewards, and so forth. They wore the red Templar cross on a black or dark‑brown mantle. Third came the clerics, priests who acted as chaplains to the order and, because they were the only group of the three with any claim to literacy, frequently acted as scribes and record keepers and were responsible for other duties of a nonmilitary character. The clerics also wore the Templar cross, on a green mantle. The clerics wore gloves at all times, to keep their hands clean for "when they touch God" in serving mass. The clerics were cleanshaven, according to the custom of the time, while the knights were required to keep their hair cut short but to let their beards grow.
As outward evidence of their vows of poverty, the knights were limited in adornment of their clothing or equipment. The only decoration permitted in their dress was sheepskin. In keeping with the regulation, the girdle they were required to wear at all times as a symbol of chastity was also made of sheepskin.
The Templar Rule further provided for just two meals per day but permitted meat where forbidden by other monastic Rules, because of the strenuous nature of Templar duties. The Templars were allowed no talking during mealtime. They were absolutely required to participate in daily religious devotions, like any other monastic group.
The Templar banner was vertical, divided into two bars or blocks; one was solid black, to symbolize the dark world of sin that the Templars had left behind, and one was pure white, to reflect
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 73
the pure life of the order. The banner was called the "Beau Seant," which was also a battle cry. The word beau is now generally conceived to mean "beautiful," but it means much more than that. In medieval French it meant a lofty state, for which translators have offered such terms as "noble," "glorious," and even "magnificent." As a battle cry, then, "Beau Seant" was a charge to "Be noble!" or "Be glorious!"
Templar initiations and chapter meetings were conducted in total secrecy. Any Templar revealing any proceeding, even to another Templar of lower rank than himself, was subject to punishment, including expulsion from the order. To preserve secrecy, the meetings were guarded by knights who stood outside the door with their swords already drawn. Although there is no documentation, legend has it that several times spies, or perhaps the merely curious, met death the moment they were caught.
The total contents of the Rule, which could be altered, added to, or even ignored from time to time by each grand master, were highly confidential. The beginner was told just enough of the Rule to permit him to take his place at the bottom of the order. As he rose in the Templar hierarchy, further sections of the Rule were revealed and explained to him. Knowledge of the contents of the complete Rule was confined to the very highest ranks of the order. To everyone else it was doled out on a "need to know" basis. One of the most serious offenses in the order was for a knight of any rank to reveal any part of the Rule.
A meeting of the Templar Knights in one of their churches could well call to mind the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table, because most of the Templar churches were circular, to emulate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The circular Templar church in London, for example, has a stone bench around the entire perimeter so that seated knights would all be looking toward the center. There is no "throne" or special decoration to indicate that any seat is more important than any other.
Ultimately, according to Matthew of Paris, the Templars held over nine thousand manors all over Europe, plus mills and markets. In addition to these income‑producing properties, the Templars had other sources of revenue. Loot taken or shared in by any brother went to the order. During its two hundred years of existence, over twenty thousand initiates brought land or money dowries to the order. As they bought and eventually built their
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own ships to transport men and supplies to the East, as well as fighting ships to guard the others, the Templars earned revenues by transporting materiel, secular Crusaders, and pilgrims to the Holy Land. They were often given memorial gifts or remembered in wills. The church in Rome contributed regularly and urged others to do so as well. Part of the penance of the English King Henry II for his role, direct or indirect, in the murder of Thomas a Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was his well‑known public flogging. Not so well known is that another part of the penance required that Henry make a substantial money payment to the Knights Templar for use in a subsequent crusade. The result of all this was a surplus of funds, and as the surplus was put to work, the Templars entered a relatively new business: the money business.
Many references have been made to Templar financial activities under the term "banking," which doesn't quite fit. Fortune magazine uses a term for a category of business that is much more apt: "diversified financial services." The easiest financial service for the Templars was safe deposit. Since they had to maintain continuous guard on their own treasure, it took no extra effort or manpower to perform the same service for others. So secure were their facilities supposed to be that even governments took advantage of them; England, at one point, stored part of the crown jewels with the Templars. There are records of theft from Templar commanderies, but they were still a favored source in a day when the only protection for valuables was armed manpower or a secure hiding place. If a rich man traveled he could take his treasure with him, and risk its loss to bandits or a rival lord, or leave it at home, at the risk of having it stolen by relatives or retainers or by an attack on his home during his absence. Now an effective alternative was a service offered by militant monks who had a reputation for safeguarding the treasure of others as vigilantly as they did their own.
Another important Templar service was acting as agents for collection. They took contracts for the collection of taxes and sometimes acted as agents to negotiate the ransom and return of important prisoners, even to the point of participating in arrangements for funding the ransom payments. They performed these services for either side, if both parties were Christian.
The Templars maintained trusts, in the sense that they col
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 75
lected income or managed income properties. They dispensedpayments to heirs on the basis of a specified agreement, ensuring proper management of the income for beneficiaries. A fee was exacted in return for the service.
As mortgage bankers, the Templars loaned money on income property, often avoiding the ban on usury by taking the revenues of the property until it was redeemed. In this case, they acted as property managers as well, which they were able to do by relying upon the personnel they employed to manage their own properties. Perhaps their most famous financial service was the issuance of paper for money. The documents were honored at any Templar commandery and as such might be considered forerunners of checks or sight drafts. It was an important service. If a nobleman in Provence wanted to send funds to his son and retainers off on a crusade, he had to find a trustworthy messenger, hire guards to accompany him, and then carry the expense of a thousand‑mile journey, with the danger of bandits on land and of pirates or shipwreck at sea. It was much easier and less expensive to turn the money over to the local Templar master, then have the funds dispersed in, say, Jerusalem, with absolutely no danger of loss. A fee for "expenses" was paid gladly.
It is impossible to say which, if any, of these financial services were actually invented by the Templars. Italian banking families were beginning to offer similar services, and the Venetians had long since perfected techniques of international money transfer and certain aspects of risk sharing and merchant banking, if only among themselves. The Jews of Europe, forbidden by law in most countries to own agricultural land or other means of production, had been forced to turn to trade and related financial transactions, although, once again, largely among their own. They did make loans to rulers, but usually as a communal activity, not as a "bank." The Templar financial services were conducted on a broader scale and were much more public in nature, which may have resulted in overenthusiastic accreditation by historians for Templar financial inventiveness.
One thing the militant monks would have to have invented, however, was their own means of identification for the completion of financial transactions. Today we have ID cards with photographs, Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, bank account numbers, holograms, invisible fluorescent inks, fingerprints, and
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an entire industry devoted to security and identification. Even with all that technology available, money and valuables are still occasionally passed to the wrong people, and stolen checks still get cashed. We can only speculate on the problems of a man in Jerusalem asked to turn over a large sum of cash to a stranger who walked in the door with just a piece of paper issued three months earlier in Paris. There was no telex, no telegraph, no radiophone, no way to determine that the document was not forged or that the man bearing it was indeed the man whose name appeared on
Novelists are fond of the broken coin or talisman, to be used years later to prove that the foundling is indeed the long‑lost prince. Unfortunately, the use of the "matching pieces" means of identification requires that one half be sent on ahead to the other party, a not very practical solution, especially if the draft is to be good at any Templar commandery. What were absolutely necessary were standard identification techniques. One method was to require two or more "witnesses," persons who could affirm identity. Sometimes this went further, to the point of demanding a bond. The person affirming identity would sign a paper saying, in effect, "If, because of my witness, you give the money to the wrong man, I will make it good." Another method was to put one or more personal questions which, it was hoped, only the authorized recipient could answer. Question: As a boy you fell out of a tree and hurt yourself. How old were you then? Answer: Nine years old. Question: What kind of tree was it? Answer: An oak. Question: Who picked you up and carried you into the house? Answer: My uncle Thomas. That ancient system is still in use today, as I found recently when wiring money from America to a friend in England. I was asked for a question which only the recipient would be likely to answer correctly. The question was "What was your mother's maiden name?" Upon the revelation of the secret word Jamieson, the money was delivered.
Letters also required verification, since most were written by scribes and copyists. False letters could carry dangerously misleading instructions as to military moves or ship movements. Built‑in codes, however, could be used to assure authenticity. In a buried‑letter code, the second letter of the third word in each sentence might spell out a message. Codes were used to hide information in the text of seemingly innocuous correspondence.
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The hidden message could be anything from "Send two ships to Messina" to "Kill the man who bears this letter."
The Templars were known to maintain intelligence agents in the principal cities of the Middle East and the Mediterranean coast, and they would necessarily have employed covert means of communication. International financial dealings required total secrecy, naval operations required it to hide shipping information from Moslem or pirate forces, and military administration over two continents would certainly require it. As a matter of record, the Templars gained a reputation, and not a good one, for their dedication to secrecy, even in the meetings and councils of the order.
Taken all together, the intelligence network of codes, signals, identification techniques, and surreptitious dealings associated with continuous military and financial operations, coupled with a fierce dedication to secrecy in initiations and meetings, provided an ideal base from which to construct a secret society. Perhaps no other organization in fourteenth‑century Europe had the need for and love for covert activities that characterized the Knights of the Temple. It is certain that if the Templars resident in Britain had felt the need to hastily construct an underground organization after learning of the arrest of their French brothers on October 13, and before their own arrest almost three months later on January 10, they had the perfect background from which to do so.
In all this administrative activity, it should not be imagined that armored warriors, largely illiterate, spent their odd hours decoding messages or in the countinghouse maintaining ledgers and checking inventory or out in the barn supervising the annual sheepshearings. Although they did not call themselves, or each other, "knights," or employ the honorific "Sir," observing rather their ecclesiastical standing with the simple title of "brother" (frate~ or fre~e), the Templars were required to be of knightly rank and lineage. They were warriors, not scriveners. In the Order of the Temple, they were the officer class, and they had as their principal training and occupation direct participation on the battlefield; the army of administrators, native troops, and employees behind them outnumbered them by as much as fifty to one. The order could not be composed of 100 percent "knights" any more than a modem air force could be made up of 100 percent pilots. The sergeants were more diversified and could be mounted or foot sol
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diers in battle, personal attendants to knights, or stewards of oneor more agricultural manors. The Templar clerics were the literate faction, and far more likely to be assigned duties of a managerial or accounting nature, including the drafting of letters in code. Other administrators, supervisors, and scribes were simply employees, and in later years a number were Arabic‑speaking. As the Holy Land became populated with mixed European and local blood over succeeding generations, young men were recruited locally and trained by the Templars to be "Turcopoles," members of a light cavalry unit in the Holy Land commanded by a special Templar officer called the brother Turcopoler (frere Turcopolier).
The grand master, who also ranked as an abbot, was the autocratic ruler of the order, although he received advice and counsel from his principal officers. Masters of preceptories or commanderies were similarly autocratic, unless the grand master was present. The headquarters of the order and the residence of the grand master were at the temple in Jerusalem. He was not just an administrator but a front‑line military leader, which is evident from the fact that of twenty‑one grand masters, ten died either in battlc or from the wounds they suffered in combat.
As the order matured, growing in wealth and numbers, the cowl of humility fell away. Although a monastic brotherhood, the Templars inevitably became involved in politics, especially in the kingdom of Jerusalem. Their role in political machinations made it inevitable that they develop an intense rivalry with the Order of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem. That rivalry grew so heated that at times there was actual fighting in the streets between Templars and Hospitallers.
As a background to understanding how the Templars changed from pious and humble monks, devoted to the service of pilgrims, to a haughty power center, asserting themselves as secular lords and kingmakers, one must examine the activities of the Order of the Temple in the final years before the loss of the Holy Land and the brutal suppression of the order.
CHAI'TER 6
~V~
THE LAST
GRAND MASTER
Tedaldo Visconti, archbishop of Liege, was in the Holy Land in 1271 when word came to him that he had been elected pope. As Gregory X, he finally had the influence to stir up the new Crusade that he felt was so desperately needed. Jerusalem had fallen years before, and the Christian territories now occupied just a narrow strip centered on fortified port cities that lay like loosely strung beads along the coast of what is now Lebanon and Israel, with each city the center of a separate feudal fiefdom.
Wealthy Christian potentates, living (and even dressing) like Oriental potentates, wanted to preserve their wealth and their incomes, which now depended upon trade with their Moslem neighbors and upon the merchant skills, fleets, and financing of arch‑rivals Genoa and Venice. They did not share the pope's enthusiasm for a new Crusade to recapture the holy places of Christendom with a war that might shatter their own fortunes.
Following the usual course to get a Crusade under way, Gregory X called for a council at Lyons, which opened in May 1274. The ruling princes who alone could order out the fresh supply of military Crusaders declined to attend. The elderly King James I of Aragon was the only reigning monarch to put in an appearance, but he saw no benefit to himself and soon went home. Maria of Antioch was permitted to address the council, to
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complain to the members that although she was one generation closer in line, her cousin, King Hugh of Cyprus, had usurped the throne of Jerusalem. Most dramatic, delegates were there from Michael of Byzantium to give that emperor's pledge that, after eight hundred years of dispute, he would cause the Eastern Orthodox church to recognize the supremacy of the Roman church. Theology had nothing to do with the concession; the emperor was expecting that his recognition of the overlordship of Rome would cause the Holy See to dissuade the pope's closest ally, Charles of Anjou, from his avowed intention to conquer Byzantium. The Byzantines were not alone in their fears, for the entire council was under the shadow of this one man.
Charles, brother of Louis IX of France and uncle of the present king, was count of Anjou and Provence. The Holy See, in order to unseat the antipapal house of Hohenstaufen from its Italian possessions, had acted quickly upon the death of the leader of that house, the German emperor Frederick II. The church made a deal with Charles of Anjou and loaned him the money to mount a military campaign against Frederick's heir. Charles was victorious, and the pope declared him to be the king of Sicily and the king of Naples. Charles became the strong man of the Mediterranean, with papal backing for everything he did. He also had the unswerving support of his cousin, Guillaume de Beaujeu, who had just been elected grand master of the Knights Templar.
As for the petition of Maria of Antioch, Pope Gregory X encouraged her to sell her claim to the throne of Jerusalem to Charles, and helped negotiate the terms. Charles agreed to pay Maria ten thousand gold pounds, with a promise of four thousand pounds a year for life, for the right to assert himself as king of Jerusalem. His cousin the grand master, in attendance at the council, assured him of Templar support of the royal claim he had just agreed to purchase.
As to a new Crusade, it was not to be. Bishops reported to the council that they could find no crusading zeal in their home territories. Knights and barons no longer believed in the spiritual benefits promised by the church. They knew that the crusading concept had been born of reverence for the Holy Land of Jesus Christ, but now they felt that its spiritual rewards had been denigrated, bartered by the popes for military support in Prussia, in Lithuania, and against the Albigensians in France. They felt that
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 81
the idea of the Crusade had degenerated into a means of getting military backing for the schemes of the church at the cost of heavy tax burdens on all the people, and they knew that much of that tax money had never been spent for the purpose for which it had been raised; far too much of it went to support the luxurious life‑styles of the higher clergy. The people, too, were disillusioned. rl here was a growing feeling that if God directed the arms of single combatants in the trial by combat, it could be reasoned that He did the same with whole armies. Since Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and most of the Holy Land had been lost, perhaps that was the way God wanted it to be. There would be no Crusade.
The only one who appears to have taken any benefit from the Council of Lyons was Charles of Anjou. His plans were not thwarted by the submission of the emperor Michael, because when the people of Byzantium learned that their emperor planned to subject their church to the authority of the Roman church the result was near revolt, and Michael had to back down.
When the bishop of Tripoli took his delegation back to the Holy Land to report the failure of the council to stir up a new Crusade, the political maneuvering accelerated. The resident Crusaders, who did not want to fight the infidel, fought each other incessantly. King Hugh of Cyprus, who had commandeered the throne of Jerusalem over the superior claims of his cousin Maria of Antioch, tried to impose his lordship over Beirut. The husband of the heiress of Beirut, an Englishman called Hamo L'Estrange ("Hamo the Foreigner"), was suspicious of Hugh's intentions, so before he died Hamo made an agreement to put his wife and her lands under of the protection of the Egyptian sultan Baibars. After Hamo's death King Hugh kidnapped the widow, intending to force her to marry a man under his control. True to his agreement, Baibars, with local support, forced Hugh to return her to Beirut. To make certain that no similar attempts would be made, Baibars provided a permanent bodyguard for the widow. An armed force of the infidel was guarding a Christian noblewoman against the designs of the king of Cyprus and Jerusalem.
King Hugh's next move was to try to get direct control over the county of Tripoli. When Prince Bohemond VI of Antioch had died in 1275, the title, and Tripoli, passed to his fourteenyear‑old son. Hugh declared that he would act as regent until the
82 BORN IN BLOOD
boy came of age, but upon his arrival in Tripoli he found that the boy's mother had declared herself to be regent and had taken the boy into the care of her brother, King Leo III of Armenia, beyond Hugh's reach. Hugh found no local support for his claim and withdrew from Tripoli, back to Cyprus. The regent placed Tripoli under the administration of the bishop of Tortosa, who used the position to attack his personal enemy, the bishop of Tripoli, attempting to unseat him and exiling and even executing some of his followers in the process. Fortunately for the bishop of Tripoli, he had made friends with the Templar grand master when they had spent months together at the Council of Lyons, so he had an armed protector. Two years later, when Bohemond VII came of age and returned to Tripoli, he found that he had to deal with two strong enemies, King Hugh of Cyprus and the Order of the Temple.
Hugh was not having much success asserting himself as king of Jerusalem, but he hoped for better things as he proceeded to the port of Acre, a walled seacoast city larger than London, with a population of almost forty thousand. Located about midway between Tyre and Haifa, it was the principal port for trade with the Syrian capital of Damascus. Since the loss of Jerusalem, Acre had also become the major base of the Templars, who were opposed to the claims of King Hugh and whose grand master Beaujeu was totally dedicated to furthering the ambitions of his very ambitious cousin, Charles of Anjou. The Hospitallers, having lost their massive inland citadel, Krak des Chevaliers, were reduced to just about three hundred knights in the Holy Land, down from their peak of several thousand, and so were not a strong political factor. The Venetians, however, with their troops and ships and trading houses, were a very strong political factor, and they sided with the Templars against King Hugh. Aware of the alliance between the pope and Charles of Anjou, the patriarch of Acre remained neutral, as did the Teutonic Knights, a military religious order that had been organized earlier by German crusaders.
With no strong support anywhere, Hugh pulled back to his island kingdom of Cyprus in 1276 but left as his bailli, or deputy, for Acre his loyal vassal Balian of Ibelin. The following year Charles of Anjou completed his agreements to purchase her claim to the throne of Jerusalem from Maria of Antioch and made
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his move. He sent an armed force to Acre with his own bailli, Roger de San Severino. Notified in advance, the Templars and Venetians arranged for Roger to disembark and enter the city. Faced with documents signed by Maria of Antioch and by the pope, backed by the troops of Venice and the Knights Templar, Balian had little choice but to step aside, and Charles of Anjou was declared king of Jerusalem.
In that same year, young Prince Bohemond VII broke his word to his cousin and vassal, Guy of Jebail. Guy had been assured that his brother John would have the hand of a certain wealthy heiress, but the bishop of Tortosa interfered. He wanted that wealth in his own family and got Bohemond VII to disavow the arrangement with Guy of Jebail in favor of a marriage to the bishop's own nephew. Guy's response was to kidnap the young heiress and to marry her to his brother. Knowing that Bohemond would come after him, Guy sought refuge with Bohemond's enemies, the Knights of the Temple. To punish the Templars, Bohemond tore down the Templar buildings in Tripoli, and in response Grand Master Beaujeu took his Templars from Acre on a raid of revenge against Tripoli and burned Bohemond's castle at Botrun. Leaving a small Templar force to support Guy at Jebail, Beaujeu retired to his headquarters at Acre, but as soon as the grand master was back at his base, Bohemond moved on Jebail. Guy and his troops, along with the Templars left with him, went out to intercept Bohemond and defeated him soundly.
In January of 1282 Guy decided to try for the capture of Tripoli. With his brothers and a small group of close followers, he surreptitiously entered the city and went first to the reestablished Templar commandery. The group then moved on to hide in the quarters of the Hospitallers, but someone sent word of their presence to Bohemond. The prince trapped them in a tower, but the Hospitallers negotiated terms with Bohemond under which the lives of Guy, his brothers, and his friends would be spared if they would peaceably surrender. Once he had his hands on the group, Bohemond disregarded his prornise. He ordered that all of Guy's followers be blinded. As for Guy and his brothers, they were buried with only their heads exposed above the ground, for a lingering public death from thirst and starvation.
In 1279 King Hugh, still seething over the deal made between his cousin Maria and Charles of Anjou, decided to have another
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try at asserting his authority over Acre as the true king of Jerusalem. Accompanied by his armed vassals he put ashore at Acre and called for the local nobility to rally to him. None did. The primary force working against Hugh was the Knights Templar, with their grand master still dedicated to the support of King Charles and with Charles's Venetian allies ready to lend their political and military support. The feudal contract between King Hugh and his Cypriot vassals required them to spend no more than four months of military service off the island, and as the time ran out they returned to Cyprus. King Hugh felt that he had no alternative but to leave with them, but he took vengeance upon the Templars by confiscating all of their valuable properties on Cyprus. Not even the intercession of the pope could cause him to give them back.
By this time the Mongol hordes, under descendants of Genghis Khan, had penetrated the Middle East, and the Mongols now ruled over Persia (Iran) and the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Iraq). Their major enemy was Baibars's successor, the Mameluke sultan Kala'un, who now ruled Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. In 1280 the Mongol ilkhan sent an ambassador to Acre, reporting that he was going to throw an army of one hundred thousand men into Syria the following spring and asking for an alliance that would bring Christian men and armaments to bear on their common enemy. The Christians did not respond, but the Egyptian sultan did. Anxious to limit his military campaigns to just one enemy at a time, Sultan Kala'un proposed a ten‑year peace treaty with the Christians. The treaty was signed, and included the signatures of the grand masters of the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights, and the Knights Templar. As the viceroy of Charles of Anjou, Roger de San Severino signed for Acre, following his orders to maintain favor and alliance with the Egyptians, who would be at Charles's back when he launched his campaign against Byzantium.
In spite of the indifference of the Crusaders, the ilkhan took the field with his Mongol horsemen in September 1281, and the Egyptian sultan Kala'un, who had massed his armies around Damascus, went out to meet him. There were several violent clashes, with tens of thousands of men slain and mutilated on the field, but no decisive victory on either side. Then in a great battle the ilkhan's brother, Mangu Timur, was seriously wounded and
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 85
ordered his Mongols to pull back. Kala'un had suffered too much in losses of men and supplies to mount a pursuit and let them go. The war was a draw.
Then, within six months, an event occurred that changed the power and the politics in the entire Mediterranean basin, from Spain to the Holy Land. Some Italian historians have said that the criminal society now known as the Mafia evolved from a secret society formed by the lower nobility and peasant leaders of Sicily, as an underground resistance to their French conquerors. If they are correct, the Mafia or its predecessor may have had a dramatic role in the final loss of the Holy Land. On one evening, March 30, 1282, in an operation that would have required many weeks of most secret preparation, the Sicilians rose and murdered every one of the hated Frenchmen on their island, a shocking bloodbath remembered in history as the Sicilian Vespers. That night rocked the empire of Charles of Anjou and the papacy that supported him.
King Charles had been assembling an army in southern Italy for his conquest of Constantinople. Now he had to use that army for thc conquest of his totally lost Sicilian kingdom. King Pedro III of Aragon had the same idea and began pouring troops into Sicily, so that when Charles arrived he found that he had a war on his hands. Then the naval forces of Aragon defeated Charles's fleet at the Straits of Messina and a few months later trounced his Neapolitan fleet in the Bay of Naples. The papacy came to his aid with men and money and almost drained the treasury of the church as the conflict spread. Genoa, engaged in a war with Charles's strong ally, the Venetian republic, came out with renewed vigor. Philip III of France supported his uncle Charles with a direct invasion of Aragon, but his troops were decisively beaten by Pedro III, who by now had been excommunicated by the pope. Charles of Anjou was no longer the strong man of the Mediterranean, or of any place else, for that matter.
Off in the East, the emperor Michael could relax. There would be no invasion of Constantinople and no need for submission of the Eastern Orthodox church to the supremacy of Rome. The Egyptian sultan saw his Christian ally drop in power and prestige and knew that Charles would not be able to defend his claim to the throne of Jerusalem, much less rid the Mamelukes of their Byzantine enemies. Nor was there now any strong power to protect the Crusader bases in the Holy Land, nor any likelihood of a
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new Crusade while almost all the princes of Europe were at each other's throats.
King Hugh of Cyprus was especially pleased to hear that Charles needed his vassal Roger de San Severino and had ordered him back to Italy, leaving Roger's confused seneschal, Odo Poilechien, as bailli of Acre. In July 1283 Hugh set sail from Cyprus, determined this time to be recognized as king of Jerusalem. His fleet steered a course for Tyre, but the winds blew the ships off course to Beirut. Hugh decided to move south to Tyre by ship, while his troops would make the journey by land. On the march, they were attacked and cut up by Moslem raiders, an attack that Hugh was convinced had been instigated by the Knights Templar.
Hugh was well enough received at Tyre, but he waited in vain for word to come that he would be welcome at Acre. The Templars there, as well as the local nobility and the Venetian traders, much preferred the laissez‑faire government of Odo Poilechien, who in his confusion about his authority and that of his master, King Charles, was leaving them alone to do as they pleased without government interference. Once again Hugh was sweating out the four‑month feudal military contract of his vassals. As before, they returned to Cyprus when their time was up, but this time King Hugh decided to stay on the mainland to pursue his claims. Then, on March 4, 1284, he died, and the crown of Cyprus and the claim to Jerusalem passed to his frail seventeen‑year‑old son John, who had not much more than a year to live.
While the Christians were maneuvering for position among themselves, Sultan Kala'un was preparing his final campaign. He began by leaping over all of the Crusader port cities to besiege the great coastal castle of Marqab, a Hospitaller base about twentyfive miles north of Tripoli. He arrived there with a great army of soldiers, engineers, and miners on April 17, 1285.
Unable to bring the walls down with stone‑throwing mangonels, the sultan's engineers undermined a tower on the north side of the castle, which came tumbling down as its wooden underpinning was burned away. The Hospitallers surrendered on terms that allowed the garrison to leave the castle unharmed.
Five days before Marqab fell, King John died, and the crown of Cyprus and the claim to Jerusalem passed to his fourteen‑year‑old brother Henry.
lHE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 87
During the siege of Marqab, Charles of Anjou also died, an event much more important to young King Henry than the loss of a Hospitaller castle. On June 4, 1286, Henry landed at Acre, and now no one opposed him but the bailli, Odo Poilechien. The grand masters of the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Knights got together and among them convinced Odo that with Charles of Anjou dead and his son Charles II totally occupied with the Sicilian war there was no point in believing that anyone was going to defend any Angevin claim in the Holy Land. King Henry of Cyprus was declared the undisputed king of Jerusalem.
There was still one chance that there would actually be a kingdom of Jerusalem for Henry to rule, and that chance lay in an alliance with the Mongols against the Egyptian sultan. It was not an alliance that the Christians had to seek out, but rather one to which they simply had to agree. The Mongol Ikhan Ahmed had assumed the Persian throne in 1282 but had been murdered in a palace conspiracy in 1284, opening the throne to his son Argun. In the first year of his reign Argun wrote to Pope Honorius IV, urging a combined Mongol‑Christian effort against the Mameluke sultan, a letter the pope didn't even bother to answer. In 1287 Argun sent his personal ambassador, a Nestorian Christian named Raban Sauma, but by the time he got to Rome the pope was dead. Raban Sauma traveled Europe looking for an alliance. He called on the doge in Genoa, on Philip IV in Paris, on Edward I of England in Bordeaux. Then in February 1288 Raban Sauma learned that a new pope had been elected as Nicholas IV, and he hurried to Rome. Everywhere he proclaimed that the Mamelukes were even now making preparations for the final destruction of all of the Christian cities in the Holy Land, but he could find no one who cared, not even the pope. The papacy, in league with France and King Charles II, was embroiled in the Sicilian war with Aragon and Genoa, which was also at war with Venice. Philip IV of France wanted to push Edward I of England off the continent, while Edward was dedicated to holding his French possessions in one hand while scooping up Scotland with the other. Raban Sauma went home in the spring of 1288 to report to Argun that he could hold out no hope of Christian cooperation with the Mongols.
Argun tried one more time, sending letters in 1289 to Philip IV,
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Edward I, and the pope. He proposed to mount a campaign against the Mamelukes in January 1291 and assured them that, in exchange for Christian support with men and materiel, the Christians would have Jerusalem and the Holy Land for their own. Unfortunately for Argun, the ambitions of Philip and Edward were centered much closer to home, and no longer could masses of men be motivated to foreign wars by religious zeal and promises of the great spiritual benefits to be bestowed upon them by Christ's Vicar on Earth. Even the pope had other problems, being totally involved in the European wars. The Christian nobles in the Holy Land were on their own.
As for those nobles, they no longer dreamed of Christian ownership of the roads and towns where Jesus Christ had walked and taught. They had learned what all occupants of that land eventually learn, from the Phoenicians long before them to the Israelis long after: The land yielded little in the way of natural resources or raw material for production, but had natural advantages for trade. The descendants of the original Crusaders had turned into merchants and traders, their attention directed to tolls, taxes, and harbor fees. They didn't want to fight the infidel but to trade with him, and Moslem merchants operated freely in every Christian port city. They felt that to a great extent the Moslems needed them and their ports, and they seemed no more aware of their imminent danger than their counterparts in Europe.
The Knights Templar had a comprehensive intelligence network that extended even to the court at Cairo, where one of the Moslem officials, the emir al‑Fakhri, was on the Templar payroll. He got word to the grand master that the Sultan Kala'un was massing a huge army in Syria for an attack on Tripoli. The grand master immediately warned that city to gather supplies and men and strengthen its defenses, but no one in authority in Tripoli believed his story: After all, he was the bitter enemy of their liege lord, King Henry. Nevertheless, the grand master sent a contingent of Templars to help the city in what he alone believed was an impending attack.
The leaders of Tripoli became believers when Kala'un showed up outside their walls in March 1289 and began to put his huge stone‑throwing catapults in place. When two towers and a large section of wall crumbled under the incessant daily bombardment, the residents knew that their city was lost. The Venetians had
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ships in the harbor, which they loaded with all their portable possessions and sailed away. The Genoese loaded their ships during the night and made off early the next morning. As they sailed out of the harbor, Kala'un ordered a general assault, and his troops poured through the wide breach into the city. The harbor provided the only escape route, but there were few ships left. The marshals of the Templars and the Hospitallers got away with Prince Amalric of Cyprus and the countess Lucia of Tripoli, while the Templar commander left behind was killed trying to hold back the Mamelukes, who soon engulfed the local population. Every adult male was killed where he stood, and the women and children were bound together to be marched off to the slave markets. After Tripoli was emptied of people and loot, Kala'un had the city dismantled, stone by stone.
The Christians at Acre were in shock. They had believed that their trading activities were a benefit that the Moslems would not want to lose. It was true that the military orders were there, who were certainly not merchants, but wasn't it also true that the Templars extended their banking services to the Moslems and Christians alike? They grasped at the antidote to their trauma when Kala'un offered the kingdoms of Cyprus and Jerusalem a hollow truce of ten years, ten months, and ten days.
To his credit, King Henry was suspicious of the truce and sent his own ambassador to the pope and to the courts of Europe to seek help, with the hope that he might succeed in conveying the desperation of his plight now that Marqab and Tripoli had fallen.
Henry's ambassador got the usual round of warm welcomes and regretful excuses, but he did have one success that Henry would have been better off without. In the summer of 1290 a mob of near‑rabble arrived at Acre from northern Italy, saying that they were ready to fight the infidel. They were loud, drunken, and offensive to the local population. Then one day a drunken gathering turned into a riot that overflowed into the streets, where the Italians began butchering the Moslem merchants of the city. Finally the local barons and the military orders were able to bring the mob under control and to arrest a number of the leaders, but the dead Moslems in the streets gave Kala'un an excuse he was not going to pass up.
When envoys arrived from the sultan demanding that the guilty prisoners be turned over to him for punishment, a coun
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cil was called of the leaders of Acre. Beaujeu of the Templarsadvised the council that for its own protection it should turn the Christian criminals over to Kala'un. He got no backing for his proposal and the consensus was that, criminals or not, no Christians were going to be sent to certain death at the hands of the Mamelukes. Kala'un couldn't have been happier with the decision, for he now had all the reason he needed to break the truce. He called for the mobilization of the Egyptian army and ordered his Syrian army to move to the Palestinian coast. He publicly announced that he was preparing a campaign into Africa~ but the emir al‑Fakhri earned his pay again by getting word to the Templar grand master that Kala'un's real target was Acre. Once again the grand master passed on a warning derived from his own spy system, and once again he could find no one in authority who would believe him.
Frustrated in his attempts to arouse the leaders of Acre to their danger, Grand Master Beaujeu sent his own envoy to the court of Kala'un. The sultan pointed out that he wanted the place, not the people, and agreed that all of the inhabitants could leave the city unharmed in exchange for a number of Venetian gold zecchine (ducats) equal to the total population. When the grand master announced this offer to the high court of Acre, the response was shouted insults and accusations of treason, which did not let up as Beaujeu stomped from the hall.
It seemed that the Templar grand master was wrong and the leaders of Acre were right when word arrived at the city that Kala'un was dead. He had moved out of Cairo at the head of his army on November 4, 1290, and had died within the week. His son, al‑Ashraf, however, had sworn to his dying father that he would take up the sword and carry out his father's plans against the Christians, and it didn't take long for the people of Acre to learn that the son was going to be as relentless as the father. Hoping to fend off the invasion, the Christians sent an embassy, comprised of a leading noble, a Templar, and a Hospitaller to the new sultan. Upon their arrival the young sultan had them taken to a dungeon before they could even state the purpose of their mission. The people of Acre did not learn by what means their envoys died, just that they were all dead.
True to his filial vow, al‑Ashraf arrived before the walls of Acre in April 1291. The city could boast a defensive force of fifteen
THE KNlGHTS TEMrLAR 9l
thousand men, while the sultan had ten times that many, plus siege engines, catapults, and engineers.
The defense of Acre consisted of a double wall to the north and east, with the sea to the south and west. Both inner and outer walls were strengthened by towers, but those inside did not take total comfort from those high, thick walls because it was said that al‑Ashraf had brought enough engineers to provide a thousand miners for every tower.
The assault began with mangonels and catapults lofting great stones and pots of incendiaries over the walls, while archers darkened the sky with flights of arrows. After ten days of this battering, the Templar knights made a night raid on a Moslem camp, taking the enemy totally by surprise. Unfortunately, in the darkness many of the armored Templars tripped over tent ropes and were captured. The rest were beaten back into the town. The Moslems were ready for repeat raids, and when the Hospitallers came at them in the dark a few nights later, the sentries promptly lit fires and torches, and the Hospitallers were easily beaten off, with heavy losses.
The mining had already begun on May 4 when King Henry arrived to take command, with about two thousand additional men. By May 15 five towers had tumbled and the defense had to move back to the inner wall. On May 18 the sultan ordered a general assault on the entire length of the wall, with a heavy concentration on the Accursed Tower, a fortified corner where the northern inner wall and the eastern inner wall came together. The local knights of its garrison were pushed out of the tower, and a counterattack by the Templars and the Hospitallers, led by their grand masters, was no match for the hordes of Mamelukes pouring through the breaches. Guillaume de Beaujeu was mortally wounded in the counterattack and was carried away by his Templar knights to die in the Templar headquarters across the city. As the Accursed Tower fell, King Henry took ship and sailed back to Cyprus.
With the Accursed Tower secure, the Moslems fought their way south along the inner east wall and opened the St. Nicholas Gate. The Moslems poured into the city and the bloody street fighting began, but with no doubt as to the outcome. As at Tripoli, the only escape was by sea. Soldiers and civilians joined a crushing mob at the harbor seeking to escape in anything that
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would float. His servant found a small boat for the wounded Patriarch Nicholas, but that good man invited so many others to share it with him that the boat sank, drowning all on board. A Templar named Roger Flor used a Templar galley to make a huge fortune for himself as he asked noblewomen on the pier to choose between their lives and the jewel cases they were clutching in their hands.
As the Mamelukes moved through the streets they took no prisoners. Every Christian was killed, with no regard to age or sex. Those who cowered in their houses were gathered up later for the slave markets, where it is said that so many slaves from Acre went on the block that the price of a young girl fell to a single drachma.
By nightfall the Moslems had the entire city except for the fortified Templar building at the extreme southwest corner of the city, which had two walls on the sea so that it had a means to receive additional supplies. The Templars had chosen to defend their temple rather than flee in their galleys and had taken in all of the women and children who had sought refuge with them. After five days Sultan al‑Ashraf tired of this one building tying up his army, and he offered terms to Peter de Severy, the grand mar shal of the order. If the Templars would surrender their fortress, all inside could leave for Cyprus with their arms and all of the personal possessions they could carry. The grand marshal agreed, and a hundred Mamelukes led by an emir were admitted to the temple to monitor the withdrawal. Perhaps on the excuse that they had been too long in the field, the Mamelukes immediately began to sexually abuse the women and the young boys. This was more than the Templars were willing to tolerate, and they drew their weapons and fell on the Mamelukes, killing them all. They hauled down the sultan's flag and announced that they were prepared to fight to the death.
The sultan sent an envoy the next day to express his regrets over the misconduct of his men. He offered the same terms as before and asked that the Templar marshal and his officers be his guests so that he might offer his apology and discuss the surrender terms in person. Peter de Severy selected a few men to accompany him, and as they approached the sultan's tent the sultan's bodyguard seized the Templars and beheaded them in full view of the Christians watching from the walls.
While all this was happening, the sultan's engineers were driv
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 93
ing a tunnel to the temple foundations. They undermined thetwo landward sides of the building and set the supporting timbers ablaze. On May 28 the landward walls began to settle and tumble down. The sultan ordered two thousand men across the breach into the building, and their added weight completed the devastation as the entire stone structure collapsed, killing everyone inside. There was no Christian left in Acre.
Next on the sultan's list was Tyre, thought to be the strongest fortification on the coast, perhaps because it had twice successfully fended off the attacks of the legendary Saladin. This time there was no fight to record, because upon news of the approach of the Mamelukes the commander of Tyre promptly set sail for Cyprus. Al‑Ashraf's men simply walked in and took over.
Tibald Gaudin, the treasurer of the Templar order, was at Sidon, where he learned that the surviving knights had elected him their new grand master. Inevitably, a Mameluke army appeared before Sidon a few weeks after the fall of Acre, and the knights fell back on the Castle of the Sea, built on projecting rock about a hundred yards offshore. The new grand master immediately sailed for Cyprus with the treasure of the order, ostensibly to return with help. None ever came. Now the Mameluke engineers could not turn to their favorite technique of mining because the sea would be above them, so they did the opposite. They began to construct a broad causeway out to the castle. The situation was hopeless, and the Templar garrison sailed off to its castle far up the coast at Tortosa. The Mamelukes, under the emir Shujai, entered the castle on July 14 and proceeded to take it down.
With Sidon out of the way, Shujai turned his army to Beirut. Perhaps taking a cue from the tactics of his sultan, Shujai invited the Christian leaders to visit with him to discuss the situation. Apparently having learned nothing from the events at Acre, the leaders of the garrison accepted Shujai's invitation and were made prisoners the moment they arrived at his tent. Without its leaders the garrison panicked and fled the city in any ships available. The Mamelukes walked in on July 31. All the Christian ornament and decoration was torn out of the cathedral and it was reconsecrated as a mosque.
A few days later another Egyptian army to the south took Haifa without a struggle. The monasteries on Mount Carmel were put
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to the torch and all the monks were slaughtered. The Templars had a castle a few miles south of Haifa at Athlit~ but with a small garrison in no position to hold off the Egyptian army. They abandoned it two weeks later on August 14. Far to the north, on the other side of Tripoli, the same decision was reached at the Templar castle at Tortosa, which was abandoned that same month. As the Templars sailed away from their castles at Athlit and Tortosa, the Mamelukes were in total control of every square foot of the Holy Land. The defeat was total. The Knights of the Temple were without a base in the Holy Land for the first time since the day they were founded over 170 years before.
The Templars continued to maintain their castle on the tiny island of Ruad, two miles offshore from Tortosa, but it was of no strategic importance and more trouble than it was worth‑‑even drinking water had to be brought in by ship‑‑and after a few years they simply abandoned it. After the fall of Acre they set up their headquarters on the island of Cyprus, with the reluctant permission of King Henry. With no place else to go, the Hospitallers also moved their base to that same island kingdom.
During the following year Tibald Gaudin died and the Templars convened to elect a new grand master, not suspecting that he would be the last to hold that honor. He was Jacques de Molay, a knight of the lesser nobility of eastern France and a confirmed disciplinarian. He had spent his entire adult life in the Templar order since his initiation in 1265 at the age of twenty‑one. Now, at forty‑eight, he was grand master, having already served as master of the temple in England and most recently as grand marshal, the supreme military leader of the order. Although the Templar fortunes in the Holy Land had collapsed, de Molay still controlled the wealth of thousands of agricultural manors in Europe, plus mills, markets, and trade monopolies. He controlled a fleet of fighting ships and still maintained an international banking operation. From dozens of commanderies in Europe he could still call up the best‑trained, best‑equipped standing army in Christendom, and his fierce pride reflected that power.
As a military man, one of de Molay's first moves was to attempt to restore morale by enforcing strict discipline and returning to more orthodox behavior within the order. Possession of all books and other writings was forbidden the knights, without exception. As an illiterate soldier‑monk, de Molay saw no purpose in the
l'HE KNIGHES TEMPLAR 95
Templars' being able to read: They would be told what they needed to know, and no good could come of their knowing more than they needed to know. He ordered a general increase in discipline throughout the order, demanding rigid enforcement of the Templar Rule as it related to diet, dress, personal possessions, and religious devotions.
A continuing problem for de Molay was the assertion by King Henry of Cyprus of his royal right to command all of the military forces in his island kingdom, including the Templars. This concept was totally and repeatedly rejected by de Molay, who recognized no authority higher than his own on the face of the earth, with the single exception of the pope himself. The king and the grand master quarreled so bitterly on this point that finally the only way to settle the matter was to put it to the pope. In August 1298 Boniface VIII ruled in favor of the grand master, pointing out that King Henry should be happy to have the courageous Templars based in his kingdom because of the added protection they afforded his crown in those times of total military uncertainty. The pope's ruling reinforced de Molay's already exaggerated appraisal of his own stature and power.
Encouraged by this expression of support from the pope, de Molay put forward arguments for a new Crusade to regain the Holy Land, but his pleadings came at an awkward time. Pope Boniface VIII was wallowing in the success of his jubilee year of 1299, a turn‑of‑the‑century celebration in which it seemed that all the world wanted to come to Rome to bow to the supreme pontiff as the new Caesar and to seek his favor with gifts of silver and gold. Discussions of a new Crusade surely could wait until the following year.
The delay was frustrating to de Molay, who with his background of military planning and leadership felt he knew just how the next Crusade should be mounted, but it gradually became obvious that there would be no new Crusade as long as Boniface VIII sat on the Throne of Peter. Then in 1305 Bernard de Goth, archbishop of Bordeaux, ascended that throne as Pope Clement V. The orders of fighting monks anxiously waited to see what the new pope's attitude would be toward the reconquest of the Holy Land. They didn't have to wait long.
In 1306, during the first year of his reign, Pope Clement V sent instructions to the grand masters of the Templars and the Hospi
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tallers ordering them to meet with him in person later that yearin Poitiers. The purpose of the meeting was to plan the military and financial aspects of a new Crusade. So that the infidel would not know that the two principal Christian military leaders had absented their eastern bases, they were told to travel to Poitiers incognito. Their journeys were to be kept secret from everyone.
The Hospitallers were engaged in an attempt to conquer the island of Rhodes, and their grand master was not rebuked when he reported that he could not meet at the requested time.
Jacques de Molay had no such excuse, but he managed to put off answering the summons until the early part of the following year because he needed time. The new Crusade was vital to the Templar order, and the plans de Molay would put to the Holy See must be well thought out, highly credible, and demonstrative of the superior military skill and experience of his order. Everything must be done to assure that the new Crusade would go forward, because without it the Templar order would have no purpose. It had been founded to guard the pilgrim roads to Jerusalem, but now those roads were guarded by the Moslems who owned them. The order had been created to protect pilgrims, but now there were no pilgrims to protect. A new Crusade was vital, too, for renewed respect and support. As a mendicant order embracing vows of poverty, the Templars relied on support in the form of gifts from their fellow Christians, but that giving had fallen away. True, the order still possessed great wealth, but that wealth could be eroded quickly by the costs of the all‑out invasion and war that the order needed now. De Molay felt that the whole world should respect the gallantry and selfless courage of his Templar brothers who had spilled their blood in the losing battles for the Holy Land, but he also knew that he was in a profession that was ultimately judged not on efforts but on victories.
The other military orders had benefited from accepting reality. The Teutonic Knights wrote off the Crusade against the Moslems and directed their total attention to a Crusade against the pagans in northeastern Europe. They conquered a territorial region that eventually became their state of Prussia; the knights themselves provided the core for what would become the Prussian Junkers, the officer class, who preserved the black eightpointed cross of the Teutonic Knights as their military iron cross. The Hospitallers were not content to be resented guests on
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Cyprus and looked about for a territorial base of their own. Expanding their fleet and seeking out allies, they gained a foothold on the island of Rhodes, the first good news from the East in fifteen years and a victory that earned them increased respect within the church and at the courts of Europe. Completing the conquest in 1308, they were content to become known as the Knights of Rhodes. Many years later they were pushed off Rhodes and backed off to the island of Malta, until unseated by Napoleon. The Hospitaller order still exists today in Rome, where it is recognized by the Vatican as a sovereign state under its current name, the Knights of Malta.
Of the grand masters, only Jacques de Molay refused to take off the blinders that directed his every vision of the future to a new Crusade to retake Jerusalem. He apparently had no idea how far his mind had strayed from the reality of European politics. Every prince in Europe would give lip service to a new Crusade, but not his sword arm, and not his purse. The church could not get Philip IV of France to do anything; reality was quite the other way round. Perhaps if de Molay had kept up with the twenty‑year battle between Philip and the Holy See he would have been able to see through Philip's machinations and perceive how he used the false hope of a new Crusade to fill his own treasury with the gold of the cllurch and of the Templar order. As for England, King Edward I had no real desire to fight the turbaned infidels across the Jordan: His concern was the kilted Christians across the Tweed. The Crusades were finished.
So was Jacques de Molay, but he didn't know it yet. No matter what rumors or reports he may have heard, he consistently refused to bow to reality, until at last he redeemed himself at the price of a slow, agonizing death over a charcoal fire.
To gain the understanding that de Molay lacked, to better comprehend how the Knights Templar could be so thoroughly suppressed and how England and Scotland could provide such a perfect haven for fugitive Templars, we will need to look briefly at what was happening in Europe between the fall of Acre and the arrest of the Templars. The significant conflicts were between Philip IV of France and the popes, and between ~dward I of England and the uncontrollable Scots on his northern border. For a short space we shall leave Jacques de Molay on his way to Marseilles, standing in the bow of a Templar gal
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ley, looking over the horizon to the shores of France where heexpects to rally a mighty army of God to retake the Holy Land, not dreaming for even a moment of the whips and chains being readied for him in Paris.
CHArTER 7
~V~
"THE HAMMER O~
THE SCOTS"
On a stormy night in 1286 King Alexander III of Scotland rode into Burntisland to change horses. He was riding to Kinghorn to be with his second wife. The storm was so fierce that Alexander was urged to spend the night at the changing post, but he insisted on riding off into the night, with fatal results. His horse galloped over a steep cliff and Alexander was killed.
Alexander's first wife had borne him a daughter who grew up to become the wife of Eric II of Norway but was fated to die after giving birth to a daughter named Margaret. This child, the greatgranddaughter of Henry II of England and granddaughter of Alexander III of Scotland, was known as the Maid of Norway. Six years before Alexander's death the Treaty of Brigham had betrothed the then four‑year‑old princess to the first Prince of Wales, who would become Edward II of England. The great plan was to unite the crowns of England and Scotland in one dynasty, although the countries would be administered separately, but fate decreed otherwise. As the little queen, now ten years old, proceeded by ship to Scotland, a storm off the Orkney Islands sank the vessel and the Maid was lost. The Scottish succession was thrown into confusion.
No vacant throne waits long for claimants, and in Scotland there were no fewer than thirteen, although only four of them
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were considered to have any chance of success. They included two Comyns of Badenock, identified by the color of their beards as Comyn the Black and Comyn the Red, to avoid confusion between the branches of the family. The Black Comyn was favored by many, but he indicated that, if it should be deemed necessary to resolve any dispute, he would stand aside for the apparent favorite choice, John Baliol, a grandson of Margaret, the eldest daughter of King David I of Scotland. The fourth major claimant was Robert Bruce, a son of King David's second daughter, Isabel.
Legally, Baliol had the strongest claim, being descended from the elder daughter of the Scottish king, but he was not popular with the common people. His timid ways had earned him the popular nickname of "Toom Tabard," or Empty Coat, indicating that he had nothing inside.
Bruce was easily the most popular of the thirteen candidates, and his secondary position was offset by the fact that he already had a male line of succession in place. There was a son in his forties and a sixteen‑year‑old grandson, who would one day hide in a cave and watch a spider and go on to become king of Scotland.
If civil war was to be avoided, there must be negotiation. King Edward I of England, renowned as a lawmaker and arbitrator, arranged to have himself asked to arbitrate the succession. He summoned the Scottish lords to meet with him in May 1291 at Norham Castle, a border fortress just inside England across the Tweed. He shocked the assembled nobility with his opening announcement that a precondition for arbitration, whatever the outcome, must be that he himself should first be acknowledged as supreme lord of Scotland. Further, several border castles were to be ceded to the English crown to bind the arrar gement. Fearing treachery, the Scottish lords immediately withdrew north across the river to Scottish soil to confer. A delegation returned to Edward and asked for thirty days to consult with those nobles and church leaders not in attendance.
When the delegation returned thirty days later, the number of claimants had dropped from thirteen to eight. Faced with the very real prospect of civil war among the adherents to the several claimants, the spokesmen agreed to Edward's overlordship, and each of the remaining claimants took an oath to that effect. Since the choice by now was obviously between Bruce and Baliol, it was
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decided that the decision would be made by a group consisting of forty men to be selected by Baliol, forty more to be selected by Bruce, and an additional twenty‑four to be nominated by Edward. This group debated on and off for over a year and finally convened at the Dominican chapel near the castle of Berwick to announce their decision. The very weaknesses that caused the Scots to scoff at John Baliol made him attractive to Edward of England as a potential puppet, so Baliol was named king of Scotland. On November 30, 1292, he was crowned at Scone, the ancient capital of the Picts, seated on the sacred Stone of Scone, which legend said had served as a headrest for St. Columba. Later, the new Scottish king appeared south of the border at Newcastle to do homage to Edward as his liege lord. E.dward provided the illustrious audience with a jolting sign of how he perceived the relationship between the crowns of England and Scotland. He sent for the Great Seal of Scotland and broke it into pieces, which were then placed in a bag for deposit in the English treasury in London. The significance was not lost on anyone present.
Legally the problem of the Scottish succession had been solved without the shedding of blood, but the manner of its accomplishment had set the stage for the spilling of rivers of blood on both sides in the years ahead. The deed was done, but the people didn't like the manner of its doing. Scottish nobles, who usually wanted no master, now had two.
It didn't take long for them to discover what kind of a master Edward was going to be. Within months after King John's coronation, Scots who could not get satisfaction in their own courts were encouraged to bring their suits in England. King John himself was summoned to appear in an English court in the matter of a disputed bill for wine sold to his predecessor. Then a Scottish earl whose brother had been killed by Lord Abemathy decided that he had a better chance against the murderer by taking the case to Westminster. The English Parliament agreed to hear the case and demanded that King John appear before them as a witness. When word of his refusal arrived, he was immediately found guilty of contumacy ("disobedience~ especially to an order of a court") and, as punishment, orders were issued for the seizure of three of his castles. At this, King John's resolve collapsed and he agreed to come to London at the next convening of Parliament.
10~ BORN IN BLOOD
In London, King John got another shock. Edward was preparing for war with France and told John that he, as Edward's vassal, would of course be expected to provide Scottish troops and money. There were angry words on both sides, and John, deciding that he would be safer at home, left London secret]y and made a dash north to the border.
He was no happier with what he found on his return. His people resented his caving in to the English king's demands to appear in London and felt that his humiliation was theirs as well. They were fed up with his weakness and appointed a board of four earls, four barons, and four bishops to advise their king and they made it clear that they expected that advice to be followed.
With the people on its side, the new board began to act in its own national interest. A parliament was convened at Scone, which instigated a series of moves that it knew involved the risk, if not the likelihood, of war. It formally rejected Edward's demands for Scottish troops to serve the English cause in France. All English officials in Scotland were deposed, and all lands held in Scotland by English subjects were declared forfeit. Then the parliament took an action that it must have known would leave Edward no choice but to declare war: It sent a parliamentary delegation to the court of Philip IV to seek an alliance between Scotland and France. The alliance was consummated with the agreement that should either country be invaded by England, the other would come to its aid. To bind the arrangement, it was agreed that Philip's niece Isabel, daughter of Charles of Anjou, would be married to the son and heir of King John of Scotland.
Upon learning of all this, Edward demanded instant possession of all border castles in order to protect his kingdom from Scottish raids while he was away at war in France. The demand was not only refused, but the Scots, their confidence bolstered by their new alliance with France, raided over the border into England. The Scottish nobles, however, as they had been before and would be again, were cursed by their unwillingness to sacrifice any of their fierce personal and clan pride in order to work together or obey any higher authority. Lacking discipline or direction, the raids were abortive and ended with a serious defeat at Carlisle. The Scots retreated to their own country to prepare their defenses against the vengeance of the English king and his army.
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It was not long in coming, and the first battle of that war is still remembered for its butchery.
At the head of an army of thirty thousand foot and five thousand horse, Edward crossed the River Tweed, with the rich Scottish port of Berwick as his initial target. The city easily beat off the naval attack launched against it, but was ill‑prepared for the land attack, although crude palisades had been hastily raised, protected by an ineffective ditch. Still, the garrison was commanded by the redoubtable Sir William Douglas, and the townspeople felt confident of their security. Edward led the attack himself on his great war‑horse Bayard. Spotting a low point in the stockade, he leaped the ditch and then jumped over the palisade to enter the city, with his army right behind. There was brief but bitter fighting in the streets and a group of thirty Flemish merchants defended their Red Hall until it was burned around them, but it was not much of a battle. The castle garrison surrendered on terms that permitted it to march out of the city, leaving the citizenry to the sack. After binding and imprisoning the entire population, Edward ordered that every male citizen of Berwick be killed. The slaughter took days to accomplish, with the number of those executed estimated at between eight and ten thousand. The scale of the massacre was a shock to both countries, even in those bloody times.
Restoring the fortifications of Berwick, Edward moved his army north from the Tweed. He met the Scottish army, just back from its raids into northern England, and defeated it with ease at Spottswood. As he had anticipated, the lesson of the massacre at Berwick had not been lost on the towns and castles in his path. The castle at Dunbar surrendered with no fight worth the telling. One town after another capitulated, and by June Edward found himself before Edinburgh. The city put up no fight and its castle held out for just eight days. From there he advanced to Stirling, where the castle garrison fled upon news of his approach, then on to Perth, where he received the message that King John was prepared to surrender.
Edward met John at Montrose, where the latter knelt to present the white rod as a token of submission. The deposed Scottish king was taken to the Tower of London, where he languished until the pope interceded on his behalf and he was permitted to go into exile in France. To make clear forever to the Scots just
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who it was who ruled their nation, Edward removed the holy coronation stone from Scone to Westminster. Perhaps no single act aroused the national Scottish ire as did the theft of their holy symbol of kingship. (Over six hundred years later, in 1950, a group of nationalistic young Scots stole back the stone from it resting place in Westminster Abbey and restored it, temporarily, to Scotland. While this effort was ultimately thwarted, rumors of more plans to retrieve the stone continue to crop up to this day.)
Finally, at Berwick, Edward demanded and received the submission of almost every Scottish leader‑‑earls, barons, bishops, clan leaders, and major knights. He demanded their names in writing, and the list required thirty‑five sheepskin parchments. This collection of parchments, sewed end to end, was derided by the Scots as the "Ragman Roll." That name for tedious business further degenerated into the term Tigamarole~ which has found a permanent place in the language. Rigamarole or not, the English defeat of Scotland was complete and, apparently, irrevocable. Edward could turn his attention again to his war with France.
And so it might have been, except for that strange phenomenon that has occurred repeatedly throughout history, in many times and in many places. A man rises to fit the occasion. Not a ruler, but a man of the people who meets their yearnings and then matches that empathy with unschooled military genius. Such men often come to sad ends, without reward, but live on as legends of their people. For Spain, it was Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, called El Cid. Mexico produced Emiliano Zapata. For the Cuban revolutionaries it was Che Guevara. Morocco had Abdel Krim, who, when invited back from forced exile to a hero's place upon the achievement of his country's independence, declined to return to his homeland because his bitter enemy, France, had been diplomatically recognized. Such a man rose in the time of Scotland's greatest need. His name was William Wallace.
Wallace was the second son of an obscure knight of Renfrew and was in his early twenties when he decided to take up his sword against the hated invader from the south. Wallace's country, in southwest Scotland, did not have the Highlands' topographical advantages but consisted of low hills and rolling plains intersected by many streams, and it was well spotted with English‑garrisoned fortifications. Under these disadvantages Wallace assembled a small group of followers and ernbarked upon a
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course of guerrilla attacks. He attracted national attention when he attacked Lanark, the headquarters of the English sheriff, William de Hessilrig, with a small band of just thirty clansmen. They took Lanark and killed the sheriff. The feat also took the attention of Sir William Douglas, whose estates were in Lanarkshire and who was burning for revenge for his defeat by Edward at Berwick. When Douglas and a few others of the Scottish nobility decided that, with Edward pinned down by his wars in France, now would be a good time to strike back, they sent for William Wallace.
Wallace and Douglas quickly agreed upon an operation that would please themselves and all of Scotland as well. They would attack William de Ormesby, the English justiciar of Scotland, who had calculatingly established the seat of his courts at Scone. It was a place steeped in Scottish tradition and regarded with reverence. In the dim past it had been the Pictish capital. Its abbey had been the home of the sacred coronation stone until Edward had stolen it away, and from time immemorial, issues important to the people had been decided in meetings held on Scone's Moot Hill.
Ormesby apparently felt that having his seat at Scone would lend validity to his rulings~ and any Scot who refused Ormesby's summons to Scone was heavily fined. If the fine was not paid the Scot was "out‑lawed," placed outside the protection of the law, and was thus fair game for anyone to rob or kill. It was a temporal equivalent of excommunication. Arrogant in victory, Ormesby proved prudent in the face of danger, as he gathered up his gold and his records and hastily departed Scone upon hearing of the approach of the Scottish army.
Wallace was a poor man, with nothing to lose, but Douglas was not. Upon learning of the seizure of Scone, Edward ordered the confiscation of the extensive Douglas landholdings in England. Later, Douglas himself was captured and sent back to Berwick, where he died in less than a year, loaded down with fetters and heavy chains in a deliberately miserable prison.
After Scone, Wallace swept north, with no shortage of recruits. Even some of the Scottish nobility joined him, but often with their maddening insistence upon their individual prerogatives, fighting when and where and how they chose, reluctant to totally acknowledge a supreme military leader in the field. To offset this, Wallace became a stern disciplinarian to the troops under his direct command. One man in each five was appointed a leader,
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as was one man in each twenty, each hundred, and each thousand. Thus his orders could be passed quickly to every single man in his army, and disobedience of those orders, or disobedience to any leader on any level, meant just one punishment: death. Those Scottish leaders who fought apart from Wallace with their traditional clannishness were no match for the English, who mauled them with ease. Wallace was of another breed. He commanded the best‑organized, most disciplined army on either side with a fanatic's will and with awesome military skill, facts not yet known to the English. They thought that they were going to once more chastise a disintegrating mob of clansmen.
In preparation for his most famous battle, Wallace laid seige to Dundee and sent a large force to Cambuskenneth Abbey. These moves threatened Stirling Castle, and the English had to respond. An experienced English army of fifty thousand foot and a thousand cavalry moved to meet Wallace's army of less than forty thousand foot and a mere one hundred and eighty horse. Wallace was a guerrilla who had never before commanded such a large military force. The English leader was John de Warenne, earl of Surrey and governor of Scotland, drawing upon a lifetime of practical experience in military leadership. The English were professionally armed, while Wallace's men, many of whom had lost their clan leaders in previous battles, were armed primarily with long spears or axes. For armor, they had only double tunics stuffed with rags or tow to ward off sword‑cuts. They were almost all barefoot. They were also largely without supplies. They were, however, fully equipped with a high degree of hatred for the invaders and a high regard for their leader.
Wallace knew that the English would march toward him from Stirling Castle, to the south. To reach him, they would have to cross the tide‑swept River Forth over Stirling Bridge, a wood structure that would pass no more than two horsemen abreast. He placed his men north of the bridge, concealed in dense thickets, with strict orders to stay hidden until ordered to advance. It is a tribute to Wallace's discipline that this order was obeyed implicitly by thousands of men eager for the fight. The English knew that the clansmen were out there somewhere, but not exactly where, nor exactly how many. Why hadn't the Scots destroyed the bridge? Should a larger bridge farther up the tidefed river be used to flank the Scots? Finally, Bishop Cressingham,
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the king's treasurer and tax collector for Scotland, had his way, demanding that the king's limited revenues not be wasted by prolonging the issue. The English army started across the narrow bridge.
Wallace needed all his self‑discipline to wait for the optimum split of the English army on the two sides of the river. It had been calculated that it would take a minimum of eleven hours to get the whole English army across. First came horsemen, to test the strength of the bridge. Once over the bridge, they fanned out on the Scottish side as a semicircular picket to guard the crossing. Then came the foot soldiers and the Welsh archers. Hour after hour the clansmen crouched uncomfortably in the thickets they had occupied the night before. Finally, at eleven o'clock in the morning, Wallace decided that the force on his side of the river was big enough to have its defeat be a crushing blow, but small enough to be beaten swiftly and decisively by what would be his superior numbers. The signal was given.
Out from the thickets poured tens of thousands of wild, screaming Scots. To the English, there seemed to be no end to them, leaping across the open ground with bare feet and bare legs, brandishing twelve‑foot spears and long hooked axes, with an occasional claymore, the deadly two‑handed Scottish broadsword. Every throat was filled with bloodcurdling screams and battle cries. Wallace had his best men on his right, and these charged into the left flank of the English army, swiftly cutting and slashing their way to the control of the north end of the bridge so that no reinforcements could get across. The English on the Scottish side were now trapped in a bend of the river. Those toward the advancing Scots were cut down and those to the rear were pushed into the river, now swollen with the incoming tide. Laden with armor and chain mail, they quickly drowned.
The helpless de Warenne watched his cavalry and archers being cut to pieces and pushed off the bridge, or offthe bank, to drown in the rushing tidewater. He gave the order to retreat, but it was not to be a retreat that the Scots would permit to be orderly. As soon as the bridge was cleared, Wallace sent his men off in a wild chase to cut up the stragglers. When news of the rout reached the Scottish nobles who had declined to fight under the commoner Wallace, many of them decided to take a hand in the chase. Thousands of English soldiers ran for safety, with no time to stop to eat or sleep. They were
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driven off the roads, hunted down in the forests and in the hills. The hunted shrank in number daily, while the pack of hunters grew as more and more joined in the chase. Prisoners were not the objective. The Scots wanted only to kill and then to continue the chase to kill again. Back at the bridge, the body of Bishop Cressingham was flayed and a portion of the skin presented to Wallace as a covering for his sword belt.
Wallace gathered what he could of his scattered army and recruited more. In a few months he had retaken Stirling, Berwick, Dundee, and Edinburgh. With Scotland secure, he engaged in a punitive expedition to burn English towns across the border, raiding into Cumberland and Westmoreland.
At home again in Scotland, Wallace, who would have had little opposition in claiming the throne had that been his goal, was knighted, and he selected the title "Guardian of the Kingdom." He had brought some organization and national union to his country, but he was a fighting man, not a politician, and the Scottish nobles still plotted to keep their precious independence from higher authority.
Scotland was free, but it had regained that freedom from an England operating without its redoubtable King Edward I, who was away almost continuously attending to his war with France. How would he react to the loss of Scotland?
His reaction was to enter into prolonged negotiations with France, to free himself to deal with the threat on his own doorstep. In 1294 it was agreed that King Edward would marry King Philip's sister, Princess Margaret, while Edward's son and heir, Prince Edward, would marry Philip's daughter, Isabella. This double marital alliance made further negotiation a mere matter of course, and by 1297 Edward was able to turn his attention, and the bulk of his military strength, to the problem of Scotland.
Back in England, Edward's first official act was to call a Parliament at York, commanding the Scottish nobles to appear as well, with the admonition that any noble who did not appear would automatically be judged a traitor. None came, not necessarily because they followed Wallace, but because some simply recognized no higher authority than themselves. More were afraid of treachery.
Edward led his army north into a wasteland. All crops had been burned and all livestock moved away from the war zone. English
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ships were waiting at the Firth of Forth with provisions, but Wallace blocked the way. The English had expected to be able to forage along the way and then pick up fresh supplies at the Firth, but now they could do neither. Wallace had based his strategy on the fact that, sooner or later, the starving English army would have to retreat to find food, and then he would attack and harry. Unfortunately, two Scottish earls decided to use the English to get rid of Wallace the commoner and sent informants to Edward. They told him that Wallace's army was hiding near Falkirk, just a few miles away, waiting for the English retreat. That was all Edward wanted to hear. "They need not follow me! I will go to meet them this very day!"
By nightfall of that same day the English army had moved up to within striking distance of Falkirk. After a few hours rest, Edward led his army through the remaining hours of darkness, and as the sun rose the English could see the Scottish army stationed halfway up the slope of a ridge in front of tllem. Wallace had just a few hundred cavalry under the command of John Comyn the Red and a few archers armed with the crude, short Highland bow, which was no match for the range or power of the longbow of Edward's Welsh archers. Most of the Scotsmen carried the twelve‑foot spear, and they were formed up in three schiltrons, hollow circles of spearmen who created a bristling hedge of spear points, with reserves in the center of the hollow to replace the fallen. The long spear was effective against cavalry but almost useless in close hand‑to‑hand fighting, and it was no defense at all against the long‑range English archers. Wallace placed his own archers between the schiltrons, with the small cavalry unit held in reserve to be used as the course of the battle dictated, primarily to break up formations of archers, against whom there was no other defense.
Both Comyn the Red and Sir John Stewart, who commanded the Scottish archers, argued before the battle that, because of lineage and titles superior to those of Wallace, they should be in supreme command. Wallace prevailed, but to his cost. At the first attack by the English, Comyn the Red and his cavalry abandoned the battlefield, leaving Wallace without screen or reserves. Sir John Stewart fell with his troops early in the combat.
For a while the schiltrons stood against the English attacks and it seemed that the Scots would again be the victors. l,dward, how
I t O BORN IN BLOOD
ever, decided to try a different approach, and the Scots in theirwool‑rag armor experienced a weapon totally new to them in the field, one against which they now had no defense. Edward had his troops fall back and lined up his archers. Arrows that flew at speeds fast enough to pierce light metal armor and chain mail had no problem with the crude cloth armor of the Scots. Flight after flight of arrows struck the massed schiltrons of spearmen, who dropped where they stood with no chance to strike back. The proper countermove would have been a cavalry sweep through the bowmen, as Wallace well knew, but the cavalry had gone. With nothing to do but stand and die, the schiltrons began to break up. When Edward saw this, he sent his own cavalry in a wide sweep to the rear, and the Scots broke into a rout. Fortunately, Wallace had placed them close to the woods, and those who fled there were more difficult prey for the pursuing heavy cavalry. Wallace himself was chased into a thicket by Sir Brian de Jay, master of the English Templars. Wallace killed him.
By the time the battle and the rout were over, ten thousand Scottish dead lay on the field. The nobles of Scotland now overlooked no opportunity to denigrate Wallace, and all of them refused to follow him. Calling on the alliance with France, Wallace went to King Philip to seek aid for his country. By way of response, Philip put Wallace in chains and wrote to Edward, offering to deliver the prisoner to him. Edward expressed his gratitude and asked that Wallace be held in France for the time being. Subsequently, Philip changed his mind and released Wallace. Instead of the military aid that Wallace had come for, Philip gave him a letter to take to the pope, soliciting the pontiff's help. There is no record that Wallace ever used it.
By 1304 John Stewart of Menteith, an early supporter and friend of Wallace, had gone over to the English and had been rewarded with the post of sheriff of Dumbarton. Later that year, Menteith was approached by a man named Jack Short, a servant of Wallace. Short wanted to collect a reward, now that his master was a fugitive with no future, and reported to Menteith that Wallace was at Robroyston, near Glasgow. Menteith arranged that he himself would go to the inn to seek Wallace and, if he found him there, he would signal soldiers in the tavern that this was their man by turning around the loaf of bread on the table. Menteith did, indeed, find his old friend Wallace and sat at the table with
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him. As the soldiers entered, Menteith picked up the loaf, turned it around, and put it back on the table, whereupon Wallace was seized.
No time was lost in loading Wallace down with chains and parading him to London. On August 22, 1305, only one day after his arrival, Wallace was placed on trial in the Great Hall at Westminster. A platform had been erected for his display at one end of the hall and a laurel wreath was placed on his head‑‑a mockery, some Scots will tell you, not much different from the mockery of the Roman soldiers in placing a crown of thorns on the head of Jesus Christ. Wallace was charged with a long list of crimes against the crown, including treason, sedition, murder, and arson. Having been declared outlaw, he was not permitted to say one word in his own defense. He was found guilty by a panel of five judges and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.
Less than an hour after the sentence was passed it was put in motion. Wallace was taken from Westminster to the Tower. There, a waiting cortege took him in hand to deliver him to the execution ground at Tyburn, to which he was dragged behind horses along streets crowded with spectators. In anticipation of his sentence, the gallows at Tyburn had been raised higher to permit good viewing for the entire crowd. Wallace had a noose placed around his neck and was raised slowly, choking and twisting, then taken down before he was dead. Somewhat revived, he was castrated, then a small cut made in his stomach through which his visceral organs were slowly pulled from his body, finally bringing death. His head was cut off to be placed on a pike above London Bridge. His body was cut into four pieces and salted. The quarters were sent north for display in Newcastle, Perth, Berwick, and Stirling as proof of Wallace's death and as examples to others who might think to emulate their leader. Scotland's greatest patriot had died the most revolting death that gory imaginations could dream up for him. His legacy was a deep smoldering hatred.
On February 10, 1306, after the butchering of Wallace, Robert Bruce met John Comyn the Red at the Franciscan monastery at Dumfries. His grandfather and father now dead, Bruce was a direct claimant to the throne of Scotland. Comyn the Redt the same who had run off with Wallace's cavalry at the Battle of Falkirk, had assumed the Baliol claim to the throne, based on a distant kinship. Bruce and Comyn argued in front of the high
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altar and grew so heated that Bruce drew his dagger and plunged it to the hilt into the side of his rival. Bruce came out of the church and said to his followers, "I doubt me I have killed the Red Comyn." One of his followers drew his own long Highland dirk and cried in answer, "I'se mak' siccar!" ("I'll make sure!"), then entered the church to deliver the deathblow.
Moving swiftly to give no enemy time to react, Bruce went directly to Scone. In response to his summons, Bishop Wishart of Glasgow met him there with the robes for the coronation. He was joined by a group of bishops and nobles who well knew that their very presence at this ceremony would earn them the undying enmity of Edward I, off in England where he did not even suspect that the Scottish peace was about to be broken.
The heroine of the day was Isabella, countess of Buchan. She was the wife of a Comyn, now blood‑feud enemies of Bruce. More important to Isabella, she was also the daughter of the earl of Fife, a fast supporter of Bruce's claim to the throne. Hearing of the impending coronation, she demanded that her saddle be placed on the fastest horse in the stables, and without her husband's knowledge she made for Scone as fast as her horse could travel. Arriving just before the ceremony, she asserted that since her brother, the present earl of Fife, was too far away to be present in person, she would be the one to exercise the hereditary right of her house to place the crown of Scotland on the head of its rightful king. As impressed by Isabella's spirit as by any legal right, her countrymen accorded her the honor, and Bruce became King Robert of Scotland.
When Edward I received news of the coronation of the new Scottish king, he exploded. Orders were dispatched to his lieutenant for Scotland, Aymer de Valence, that all who followed Bruce were to be killed. There were to be no prisoners taken by the army that was assembled in England for the fresh invasion of Scotland. Largely because of his own failing health, but also in an attempt to get his effete son, Prince Edward, to assume some manly responsibility, Edward placed the army nominally under the command of the young man, who was the first heir to the English throne to carry the title of Prince of Wales.
To lend ceremony to the new stature of Prince Edward, he was knighted at Westminster. Two hundred and seventy young men who were to accompany him to war were also knighted
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR tl3
in one great chivalric event. The formal ceremonial procedure at that time called for the young man who was to be knighted to be prepared for the ceremony the night before, by shaving him and fixing a scented bath (this in marked contrast to the Knights Templar, who took vows not to bathe and not to shave). After his bath, the candidate spent the night in a chapel in prayer and meditation, while watching over his armor and weapons. On this occasion, no available facility was large enough for all of the candidates, and many were housed at the Templar compound in London. Some of the trees in the Temple orchard had to be cut down to provide room for the tents of the candidates, with their servants and attendants. Most made their all‑night vigil in Westminster Abbey, but many stood watch over their knightly gear in the Templar church. (It is interesting to note the high standing of the Templars with the English royal family on this special occasion, just a few months before their arrest in France.)
The ceremony itself crowded Westminster Abbey as never before. In the crushing pressure of the throng gathered to watch the historic spectacle, two men died of suffocation before the high altar. After the prince and each of his new companions had achieved their knighthood with a sword tap on the shoulder, the whole entourage retired to a great feast. There, the king swore an oath to seek vengeance for the murder of the Red Comyn and to take no rest until he had killed Robert Bruce. The young prince followed with his own oath not to sleep more than one night in the same place until Scotland had been conquered. Joining in the festivities were two new young knights who were to play destructive roles in the future of the English prince: Roger de Mortimer, who would become the lover of Isabella of France after she had married the future king, and Hugh le Despenser the younger, who would years later become the lover of that future king with whom he had just been knighted.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, Aymer de Valence was mindful of the orders of Edward I. When he advanced toward Perth he found Bruce, with his newly formed army, eager to lock in battle with the English. The Scots were pleased with themselves when the English refused to close with them, and they finally retired from the field to relax and gloat over the reluctance of their cowardly enemy. Completely off guard, they were totally surprised by the
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sudden attack of the English army and in their confusion were easily defeated.
Bruce retreated to the hills and finally fell back with a remnant of his army to a refuge in the Western Isles. The dispersed Scots, assembled just days before and now with no leader, had nothing to do but try to return to their homes, and along the way they were easy prey for the still organized English. Every follower of Bruce who fell into their hands was executed in accordance with the orders of the English king. Bruce's brother Nigel was captured and taken to Berwick Castle to be publicly hanged. His brothers Thomas and Alexander were taken together and dragged through the streets tied to horses' tails, to the gallows awaiting them.
Aymer de Valence knew his king. When the countess of Buchan was taken he did not execute her but sent to Edward for instructions. They were not long in coming. Still furious that she had left her loyal (to Edward) husband to personally place the Scottish crown on the head of Robert Bruce, Edward decided to give the countess a crown of her own. He ordered a cage, built in the shape of a crown, placed in one of the high turrets of Berwick Castle. Here the unrepentant countess was placed, and in good weather the cage was swung outside on a beam for all the world to see the price of offending Edward of England. Two English women, questioned to make certain that they entertained no sympathies, were assigned to provide for her needs for food and sanitation, to keep her alive as long as possible. Isabella's husband, Comyn the Black, was totally in agreement with her punishment and made no attempt to even have her imprisonment made more tolerable. Finally, after four years in her crown‑shaped cage, the countess was transferred to confinement in a monastery. It was not until after her husband's death several years later that friends were able to intercede and secure her freedom.
King Robert had been guilty of committing his people to battle before they were ready. It was while he pondered his mistakes that winter, planning how he would again take up the sword against England, that he is supposed to have watched the spider try and try again until it succeeded in connecting its web. Whatever the source of his inspiration, the Scottish king returned to mainland Scotland in the spring of the following year ready for war. Edward I once again marshaled an English army and this time decided to lead it himself. By now too weak to ride, he
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR I 15
accompanied the army on a litter. He did not complete the journey, dying along the way in July 1307, just three months before the mass arrests of the Templars in France.
Had Edward I lived, it is doubtful that Philip of France would, or even could, have made his move against the Templars. In concert with the Order of the Temple, Edward would have been too powerful an opposing force, for he was one of the strongest kings England would ever have. Fortunately for Philip, the young Prince of Wales who now became King Edward II was perhaps the worst and weakest monarch ever to sit on the English throne.
Throughout his reign, Edward I had made consistent attempts to bring Scotland under his control, and in so doing he had set in motion a bitter enmity toward the English that was to last for generations among the Scots and of which traces linger today. His tomb in Westminster Abbey reads "Here lies Edward the Hammer of the Scots," but his legacy to his son was a Scotland blazing with renewed patriotic fervor under a king determined to do some hammering of his own on the English enemy. He also left a Scotland ready to welcome and shelter any fighting man fleeing English authority. The Knights Templar would flee that authority because of a brutal suppression born in the conflict that had been growing between Philip IV of France and the popes of the Holy Roman Church.
CHArTER 8
~OUR VICARS OF
CHRIST
Uupon the death of Pope Nicholas IV in 1292, the cardinals were divided into two principal factions led, as they were upon several such occasions, by the two principal families of Rome, the Colonna and the Orsini. Neither coulcl achieve the election, so they did what the cardinals have often done. They selected an old man with not much time to live and with no allegiance to either side. In this case, they chose Pietro Morrone, a peasant priest who had never occupied high office in the church hierarchy. His followers, called Celestines, led an austere existence of fasting and self‑flagellation. They were not permitted to laugh, because although scriptures said that "Jesus wept," nowhere did they say that Jesus laughed. The life suited Morrone, who did not want to be pope, but his objections were ignored and he was taken from his cave in the mountains to Naples, where he became Pope Celestine V. Charles II, the French king of Naples and son of Charles of Anjou, easily dominated the new pope, who was already experiencing the difficulties of senility. He was confused and vague but tractable enough to name thirteen new cardinals, of whom three were Neapolitan and seven French.
The cardinals soon saw that they had made a mistake. What they had thought would be a neutral papacy turned out to bc
1 1 6
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR I 17
under the influence of a growing third faction, the French monarchies of France and Naples. Their answer was to suggest that Celestine V abdicate. The most ambitious of the cardinals, Benedetto Gaetani, went beyond mere suggestion to pressure and persecution. There is a legend that Gaetani had a hole made in the wall of the pope's chamber behind a hanging. He is said to have spoken through the hole during the night, telling Celestine that his voice was that of a messenger from God, relaying the Almighty's command that Celestine quit the Throne of Peter. Finally the pope announced that he must resign because his age and failing health had rendered him unable to rule the Church properly. His resignation was summarily accepted.
Once again the cardinals were back to the problem of choosing between the candidate of the Colonna and the candidate of the Orsini. ~hen Gaetani put himself forward as the candidate of neither, he did not seem to have much of a chance. However, he had ingratiated himself with Charles of Naples and the French interests, which as a result of the recent appointments of new cardinals by Celestine now constituted the swing vote. The French group, backing Gaetani, sought alliance with the Orsini. They, in turn, were determined to block any candidate of the Colonna, and Benedetto Gaetani became Pope Boniface VIII.
An annoyance to the reign of Boniface VIII was that many people would not accept that a divinely chosen pope could resign the divine plan and therefore contended that Celestine was still the true pope and Boniface simply an imposter. Pilgrims started to visit the former pope, bowing down to him and receiving his blessing. This was more than Boniface VIII was prepared to tolerate, so he had Celestine seized and imprisoned in a tiny cell in which the bewildered old man could hardly stretch out. In the spring of 1296 Celestine died in his cell.
Depending upon the point of view, Boniface VIII was the grandest champion of the papacy or the most egomaniacal of all the popes. He maintained that he had authority over every kingdom and principality in Christendom and over every human being on the face of the earth. He also had time to deal with his enemies. The house of Colonna had not only opposed his election as pope but continued to assert that, since he had been elected while Celestine was still alive, his election was invalid. They demanded that he vacate the Throne of Peter. Boniface's
1 18 BORN IN BLOOD
reaction was to determine to wipe out the Colonna family once and for all.
The two Colonna cardinals were stripped of their privileges as princes of the church. Boniface condemned all the Colonna, past and present, and suggested that their lands should be forfeit to the church. He further delivered a public warning that, in this downfall of the Colonna cardinals, the whole world should recognize that the Holy See knew how to deal with its enemies. The Colonna replied with the accusation that Boniface had not been validly elected and therefore was not the true pope. In addition, they recited a catalog of crimes and irregularities of which they alleged he was guilty. Boniface's response to the accusations was to declare that the Colonna properties were forfeit to the papacy and to declare that no member of the Colonna family could enter the priesthood for the next four generations. He characterized his battle against the Colonna family as a holy war and promised all participants on the papal side the same indulgences and privileges as had been given to the Crusaders. The Orsini leaped at the chance to finally eliminate their bitter rival, and they were joined by thousands of others seeking the papal rewards. Every castle, town, and fortified house of the Colonna fell before the papal army until only Palestrina, their strongest fortress, remained to them. In this almost impregnable position the two Colonna cardinals had taken refuge. After some time, Boniface broke the siege by promising full pardon, the personal safety of the occupants, and the sparing of their property. He had no problem breaking all three promises, and the Colonna family was broken as a power‑‑or, at least, appeared to be.
Boniface VIII proceeded to impose his authority on all the states of Europe, with mixed success. He met resistance from Edward I of England, which several times led to compromise, but the greatest stumbling block to the pope's ambitions was Philip IV of France. In 1296 Philip had imposed a tax on church property and income in France to help finance his constant war with England. The pope denounced this tax as a misuse of the secular power, asserting that neither church property nor revenues could be taxed without the specific permission of Rome, and he demanded the withdrawal of the tax. Philip responded with a new law prohibiting the export of gold and silver from F'rance without his express permission, which effectively blocked the substantial
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 119
French church revenues being sent to Rome. The blockage hurt, and in 1297 a compromise beneficial to Philip was reached.
However, within two years Boniface had found a way to advance his fortunes and his power without the need for the cooperation of secular princes. The turn of a century had long been a time of religious celebration, but Boniface turned 1299 into a great jubilee. He promised absolution to all pilgrims who would come to Rome for fifteen days that year, and they came in a flood that some historians have claimed saw as many as 2 million visitors. The people of Rome had never experienced so much business from pilgrims nor seen so much money pour into the city. Gifts to the church were expected as part of the pilgrimage, and they came in such a stream that at the Church of St. Paul priests stood behind the altar pulling off the gold and silver with wooden rakes as fast as it was deposited by giftladen pilgrims who had fought their way up to the altar. Boniface was elated. He is said to have put on the insignia of the old Roman Empire and to have styled himself as Caesar, going out with two swords held upright before him, symbolic of his dual authority over the spiritual and secular worlds, with heralds going before him crying, "Behold! I am Caesar!'t Intoxicated and emboldened by his new wealth, Boniface returned to his battle with Philip of France.
Philip had done much to defy and anger Boniface. Among other things, he had seized church lands for himself and had provided sanctuary to Boniface's bitter personal enemies, the Colonna. Boniface summoned the clergy to a council in Rome, to convene at the end of the year, to discuss the problems between the church and France. He warned Philip not to interfere, but Philip did interfere by calling a great council himself. This was the first time that the third estate, the commoners of France, had been called. The first two estates, the clergy and the nobility, had always sufficed, but now the commoners must be rallied in case the king should have an outright confrontation with the pope. The nobles and commoners quickly rallied to the king and supported the view that Philip held his throne directly from God, not from the pope. They called upon the cardinals to rebuke and discipline the pope. The French clergy reaffirmed their loyalty to Philip but pleaded that they also owed loyalty to Rome and therefore must answer the pope's summons to the council in Novem
1~0 BORN IN BLOOD
ber. The king flatly refused to permit any of the clergy of Franceto attend a council called to criticize their king.
Faced with this latest defiance, and against the advice of several cardinals, Boniface issued his historic bull, Unam Sanctam, which asserted the superiority of the papacy over all secular rulers and stated that, furthermore, "it is a condition of salvation that all human beings should be subject to the Pontiff of Rome." This bull was and is the strongest statement of papal supremacy ever put forward by any pope.
Boniface warned the French clergy that if they did not attend the council in Rome they would be subject to his anger and discipline. Philip warned them that if any of them did attend, he would be stripped of all his property in France. A few of the French clergy did run the risk, but the council fell flat from want of attendance.
As he would several times in the future, King Philip called upon the special talents of Guillaume de Nogaret, whom various historians describe as a "lawyer," a "minister," and an "agent" of Philip. In April 1303 de Nogaret proposed to a council in France that Boniface should be proclaimed unfit to sit on the Throne of Peter. His reasoning was that the church had been married to Pope Celestine V and that Boniface had committed adultery in stealing away the bride of the former pope while he still lived. Three months later de Nogaret appeared again, this time with a list of twenty‑nine charges against the pope. He accused Boniface of heresy, sodomy, blasphemy, stealing from the church to enrich his family, revealing secrets of the confessional, murder, and so on, including the extraordinary charge of secret sexual relations with a pet demon that lived in the pope's ring. This document was circulated throughout France to gain popular support for the king. Meanwhile, Philip appealed to all the princes of Christendom to impeach Boniface, with little result. In France, however, he had full support. Almost all of the nobility backed the call for impeachment, as did over twenty bishops, a host of lesser clergy, and French representatives of the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers.
Boniface had one final card to play. He had already, in April of 1303, proclaimed the anathema, the most extreme form of excommunication, against Philip personally. To the pope's annoyance, his proclamation had the undesired effect of arousing
l‑HE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 121
the sympathy and anger of the French people. Now he announced that on September 8, 1303, he intended to put the entire kingdom of France under interdict. The interdict was not excommunication, but rather an ecclesiastical censure. Under this censure, the pope could preclude every Christian in France from baptism, holy communion, absolution, even ecclesiastic burial. This was the ultimate threat to Philip, because it could lead to outbreaks of rebellion or even full‑scale revolution. The decision was made to stop the interdict by any means possible, and the task was given to Philip's trusted agent, Guillaume de Nogaret. He was enthusiastically joined by Sciarra Colonna, eager to get at his family's most hated enemy.
Boniface was scheduled to issue the proclamation of interdiction from his own ancestral palace at Anagni, in Italy. On the night before the announcement was to be made, de Nogaret and Colonna, who had recruited a small local force, invaded Anagni, many of whose inhabitants fled at their approach. They found the palace almost deserted and easily took the eighty‑six‑year‑old pope as their prisoner. For three days they heaped verbal and even physical abuse on the old man. Colonna was for killing Boniface on the spot, but de Nogaret restrained him. Finally, on the fourth day, the people of Anagni returned to effect the pope's rescue and drove off the invaders. The pope returned to Rome badly shaken in mind and body, where he died a few weeks later. There is a legend that he killed himself by beating his head against the stone wall of his room. There is another legend that someone else's hands were guiding his head toward the wall.
There were no repercussions, no condemnation by other princes of Philip's rough handling of the supreme pontiff. Perhaps they saw in Philip a champion in their own struggles to maintain freedom from papal control. Without fuss or argument, the successor to Boniface VIII was elected within ten days, and the new pope selected the name Benedict XI. He began his papal reign with a conciliatory attitude toward Philip IV of France. He made concessions. Philip took those concessions but demanded more, and their relationship deteriorated. Philip, still consumed with hatred for the dead pope, demanded that Benedict XI call a council to follow through on the accusations that had been made against his predecessor. Benedict was incensed, and in July 1304 he issued a severe rebuke against all participants in the attack on
122 BORN IN BLOOD
Boniface at Anagni and ordered the excommunication of the participants. Philip braced himself for another papal battle, but a few weeks after his condemnation of the "Crime of Anagni" Pope Benedict XI was dead. There were those who claimed that he had been the victim of poisoning at Philip's direction.
Next Philip turned his attention to the man who would become the principal actor in the drama of the brutal suppression of the Knights of the Temple, Bernard de Goth, archbishop of Bordeaux. The relationship between de Goth and Philip was not based on any prior cooperation, and they disliked each other intensely. It was not born of a desire to resolve the differences between church and state; de Goth had sided consistently with Boniface against Philip. It was simply that Philip wanted a pope he could control and Bernard de Goth wanted more than anything else in the world to be pope. They made a deal.
Burning with ambition, the archbishop wanted‑‑at any cost‑the honors, the wealth, and the power that would be his as the vicar of Christ. Philip held the appointment in his hands, because after almost a year of negotiating, arguing, and politicking, the cardinals had still not agreed upon the successor to Benedict XI. There were now three solid factions. To the ancient Roman houses of Orsini and Colonna (the latter now restored to influence) had been added the French cardinals. To break the deadlock, a decision was reached to seek a candidate outside the cardinals, and the French faction sold the conclave on a unique concept: Within forty days the French cardinals would elect one of three candidates nominated by their opponents.
The archbishop of Bordeaux was fully expected to be one of the three nominated because of his history of opposition to Philip and his support of Boniface. He owed no fealty to Philip, because at that time Bordeaux was in English territory. Checking the list, Philip felt that he had his man, that Bernard de Goth would overlook any enmity and disavow any previous stand in order to be elected pope. In complete control of the French cardinals, Philip could personally designate which of the three candidates would become the next supreme pontiff.
There remained only the matter of making the deal with de Goth. Philip kept faith with the Colonna for their support and demanded the reinstatement of their two cardinals. Everyone who had fought against Boniface and been punished with excom
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 123
munication or censure was to be completely absolved. The bullsof Boniface were to be erased and the deceased pope was to be officially condemned. Philip was to have the right to tax the French clergy to the extent of 10 percent of their gross revenues for a period of five years. (There is said to have been one more covenant, kept secret, that de Goth would cooperat:e in the suppression of the Knights Templar.) The archbishop agreed and took a most solemn oath on the host to keep his part of the bargain. As an indication of the true state of feelings between the two men, Philip was not assured by the sacred oath alone and required that the archbishop deliver up his brothers and two nephews as hostages to guarantee the arrangement. On November 14, 1305, Philip kept his part of the bargain as Bernard de Goth was unanimously elected to the Throne of Peter. Thus began the reign of Pope Clement V.
During his reign, Clement V set the stage for the "Babylonish Captivity" of the papacy outside Rome by appointing twentyfour cardinals, of whom twenty‑three were French. A number of them were his relatives. Philip managed to play a strong hand in the appointment of cardinals, for although consumed with ambition, Clement V was a physical coward. As he proceeded with his retinue from his home toward Italy, he was never long without some evidence of Philip's intention to keep him under guard and under control. He wandered through southern France, ostensibly headed for Rome, but never reached his destination. Instead, in 1309 he took up residence in Avignon. It was then not part of France but of Provence, which was owned by Jane of Naples. She was in need of funds, so she sold Avignon to the papacy for eighty thousand gold florins. The Avignon popes built a palace and fortress and the papal court settled down for a stay of seventy‑five years, during which time only one pope even made a visit to Rome.
Clement kept most of his part of the bargain with Philip but constantly balked at a formal condemnation of his fellow pope, Boniface VIII, a stand for which Philip would berate and threaten him regularly.
The Colonna family emerged stronger than ever Their land~ were restored and the courts of Rome required that the sum of one hundred thousand gold florins be paid to them by the Orsini and other supporters of Boniface VIII.
1~4 BORN IN BLOOD
It should not be thought that the struggle for power between secular and spiritual authorities was limited to the battle between the Holy See and the kingdom of France. Medieval kings were autocrats. They believed that all persons and properties in their domains were subject to them and that the complex upward interlocking of feudal fealties stopped at the throne, which ultimately had power over all of them. In contrast, the church felt above and apart from secular authority. The Holy See assumed the right to criticize, judge, and chastise all secular authority and would admit of no circumstances in which it might be the other way round. In Unam Sanctam Boniface VIII had finally summed it up: Every human being on the face of the earth was subject to the Roman pontiff. The spiritual power, being held direct from God, was in all ways superior to the secular, which had been born in original sin.
The secular princes did not agree. No absolute monarch could possibly be comfortable with a host of clerics in his kingdom holding vast properties and with sympathies and loyalties binding them to an alien power. It was like (and often was) playing host to an army of spies for a foreign enemy. Compromises were worked out and they were constantly shifting. Princes needed money and frequently looked with envy and anger at the neverending stream of wealth flowing from their lands to the Holy See. In compromise, they were sometimes permitted to tax that revenue, but only upon very special occasions and onl~ with permission. Within the secular domain, the church not only owned over 30 percent of the land surface of Europe, but maintained separate and independent ecclesiastic courts and prisons.
Often an agreement was reached that gave a prince the right to approve, or even to designate, the holders of important church offices in his dominions. It was a right jealously guarded. A shocking example of just how jealously is cited by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Relating an incident in the life of Geoffrey, son of the king of Jerusalem and father of Henry II of England, Gibbon writes, "When he was master of Normandy, the Chapter of Seez, without his consent, proceeded to elect a bishop: upon which he ordered all of them, with the bishop elect, to be castrated, and made all of their testicles to be brought to him on a platter." (Gibbon's comment on this act of cruelty is in itseif incredible. He states, "Of the pain and danger
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 125
they might justly complain; yet, since they had vowed chastity, he deprived them of a superfluous treasure"!)
With the pope entrenched in Avignon, under the strong influence, if not the domination, of the French monarch, the question of temporal power was somewhat abated and church energies turned toward the acquisition of wealth, luxury, and personal aggrandizement. Gold was poured into furnishings, sumptuous clothing, hundreds of liveried servants, and elaborate ceremonial. Money was all that mattered, and everything was for sale. The profits were almost 100 percent, because what were sold were rights, not material goods. Indulgences, exemptions, honors, all went on the block. Clement V invented "annates," fees based on percentages (up to 100 percent) of the first year's revenue from benefices. Faced with this liability, appointees to these bishoprics and other benefices passed the problem to those below, milking every property for every penny it could or could not spare, often leaving a destitute clergy at the bottom of the heap.
Prestige and personal stature became all‑important to the higher clergy. Endless meetings were held to define the exact relationship of the hierarchy of the church to the secular nobility. Protocol was established regarding positions in processions and at the table. Ego defined honor and the church demanded for itself every conceivable right, privilege, and gesture of respect. Not even idle‑hour games were exempt. The Crusaders had brought home the Persian game of chess, a board game which was a battle between two kingdoms, leading to the capture or death of one or the other king. (The modern chess player's cry of "Checkmate!" is a corruption of the Persian "Shakh Mat!" which translates, "The king is dead!") Each piece in chess moves according to its ability. The eight pawns protect the whole array. As foot spearmen, they move one step at a time, except in the opening move when they can move two squares, in keeping with a common Persian military tactic in which the spearmen ran out to make a bristling picket in front of the host. The rook or castle was originally an elephant, with a fortified chamber or "castle" on its back. The elephant moved inexorably, but only in a straight line. Next came the cavalryman, whom the Crusaders dubbed the knight. He galloped, moving two squares in one direction and one to the side. Next came the navy, represented by a ship, which could only advance by tacking, so the ship moved only on the diagonal. In
126 BORN IN BLOOD
the center was the king, burdened with his household, his administrative staff, and most of all his treasure, which he had to take to the battlefield with him as its only means of protection. So laden the king moved heavily, just one square at a time. The queen, on the other hand, was guarded by swift light cavalry and could move in any direction as far and as fast as was necessary. So what did all of this have to do with the Holy Roman church? Simply that it was intolerable that there could be a popular game that pitted nation against nation with no role for the church. Further, only the position next to the royal family would do, so the ships became bishops, and to this day every chess player moves his bishop diagonally across the board, tacking like a ship to catch the wind. In summary, the medieval church perceived itself as the ultimate power center. Secular kingdoms, duchies, and counties were power centers. Holy orders like the Knights Templar were power centers. Real life was a game of chess, but l:he real name of the game was power.
Philip IV of France had played the power game very well, but it was far from over. With Boniface out of the way and Clement V substantially under his control, he could get on with the larger issue that had caused most of his rift with the church: the need for more money to conduct his territorial war with England. He was heavily in debt, largely to the Knights Templar, who were the major bankers in Europe. They were incredibly wealthy, with manors and mills and monopolies on which they paid little or no tax. Here was Philip's chance at a double reward, the cancellation of his debts and the plundering of the Templar treasury. Even with the new pope under this influence, even with the timely death in July 1307 of the English king Edward I, the one European monarch who could have thwarted his ambition, the suppression of the Templars would take careful planning, skilled propaganda, and bold action. It was a great risk, and Philip was probably the only man in Christendom with the ambition and the nerve to try it. He began to make his plans.
cHArTER 9
~v~
"SrARE NO
KNOWN MEANS OF
TORTURE"
A rriving in Marseilles, Jacques de Molay decided not to proceed to Poitiers, as the pope had instructed, but to go directly to his temple‑fortress in Paris. Also ignoring the pope's orders to travel incognito, he decided to remind the world of his wealth and power and paraded to Paris like an eastern pasha. His escort consisted of sixty Templar Knights with their servants and attendants, plus twelve packhorses burdened down with a treasure of 150,000 gold florins.
De Molay was convinced that he would be made most welcome in Paris by King Philip, who owed the Templars for many favors. They had supported the king in his confrontations with Pope Boniface VIII. They had loaned him the money he required for the dowry of his daughter, Princess Isabella, who had been betrothed to the future King Edward II of England. They had allowed him the use of the Paris temple for the treasury of France. During the Paris riots the year before, they had sheltered Philip in the Paris temple for three days, keeping him safe from the angry mob. Philip had even asked Grand Master de Molay to be godfather to his son Robert. Surely no one merited more of the gratitude and respect of King Philip the Fair than the Order of
1 27
~ 28 BORN IN BLOOD
the Temple and its venerable leader, and surely de Molay could count on Philip's support in the one matter that troubled the grand master.
As part of the planning of a new Crusade, the pope had indicated that he wanted to discuss the proposal that the Templars and Hospitallers be merged into one order, an idea that had been coming up more and more frequently in recent years. Just two years earlier a Dominican friar, Ramon Lull, had written a merger plan that had aroused much interest. He proposed that the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem and the Knights of the Temple of Solomon be combined into a single order to be called The Knights of Jerusalem, and that all of the rulers of Europe combine their Crusading forces under a single commander to be known as the Rex Bellator, the "War King." A few years earlier a French priest, Pierre de Bois, had submitted a written plan for the recuperation of the Holy Places called De Recuperatione Sanctae, in which he cited the efficiencies to be achieved by combining the military orders.
The pope had responded favorably to the merger concept. The Hospitallers had brought new hope for a Crusade and new respect to themselves by their recent invasion of the island of Rhodes, and the pope leaned toward the appointment of Foulques de Villaret, grand master of the Hospitallers, as grand master of the proposed combination.
Philip, too, looked upon these merger proposals with favor, but from a totally different point of view. He proposed to the pope that the kings of France be named the hereditary grand masters of the combined orders and that he himself be appointed Rex Bellator, with full access to the surplus wealth of the united orders. The only person who seemed disposed to favor that plan was Philip himself, so, as an alternative, Philip developed a plan to bring down the Templar order. Their most valuable properties and their largest treasure were in France, and he intended to expropriate it all for himself. As an added bonus he should thus be rid of his substantial debts to the Templars, which was important to him because his personal crusade to acquire the continental possessions of the English kings had drained his treasury. Edward I had been a formidable enemy, but his effete son was quite another matter. Philip was certain that his time had come, and he just could not pass up this opportunity.
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 129
Jacques de Molay did not know of Philip's personal ambitions and so must have expected Philip's support for the document the grand master had prepared for the pope, in which he set forth all of the reasons why the Templars were opposed to any concept of a merger with the Hospitallers. His stubborn refusal even to consider such a move undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the events of the weeks that lay ahead, and played into Philip's hands.
Certainly de Molay got no clue of the impending clisaster from Philip, who in true mafia fashion feted and praised the man he planned to destroy. That plan had been put together by Guillaume de Nogaret, the same man who had engineered the kidnapping of Pope Boniface VIII. De Nogaret's mother and father had been burned at the stake as Albigensian heretics and he overlooked no opportunity to get back at the Rornan church. In preparation for his attack on the Templars, de Nogaret had planted twelve of his own men as spies in various commanderies of the order.
Unaware of the plots against him, de Molay made a call at the papal palace and submitted to the papal planners the Templar suggestions for the conduct of a new Crusade. He recommended that the definitive plans for the invasion of Palestine be kept totally secret and not even committed to writing. As for his personal advice, he indicated that his secret suggestions were so germane to a successful war plan that he would only reveal them to the pope in person. When the expected subject of a merger of the Templars and Hospitallers came up, de Molay was ready. He presented a formal document entitled De Unione Templi et Hospitalis Ordinum ad Clementum Papam Jacobi de Molayo ~elatio, a work he could discuss only in general terms because he himself was totally illiterate. He couldn't even read the text of his own arguments.
De Molay also used that meeting to deal with rurnors he had heard since returning to Paris, rumors that there were serious improprieties within the Order of the Temple. He suggested that a formal papal inquiry be implemented, which would most assuredly put to rest any criticisms against his holy fraternity.
All the while the grand master was asserting his confidence in himself and the Templar order, the plan to bring them down was in work. As part of that plan a former Templar knight, who had risen to the post of prior of a Templar preceptory in France
t 30 BORN IN BLOOD
before being expelled from the order, had been recruited for an ingenious bit of playacting. He was put in prison in Toulouse with a man under the death sentence. In keeping with the ecclesiastic provision that members of the Catholic laity may confess each other in the absence of a priest, the two prisoners heard each other's confessions. The former Templar confessed to blasphemous and repugnant practices he claimed to have witnessed within the Templar order. The shocking confession was used to prepare the list of items on which the Templar prisoners were subsequently "put to the question" by the torturers of the Inquisition. New members, he said, as a part of the initiation rituals, were required to spit or trample upon the cross. Templars were required to put their order and its wealth ahead of any other principle, temporal or religious. Any member suspected of revealing the secrets of the order was secretly murdered. The Templars scoffed at the sacraments of the church and absolved each other of sins. They kept secret contact with Moslems. They permitted and encouraged homosexual activity among members. They had lost the Holy Land to Christianity through their insatiable greed. They worshiped idols, usually in the form of a head or a cat.
The other prisoner (who was also a plant) demanded of his jailers that he be allowed to pass on this vital information. It was duly delivered to the king, who passed it to the pope with the suggestion that a formal inquiry be implemented. Both prisoners were then rewarded and sent on their way.
De Nogaret had much to do. The logistics of obtaining chains for fifteen thousand men and arranging for their imprisonment would be difficult enough in public view, but the problems were multiplied by the need for total secrecy. That secrecy was important because the plan was to arrest every Templar in France at the very same time.
As a covert operation, the concept of simultaneous apprehension was not totally new to de Nogaret. In a similar plan the year before he had effected the arrest and imprisonment of every Jew in France on one day, July 22, 1306. A few weeks later, in accordance with the master plan, the Jews were all exiled from France, but without their property. Their cash was taken directly into Philip's treasury and arrangements were made for auctions of their chattels. Then it was announced that the crown of France had also taken possession of their accounts receivable, and the
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 131
state became a very efficient collection agency, demanding that all sums due to the Jews of France be paid to the lawful holder of those accounts, the Exchequer of France. Correspondingly, of course, all debts owed to the Jews by the state were cancelled, just as Philip expected that in a suppression of the Temple all debts owed by the state to the Templars would also be cancelled. The simultaneous arrest of every Templar would take a similar operation, but one made more complex because the group to be arrested contained many experienced fighting men. It was decided to move while they were asleep. Sealed orders went out to the seneschals of France, with instructions not to open those orders until October 12.
There is ample evidence that de Molay and his principal officers had to have been aware that something was stirring. A knight who applied to leave the order was commended on his decision by the treasurer of the Paris temple, who told him to act with dispatch because a catastrophe for the order was imminent. The Templar master for Paris issued an order to every Templar commandery in France to tighten security and under no circumstance to reveal anything to anyone regarding the secret rituals and meetings of the order. Several former Templars were placed under protective arrest by the state for fear that they would be killed if it was suspected that they might reveal secrets of the order. Unfortunately for the order, Jacques de Molay took no action at all, blindly serene in the confidence engendered by his wealth and power. After all, he was responsible to only one man on the face of the earth, and only that man could bring harm to the order. Of that there seemed no danger whatsoever. The Templars were not subject to the laws of any land, could not be punished by any secular ruler for any offense, and, as a holy order, were exempt from torture. Add enormous wealth and a standing army, and what danger could there possibly be?
Upon de Molay's return to Paris from his papal visit, he was further lulled into complacency by a great honor bestowed upon him by the king. On October 12, 1307, the grand master was among the highest nobility of Europe who acted as pallbearers at the funeral of Princess Catherine, the deceased wife of King Philip's brother, Charles of Valois. As de Molay performed this somber service in the company of the mighty, seneschals all over France were opening their sealed orders.
132 BORN IN BLOOD
When de Molay retired that night, there was no way he could have known that just before the dawn of the next day an event would occur of such shattering dimensions that the date, Friday the Thirteenth, would live for centuries in the minds of millions as the unluckiest day of the year. And indeed it was for the Order of the Temple as Philip's troops descended on every Templar commandery over an area of one hundred and fifty thousand square miles to put fifteen thousand men into the chains that had been made ready for them.
The following day de Nogaret launched the second part of his plan. Announcements were read to local citizens all over France setting forth shocking charges against the Templars; the chief was heresy and the rejection of Christ, as exemplified in spitting and trampling on the cross. Sodomy, that faithful companion to almost all medieval charges of heresy, was alleged, along with "obscene kisses" required of each new Templar at his initiation. The charges were elaborated upon from the pulpits of France on the following day, all calculated to first shock and then win the support of the general population for the Templar arrests.
When the news of the arrests came to him, Pope Clement V was furious, not because of any sympathy for the Templars but at the usurpation of papal authority, the only power that could legally make such arrests. Philip justified his actions by claiming to have received the authority of the pope to investigate the accusations against the Templars. Clement V had apparently approved such an investigation but had meant investigation by an appointed council, not through mass arrests and torture. Philip also fell back on a papal directive that ordered all Christian princes to give all possible assistance to the Holy Office of the Inquisition, arguing that as king of France he had simply rendered the required assistance to the grand inquisitor of France (who was also Philip's personal confessor).
The pope responded with a formal protest to King Philip. As pope, he had sole authority over the Templars and had not been consulted in the matter of their arrest and imprisonment. The Templar wealth seized by Philip had been intended to help finance a new Crusade (which probably means that the proposed merger with the Hospitallers had already been decided upon). For flouting the papal authority, the Dominican grand inquisitor of France, Guillaume Imbert, was removed from office. Finally, the
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR 133
pope demanded an immediate cessation of the proceedings against the Templars.
Philip's reaction to the papal directive was to launch a propaganda campaign against Clement V to the people of France, followed by a visit to the pope with a small army at his back. Philip denounced the pope with charges of lenience toward heretics, a desire to have the Templar wealth for himself and his family, and befriending the enemies of Holy Mother Church. The harangue continued day after day, with Philip's army camped about the city. What agreements they reached we shall never know, but within a few weeks pope and king were in complete accord, and the grand inquisitor was restored to his grisly office. On November 22 Clement V promulgated the bull Pastoralis Preeminentae, in which he praised King Philip, stating the official papal position that the charges against the Templars appeared to be true and calling upon all the monarchs of Christendom to arrest and torture all of the Templars in their domains. From that day forward, the pope pursued the Templars with enthusiasm.
All the while this political maneuvering was in progress, from the arrests at dawn on October 13 to the issuance of the papal bull on November 22, the imprisoned Templars in France were being tortured to obtain confessions of heresy. Torture for confession involved the fine art of inflicting all of the pain possible short of death, only because death precluded the possibility of confession, which was the object of the exercise. As an indication of the brinksmanship practiced by the good friars of the Inquisition in stopping short of the agony‑death borderline, thirty‑six Templars died in the first few days after the tortures began. Of course, there were great differences in the men being tortured. Physically, some were young men in their prime and others were quite elderly. Culturally, some were warrior knights, some were priests, and many more were men‑at‑arms or employees. All had been suddenly wrenched away from one of the most powerful organizations in the world and rendered helpless. The only legal authority over them was the pope himself, yet here they were as prisoners of the king of France and the grand inquisitor, who had no legal right to hold them without the direct authority of the pope. As members of a holy order, they were exempt from torture, but here were the priests of the Inquisition with their racks and redhot irons. Add to all of this the deliberately repugnant nature of
134 BORN IN BLOOD
medieval confinement, and they could be expected to confess anything, for the conditions of confinement could well be considered part of the torture process, with abject, revolting misery acting on both mind and body.
Unlike the modern jail, with its divisions into series of cells, the medieval dungeon generally consisted of a large room with very small windows, or even no windows, to ensure maximum security. Prisoners were usually chained to rings in the wall or in the stone floor. If the punishment decreed was lenient, chains might be light and loose enough to permit a man to move his limbs and to lie down. A ring higher up the wall, with a chain fastened to an iron collar, might force him to sit or kneel. As a temporary punishment, the neck ring might be fastened higher for some hours to force the prisoner to remain standing or risk being choked to death. Heavier chains and weights could be added to make it difficult to stand at all, or even to move. Variations could find the prisoner on his back with his ankles fastened several feet up the wall, or hanging by his wrists or ankles, or both.
With few or no sanitary provisions, and no air circulation, the stench would be almost three‑dimensional. In purpose‑built dungeons, a drain was provided for the urine, excrement, vomit, and blood. This gave the French the opportunity to develop a Gallic refinement called the "oubliette." The oubliette was a small pit or chamber just beneath the heavy iron sewer‑drain cover in the floor. Into this chamber was put any prisoner who was unusually unruly, incorrigible, or destined for particular degradation. With a cell too small (and too deep) to lie in, the wretched man had to sit or kneel in the half‑full drain pit, which was constantly replenished by the filth of his fellow prisoners.
Confinement usually meant little or no clothing. If sanitation and comfort were thought of, it was generally in the negative sense‑‑to enhance the atmosphere of sickening misery calculated to induce confessions that would lead to freedom from such conditions, if only through death. In the summer, the prisoner roasted. In the winter, he froze. The water was foul and the food often deliberately revolting, designed to maintain life at the barest subsistence level for as long as the jailer chose. (At one castle in that era, it was ordered that prisoners must not drink the clean well water but were to be given only water from the moat into which all of the castle latrines were emptied.)
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 135
Certain instruments of torture were cumbersome and not easily moved, such as the rack and the wheel, but others were easily carried to any chamber, so that the agony inflicted upon the sufferer being questioned would not be lost to the audience of his fellow prisoners. Frequently, witnessing the suffering and screams of others while awaiting his own turn was sufficient to induce a strong man to break down and confess to anything his tormentors chose to suggest.
So many members and servants of the Templars were arrested in France that they had to be distributed to dozens of locations, many of which had not been designed as prisons. This must have placed a strain on the number of complex instruments of torture available, so that some improvisations were called for, the simplest of which were charcoal fires and hot irons. Since friars and priests were generally forbidden to spill blood, a number of devices had been developed to enable them to convey exquisite agony without breaking the skin. One of these was a device with two iron bands, widely spaced behind the calf, and a screw that was turned to apply pressure at the front between the braces, breaking the shinbone. A common and easily rigged device was a box frame around the leg. Boards were placed between the frame and the leg and wedges driven between them with mallets. By this means, deliberate local pressure could be applied to break the bones of the foot, the ankle, the knee, and the legbones between.
The hot iron might be applied anywhere on the body, including the genitals, and sometimes was used in the form of pincers, to nip away pieces of flesh with the red‑hot jaws automatically sealing and cauterizing the wounds. Cold pincers were used to pull out the fingernails and teeth of some of the Templars, with tooth sockets probed to add to the pain.
A number of Templars were bound horizontally with their lower legs fastened to an iron frame and their feet well oiled. Then a charcoal fire was brought to bear. Some had their feet burned totally off in this manner and, understandably, a number are reported to have gone mad from the pain. One Templar was helped to a council of inquiry later, carrying with him the blackened bones that had dropped out of his feet as they were burned off. He had been permitted by his torturers to keep the bones as sickening souvenirs.
Why all the grisly details? Because to understand the elaborate
136 BORN IN BLOOD
steps that were taken in Britain for men to run and hide, to form new opinions and beliefs about God and about the papacy that had unleashed upon them the hatred and persecution of the Church, requires a thorough understanding of the level of terror and anger that drove the fugitives. Even to this day there is little proof that fear of punishment actually prevents crime, but it is quite certain that fear of punishment motivates men to take almost any action to avoid being caught. It had been ordered by the pope that no known means of torture was to be spared in questioning the Templars. Arguably, it could be stated that at no time before or since has any group been subjected, by direct order, to the entire range of the known means of inflicting intolerable pain.
The charges to which the Templars were asked to confess were profuse and included several that frequently showed up in allegations of heresy and witchcraft and would for centuries to come. The Templars were asked to admit that initiates were required to deny God, Christ, and the Virgin Mary; that they were required to bestow the Osculum Infame, the "kiss of shame." on the prior by kissing him on the mouth, navel, penis, and buttocks; that they worshiped idols; that in their secret ceremonies they were required to urinate and trample on the cross; that they did not consecrate the host; that the order not only permitted but encouraged homosexual practices among its members. The allencompassing charge, proof of which would permit confiscation of property and total suppression, was heresy, defined as denial or doubt by a baptized person of any "revealed truth" of the Roman Catholic faith.
The primary responsibility for the "discovery, punishment and prevention of heresy" had been bestowed on what by now was known as the Congregation of the Holy Office but was still referred to as the Inquisition. Its functions were largely in the hands of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, founded by the Spanish priest Dominic Guzman (later St. Dominic), who had made his name by his extraordinary zeal against the Albigensian heretics in southern France. Unfortunately for the accused, it had been decided that confession under torture was valid and irrevocable. A convicted heretic, once having confessed his doubts and denials and then admitting the whole truth of the teachings of the church, would suffer a light penance, a fine, imprisonment,
THE KNIGHTS TEMrLAR I 37
death, or such other punishment as the tribunal might fix according to the seriousness of the heresy. On the other hand, any person who confessed, even under horrible torture, and later retracted that confession was beyond hope. He was known as a "relapsed heretic" and was turned over to the secular authority, which had no choice but to burn alive all such persons delivered to them for that purpose. That was the trap that caught dozens of Templars who confessed under torture to one or more of the allegations against the order and then retracted those confessions when the torture stopped. Fifty‑six of them were publicly burned alive as relapsed heretics on a single day in Paris.
In the meantime, the pope was not getting the results he had hoped for outside of France. On the Iberian Peninsula the Templar fighting forces were too important to lose, for to the Christian monarchs of Spain and Portugal the Moslems were not enemies across the sea, but enemies across the next range of hills. The bishops of Aragon announced that their inquiries had found the Templars innocent of the charges against them. In Castile the archbishop of Compostela announced the same finding. In Portugal the king went further. Not only were the Templars found to be free of guilt, but they and their property were converted into a new order called the Knights of Christ, reporting to the king, rather than the pope, as their supreme head. In Germany the local Templars managed on their own. The Templar preceptor Hugo of Gumbach clanked into the council of the archbishop of Metz, arrayed in full battle armor and accompanied by twenty of his brother knights. Hugo proclaimed to all present that the Templar order was innocent of all charges and that Grand Master de Molay was a man of religion and honor. Pope Clement V, on the other hand, was a totally evil man, illegally elected to the Throne of Peter, from which Hugo now declared him deposed. As for the Templars present, they all stood ready to risk their bodies in the ordeal of trial by combat against their accusers. Suddenly there were no accusers, and the archbishop's council adjourned.
The situation at Cyprus, home of the Templar headquarters, was especially frustrating to the pope. Prince Amalric did not even acknowledge receipt of the pope's bull of November 22 until the following May, and when the Templars were subsequently tried they were found to be completely innocent. In anger, the pope dispatched two inquisitors to Cyprus to stage a retrial, but
t 38 BORN IN BLOOD
only after his orders to torture the Templars for confessions of heresy had been carried out. If necessary, because of the numbers involved, the inquisitors were given authority to call on the Dominicans and Franciscans on the island to help with that torture. Strangely, no documentation exists to tell us the outcome of the second trial, or if it even took place.
In Britain, resistance to the papal orders was strong. That situation is so important, however, that it will be dealt v~, ith separately and in detail.
As to treasure, Philip was again frustrated, as much of the wealth he expected to take from the Templar commanderies was gone. Gone, too, was the entire Templar fleet from its naval base at La Rochelle, and no historical record exists of the fate of even one of the eighteen ships that were supposed to be there.
As could be expected, the Templar reactions to the tortures inflicted on them varied widely. Some went insane from the agony. Some died rather than confess to anything. Most confessed to two or three of the charges, probably in the hope that their inquisitors told the truth when they said that upon their confessions the pain would stop. Two Templars confessed to worshiping a bearded idol, apparently a head, which they called "Baphomet." The treasurer of the order collapsed completely, avowing that under such torture he would freely admit to killing God. Jacques de Molay was approaching seventy years of age and apparently could not face up to the prospect of torture. He confessed to a number of charges against the order and against himself but balked at the personal allegation of homosexual practices, which he furiously denied.
As the confessions were collected and passed on to the Holy See, Clement V was able to promulgate a formal, public list of charges against the Templars on August 12, 1308, ten months after their arrest in Paris. He also called the fifteenth ecumenical council of the church to convene in Vienne two years later to deal with a number of matters, including plans for a new Crusade and the fate of the Templar order.
Records of Templar trials and inquisitions held throughout Christendom were sent to the Holy See, and finally the Council of Vienne convened a year late on October 16, 1311, by which time the arrested Templars had been agonizing in their miserable prisons for four years. Jacques Duese, cardinal‑bishop of Porto,
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 139
who was to follow Clement V to the papal throne as the controversial Pope John XXII, gave advance notice of his attitude toward papal power by advising Clement V to ignore the council and condemn the Templars on his own authority, but the pope wanted the legitimacy and support of an ecumenical council. He had even formally invited any members of the Templar order to appear in their own defense, apparently on the assumption that none would dare to be present. When nine Templars did show up just before the opening of the council, saying that they had come to present a defense, the pope promptly had them arrested.
As for the members of the council, many expressed their feelings that the Templars should be permitted to present their case. The French prelates, knowing that their every word would be reported to Philip, took the opposite view. So vacillating were the members, and so reluctant was the pope to take a firm stand, that five months later the whole matter of the Templars' fate was still up in the air. The ultimate decision might fall either way, a situation which Philip of France would not tolerate. In March 1312 the king wrote to the council demanding that the Templar order be suppressed and that all of its rights, privileges, and wealth be transferred to a new military order. He hammered home his suggestion by showing up in Vienne a few days later, on March 20, with a strong military escort.
Contrary to the opinions of church historians, Clement V demonstrated over the following weeks that he was not under the total domination of Philip of France. The pope's goal was the merger of the Templars and the Hospitallers into a single order, and he was not eager to brand a holy order responsible only to him as heretical. Philip's ambition, as expressed to the council, was a new military order to be headed up by himself or one of his sons, with complete access to the wealth and property of the present orders. The pope prevailed, in his own way. On April 3, 1312, he promulgated the papal bull Vox in Excelso, which disbanded the Templar order without actually proclaiming it guilty of the charges brought against it. The order was simply dissolved in the parliamentary sense, and not as punishment for proven crimes against the church.
Achieving, in a sense, his desire to make one order out of two, the pope promulgated yet another bull, Ad Providum, about a month later, on May 2. This decree ordered that all of the prop
140 BORN IN BLOOD
erty of the Templars be transferred to the Hospitallers, exceptingonly on the Iberian Peninsula, where the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs had exerted adverse pressure on the basis of their continuing struggle against the infidel on their home grounds. Perhaps as a concession to Philip, it was agreed that the Christian monarchs could recoup from Templar property their o~,vn expenses for the arrest, imprisonment, and feeding of the Templar prisoners, as well as for the custodial care and management of that property since the day of the Templar arrests. Suddenly, to the distress of the Hospitallers, those expenses became very high indeed.
Another problem was that quite a few of the Templar properties had been donated to the order with various bonds and agreements under the prevailing feudal system. Many of the original owners simply seized back the properties on the basis that their gifts were not transferable. This meant many a legal battle for the Hospitallers, but they did succeed over the next decade in enforcing the pope's desire by acquiring the bulk of the Templar holdings. Templars subsequently released were free to seek membership in the Hospitallers, and a few of them did. As it turned out, however, the whole business was basically meaningless; its purpose from the standpoint of the church was to create a combined order that could more effectively support the next Crusade, but that Crusade, although authorized and encouraged by the Council of Vienne, just never got off the ground. The Crusades were finished. The notion of a combined order was finished as well; although the Hospitallers did gain new wealth, they gained very few new members from the Templar suppression.
There remained the business of the Templars still in prison, which was settled a few days later by the papal decree, Considerantes Dudum. It set forth that the high Templar officers would be judged by the Holy See, while the fates of the rank and file would be determined by provincial councils of church leaders. The latter generally determined that those Templars who had not confessed their guilt, or those attempting to change their statements made under torture, would be sentenced to life imprisonment. Those who had confessed and made no effort to change or retract those confessions were released from prison, but not from their vows, and were put on very small pensions. No provisions were made for those Templars who had not been caught. They
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR 141
were still subject to arrest if found, a necessary precaution because word had reached the council that as many as fifteen hundred Templars and sympathizers were hiding in the area around Lyons, planning some sort of revenge. The manhunt launched to round them up was totally unsuccessful.
As for the high of ficers, it was almost two years after the Council of Vienne before they were brought before a panel of three cardinals. Since all of them had confessed to a number of charges either under torture or, as in the case of de Molav, under the threat of torture, the review was cursory, leading to sentences of life imprisonment. To put to rest all thoughts or rumors that the Templars were not actually guilty but rather had been the victims of greed‑oriented persecution, it was decided to have the order's grand master make his confession before the world. The nobility, prelates of the church, and influential commoners were invited to witness the historic event on March 14, 1314. A high platform was erected in front of the great cathedral of Notre Dame from which de Molay would confess his shame, so that all the world would know that the Templars were indeed guilty of gross obscenities and heresies.
The grand master was escorted up the steps to the platform, accompanied by the Templar preceptor of Normandy, Geoffroi de Charney, and two other officers. De Molay must have thought and prayed long about this moment, which would be his very last chance to vindicate his order. To do that, to retract his confessions of guilt to defend the honor of the Order of the Temple, would be a form of suicide. Yet all those men who had followed him, who had looked to him in vain for leadership in their blackest hour, who had suffered humiliation, inconceivable agonies, and the most painful deaths known to the medieval mind, would all have suffered and died to no purpose if their grand master pronounced them all guilty out of his own mouth. It was the most important moment in Templar history, and the aging grand master found the courage to use it. Stepping forward on the platform to address the crowd, most of whom had been told what he was going to say, de Molay condemned himself to martyrdom:
"I think it only right that at so solemn a moment when my life has so little time to run I should reveal the deception which has been practiced and speak up for the truth. Before heaven and earth and all of you here as my witnesses, I admit that I am guilty
142 BORN IN BLOOD
of the grossest iniquity. But the iniquity is that I have lied in admitting the disgusting charges laid against the Order. I declare, and I must declare, that the Order is innocent. Its purity and saintliness are beyond question. I have indeed confessed that the Order is guilty, but I have done so only to save myself from terrible tortures by saying what my enemies wished me to say. Other knights who have retracted their confessions have been led to the stake, yet the thought of dying is not so awful that I shall confess to foul crimes which have never been committed. Life is offered to me, but at the price of infamy. At such a price, life is not worth having. I do not grieve that I must die if life can be bought only by piling one lie upon another."
In the tumult that followed, Brother de Charney shouted out his own retraction and assertion of the innocence of the order, as he and de Molay were hustled off the platform. The monumental embarrassment they had brought to both king and church assured that there would be no backing off from the rule that relapsed heretics would be burned alive, and the prospect of their causing additional embarrassment assured that their deaths would not be put off one hour longer than necessary. The burning was announced for that same evening.
There were variations in the practice of death at the stake, and even the possibility of small mercies. The victim might be given a brain‑numbing potion to dull the awareness of pain. For a fee, the executioner might add green wood and even boughs of evergreen to produce a dense smoke that the victim would suck in frantically, to produce unconsciousness or death from smoke inhalation before the pain grew too great. A roaring fire could assure the fastest possible death. None of these reliefs was to be available to the recanting Templar leaders.
The executions were held on a small island in the River Seine, but a crowd still managed to gather by boat to witness the end of the drama that had exploded that morning. The fires were carefully prepared of dry, seasoned wood and charcoal, to make a low smokeless pyre of intense heat, calculated first to blister the legs and to drag out the final relief of death by slow roasting from the ground up. De Molay and de Charney, as long as they could, continued to shout out the innocence of their order. Legend says that as Jacques de Molay's flesh was being burned away he called down a curse on Philip of France and upon all of his family for
THE KNlGHTS TEMrLAR 143
thirteen generations. He called upon both king and pope to meet with him within the year for judgment at the throne of God. Clement V died in the following month of April, followed by Philip's unexplained death in November of that same year. As we shall see, the death of Clement V was an almost insignificant revenge compared to the continuing impact of the Templar suppression on the Roman church over the centuries ahead.
After the execution of de Molay, King Philip received a formal complaint from the Augustinian monks who owned the island on which the executions had been carried out. They expressed no objection or outrage over the burning of the abbot and master of a holy monastic order. Their complaint was trespassing.
This background of six and a half years of the Templar suppression in France in the shadow of king and pope will help us to better understand the very different circumstances surrounding the Templar suppression in England and Scotland, where conditions, including a substantial advance warning, were much more conducive to the formation of a secret society for mutual protection.
CHArTER 10
"NO VIOLENT
EF~USIONS OF
BLOOD"
In July 1307, three months before the arrest of the Templars in France, the twenty‑four‑year‑old first Prince of Wales became King Edward II of England. Thus the crown passed from one of England's strongest kings to its weakest and most deplorable.
For his part, Edward II was happy to have his stern old father out of his life because the young king was in love; not with the Princess Isabella of France, to whom his father had arranged his betrothal, but with a handsome young man named Piers Gaveston, a poor knight from Gascony. They had been friends since childhood, and Edward's father had encouraged the friendship in the belief that the courtly young Gascon, so skilled in arms and apparently possessed of all of the knightly virtues, would be an effective role model for his weak son.
The old king was preoccupied with his wars against Scotland and France and had not noticed the development of the relationship between the two young men. Then, in the last year of his reign, he summoned the young prince to join him in his campaign against the Scots. Gaveston, of course, accompanied the Prince of Wales, and watching them the king could see that this was an unnatural relationship. The real blowup came when the prince
1 44
THE KNIGHTS l‑EMPLAR 145
asked his father to give Gaveston the French province of Ponthieu. 'I his royal territory was located on the Channel and vital to the defense of the king's French possessions. It is said that the king flew into such a rage at the extraordinary request that he struck the prince in the face and dragged him around the room by his hair, screaming at him for his stupidity. Piers Gaveston did not get Ponthieu. Instead, he got banished from England.
Now, as king, young Edward II could do as he liked. His first official act as monarch was to call his lover back to the English court, where he was compensated for the discomfort of his brief exile by being made earl of Cornwall.
AS Edward II was using the first few months of his reign to exercise his royal powers for the benefit of his favorite, his barons used thc time to reduce that power. They gained control of the Curia Regis, the king's council, and created within it a governing committee of what they called the "lords ordainers." Gaveston seemed to divide his time between making incessant demands on the king for wealth and power and using his wit and facility with words to mock the nobles at court, even making up insulting nicknames for each of them. That antagonism set the tone of the English court for the next five years. Whereas the suppression of the Templars was a grim dedication at the court of France, to the English court it was more of a distraction. Other major events had to be addressed: Robert Bruce had left his sanctuary in the Western Isles and was back on the mainland of Scotlancl rallying his people. The king's wedding with Isabella of France had been scheduled to take place in Boulogne during the following Januar~, and the preparations would take months.
Philip sent an envoy, Bernard Pelletin, to his future son‑in‑law, urging that he arrest the Templars in his realm, and the pope transmitted his written instructions for those arrests. The reaction of Edward II to the charges against the Templars was one of disbelief. He had grown up with the Templars all about him. The London temple had acted as host to many of the young men who had been knighted with him, even willingly chopping down part of their temple orchard to accommodate tents for the newly made knights who would fight for their king against Scotland. AII English master of the temple, Brian de Jay, had died fighting for England against William Wallace. The order didn't appear guilty of anything to the young king, and he said so as he dispatched let
146 BORN IN BLOOD
ters to other Christian monarchs, asking that they support him indefending the Templars against the false charges. On December 4 Edward wrote to the pope, declining to arrest the Templars in England on grounds of their innocence. In transit, his letter crossed the path of the bull Pastoralis Preeminentae, the official papal condemnation of the Templars that had been published on November 22, 1307. Edward II received his copy on December 15. His personal feelings no longer mattered, and he now had no choice but to order the Templar arrests. But he didn't have to do it right away.
We do not know if the delay was born of the king's own personal feelings, his propensity to procrastinate, or the influence of the Templars and their friends at court, but the arrests in England did not begin until January 7 in London, and stretched out from there with the passage of additional days as orders were disseminated throughout the kingdom and to the English provinces on the continent. Whatever arrangements had been made for the Templars' flight during the two months between news of the Templar arrests in France and the receipt in England of the papal bull on December 15 would have been greatly accelerated by the alarming news that the arrests were imminent. We can only imagine the stir when the English master, William de la More, returned from the court to the Temple at London to report the arrival of the papal bull. Riders undoubtedly went galloping out from London in all directions to warn their brothers in the shires.
That there was effective planning in those twenty‑three days between the arrival of the bull on December 15 and the start of the arrests on January 7, 1308, is beyond question. When the royal troops came for them they were able to arrest a few, but most of the Templar knights, sergeants, and clerics were not to be found. Records were missing or destroyed. At the London temple the soldiers of the king, expecting to seize the greatest treasure they would ever see, actually found less than two hundred pounds. The gold and silver plate, the jewelled reliquaries, all were gone.
Also gone was the king. He and many of the lords of the household had embarked for France and the king's wedding to the twelve‑year‑old Princess Isabella of France (her preteen innocence giving no clue that she would one day be known to Englishmen as the "She‑Wolf of France"). To the fury of his nobles, Edward II named Piers Gaveston the regent of the realm, to gov
THE KNlGHTS TEMrLAR 147
ern in the king's absence. Gaveston would see no personal gain inthe matter of the Templars, and the nobles left behind had no heart for the task of arresting their brothers‑in‑arms, among whom many friendships existed. A royal dragnet, assisted by the religious orders, turned up only two fugitive Templars in all of England. Some Templar preceptors were permitted house arrest and stayed in their quarters. English master de la More, who probably had to stay behind because his flight would have given away all the careful preparations, was taken to prison in Canterbury, but lodged in relatively comfortable quarters with a royal allowance to permit him to purchase additional comforts from his jailers. Several of the captive Templars escaped from their prisons, which had to have involved help from inside or outside, or both. Perhaps the assistance they received was efficiently organized, or perhaps their pursuers had something less than an intense desire to recapture them, but for whatever reason not one of the escaped Templars was ever found.
As for those few Templars remaining in prison, they benefited from the fact that the Channel was not just a water barrier between Britain and the continent but was in many ways a philosophical barrier as well. Since the days of the old Celtic church, which had never been subject to the authority of Rome, leaders of the church in England and of the secular government hald struggled against papal authority in the island kingdom, and one of the institutions they had resisted was the Inquisition, which did not exist in Britain. The Dominicans had been permitted to come in, but they had had to leave their charcoal fires and red‑hot pincers at home. The Templar prisoners were incarcerated but not tortured, a situation that was taken by Pope Clement V as a personal affront to his authority. He demanded that the Templars be tortured for confessions of heresy as he had originall y instructed. The pope also decreed that any person giving aid and assistance to a fugitive Templar, anyone even giving advice to a fugitive Templar, would be punished and excommunicated. Remarkably, the threat of torture and excommunication for those aiding the fugitives did not result in the reporting of even one missin~ Templar. While the pope was struggling to get Edward II to bend to his will, his fellow Gascon, Piers Gaveston, was enjoying huge success in that same endeavor. Upon his return from his wedding, Edward had given Gaveston some of the most valuable
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jewelled wedding gifts. At the king's coronation the following montht Gaveston was given a position above all the peers of the kingdom.
Two years went by, and the Templars being questioned without torture confessed nothing, constantly reaffirming their innocence, perhaps heartened by the occasional escape of one of their brothers. In response to a papal demand that torture be applied, Edward replied that torture had never played a role in eitller ecclesiastic or secular jurisprudence in England, so that he didn't even have anyone in the kingdom who knew how to do it. Exasperated, Clement V wrote warning Edward that he must look to the fate of his own soul in thus flouting the direct orders of the vicar of Christ on earth, and saying that he would try just one more time, giving King Edward the benefit of the doubt. The pope was dispatching ten skilled torturers to England in the charge of two experienced Dominicans; now Edward should be out of excuses. Further, when the torturers reached their destination, Clement expected that they would be put to work promptly. It says something for the pope's resolve that he took time out from the important religious duties of his holy office on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1310, to deal with the problem of ensuring the infliction of agonizing physical abuse on the captive Templars. His Christmas gift to the people of England was t:he introduction into their legal system of interrogation by torture.
Edward did receive the papal torture team, but ordered that their ministrations must exclude mutilation and that there must be no permanent wounds and "no violent effusions of blood." There is very little that history can report to Edwarcl's credit; however, these restrictions on the torturing of the English Templars may be the first recorded effort to place some kind of check on the runaway madness that peaked in the fourteenth century and made the application of maximum pain on another human being a vital part in deposition and interrogation. As with the pain inflicted by angry parents or schoolmasters, it was probably born of frustration, but it grew in frequency of application and in ingenuity until it tipped over the edge of sanity when someone decided that this would be an effective tool in protecting and furthering the teachings of Jesus Christ. The church did ultimately put curbs on the use of torture by the Inquisition, but not without strong objection being registered by leading Dominican friars,
THE KNlGHTS TEMrLAR 149
who felt that their effectiveness was being curtailed. It remained for secular authority to provide the most dramatic limitations to legal torture in what is probably the most misunderstood term in its long history, the "third degree." Somehow this term has been taken by some to have a relationship to Freemasonry, probably because of the bloody oath of the Master Mason in the "thircl degree" of Masonry.
The phrase actually originated in what was at the time consid ered an extremely humane decree. Up to the time of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, individual authorities were very much on their own in setting limits on the types and intensity of torture used to question "witnesses" or to extract confessions. Innocent people often died as a result of the questioning, and many more were crippled for life. Under Maria Theresa in the eighteenth century, the tortures to be used for questioning were standardized throughout her domain. The First Degree of the Question was the thumbscrew. This little machine was tightened by two threaded bolts until pressure by a bar or blunt point was brought to the base of the thumbnail. Then the questions began, with subsequent turns of the screw until the thumb joint was crushed.
In the Second Degree of the Question, the victim was stripped to the waist and tied, with arms stretched upward, to a crude ladder placed at an angle against a table or wall. The torturer held a candle flame in position to burn the sensitive skin of the side, at locations from the waist to the armpit. With so large an area to work in, on two sides of the body, and with wide latitude as to the time the flame could be held to the flesh, the torturer had considerable discretion as to the amount of pain inflicted, according to his appraisal of the importance of the witness or his own mental set.
The Third Degree of the Question was the strappado. The victim first had his hands tied behind his back; then a rope was tied to his wrists and passed through a pulley attached to the ceiling. By pulling on the rope, the torturer and his assistants would pull the victim's arms straight up behind him, causing excruciating shoulder pain, until the victim's feet actually left the floor. Now, two variations might be introduced. With the victim's feet several feet off the floor, the torturer could release the rope and grab it again, causing the victim to drop and be jerked to a stop, a procedure that frequently led to the dislocation of one or both shoul
t 50 I~ORN IN BLOOD
ders. In the other variation, once the victim was suspended in t'heair, the assistant would tackle his legs and pull with all his weight toward the floor, thus intensifying the pain and perhaps tearing the victim's arms out of their sockets.
Anyone who passed through the third degree without confessing was to be judged innocent and released. It is important to understand that the foregoing, however brutal it may appear, was hailed by secular and religious leaders alike as an example of Christian mercy, and indicative of the humanitarian qualities of the empress.
Edward's orders had not been as restrictive as the three degrees of the question of Maria Theresa, but perhaps his expressed sympathy for the victims had some bearing on the fact that even under torture no material confessions were extracted from the English Templars. They may have benefited as well from being in confinement for three years before the torture began, during which time they could talk among themselves and steel their resolve, in contrast to their French brothers, who had been taken completely by surprise and subjected to the agonies of the Inquisition immediately after their arrests.
One effect of the commencement of the torture of the Templars in England would most certainly have been to increase the determination of the fugitives not to be caught. For three years capture had meant only imprisonment with their fellow Templars, but to be taken now would mean to share their suffering at the hands of the ten papal specialists in human agony.
While all this was happening in England, the pope's efforts to have the Templars in Scotland arrested and questioned got nowhere. There were a few Templar arrests in January 1308, but Robert Bruce was busy with problems of his own and was more likely to recruit warrior knights in his kingdom than to arrest and torture them. Bruce knew that the death of Edward I had bought him additional time but that sooner or later an invading English army would cross the Tweed to bring him down. He had no interest in the military orders, no interest in a Crusade to the Holy Land, no interest in the ambitions of Philip of France or Pope Clement V. Bruce's interest was totally dedicated to the security of an inldependent Scottish nation. As a Christian monarch, he had received a copy of the papal bull of condemnation, with instructions to carry out the decree it embodied, but he apparently just
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cast it aside. The papal bull was never published, announced, or acknowledged in Scotland, thereby giving that country the aspect of a legal haven for fugitive Templars from England or the continent. Not only would a fugitive Templar knight have felt safe, but if he had no compunction about fighting against the English king he would have been a welcome addition to Bruce's pitifully small force of armored cavalry. How important that small force was to Bruce would be amply demonstrated when the English finally launched their invasion of Scotland just a few years later.
As the persecution of the Templars in England moved into the stage of formal inquiries in November 1309, the tribunals had little in the way of confessions to help them, and little in the way of witnesses. Most of those who came forward to testify against the Templars were members of other religious orders and had lit‑tle to offer except rumor and hearsay. As to the rulers of the country, they were not all that interested: Their attentions were focused elsewhere. The ten professional torturers provided by the pope knew their business‑‑there was a variety of ways in which they could inflict excruciating pain while still staying within the king's guidelines‑‑but in spite of that revolting expertise they extracted no material confessions. They were only able to get admissions that to preserve their secrets Templars were told to go only to their own priests for confession, that they might have occasionally absolved each other of sin in special situations, and that they wore a cord next to their skin, although they didn't know why. It was conceded that this cord might have been a dividing line defining the "zones of chastity," a device invented by St. Bernard of Clairvaux for holy orders. There were no confessions of heresy, blasphemy, obscene kisses, or homosexual practices.
In 131 1, the year that the Templar torture began in England, the lords ordainers had had enough of the king's homosexual favorite, not so much because of his and the king's sexual proclivities as because Piers Gaveston had used his hold over the king to secure almost total control over the monarchy. Much to the anger of the king, the barons, aided by the fact that Gaveston had been excommunicated by the archbishop of Canterbury, exilecl Gaveston to Flanders. Within the year, however, he was back, and while the Council of Vienne was sitting to talk a new Crusade and the fate of the Templar order, the lords ordainers were busy chas
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ing Gaveston around the north of England. They finally trappedhim in Scarborough Castle where, characteristically, he talked them into sparing his life. As he was being taken under guard to London, Gaveston's escort was surrounded by the troops of the earl of Warwick. Although a lord ordainer himself, Warwick maintained that since he had not been at Scarborough, he had not been a party to the agreement reached there with Gaveston and so was not bound by it. Gaveston was taken back to Warwick Castle, but knowing that the king would exert any pressure to save his favorite, Warwick had his men take the prisoner outside the castle to Blacklow Hill, where they struck off his head on July 1, 1312.
Edward II evidently learned nothing from this incident, apart from new levels of rage, and before long he was under the influence of yet another homosexual lover. For the moment, however, his fortunes seemed at their lowest ebb and the monarchy itself in great danger, as the lords ordainers could reflect on their victory over their defenseless king. Edward decided to take tlle advice given to disturbed rulers for centuries before and after him, that the way to pull the nation together again and regain his own authority was to take his country to war. In 1313, at the urging of his father‑in‑law, Philip of France, Edward took the cross and swore to lead his people on the great new Crusade that had been declared by the same Council of Vienne that had abolished the Templar order the year before. However, neither Edward nor his people had any desire to travel to the Holy Land. Politically and militarily, it would be disastrous for English fighting men to absent themselves at the very time that the energetic King Robert in Scotland was inexorably evicting the English from one Scottish stronghold after another, until in all of Scotland only the castles of Dunbar, Berwick, and Stirling remained in English hands. No, it was not a costly Crusade under the domination of the French king that would establish Edward's supremacy over his warrior barons, but rather a great victory over the threatening enemy at England's back door. The promises to his father would be kept. Edward II would be the king who would finally bring the Scottish nation to heel and make it a part of the English realm.
In 1314, while the hot coals were roasting the flesh from the blackening bones of Jacques de Molay, Edward II was marshaling a great force for the final invasion and conquest of Scotland. Bruce was able to assemble ten thousand men to defend their
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homeland, while England drew on all its resources and territories to amass an army of over twenty‑five thousand, including five thousand heavily armored cavalry and about ten thousand archers.
The lords ordainers, the chief barons of the realm, had no desire to risk their lives to make a national hero of the despised king, and a number of them simply declined to go. That was apparently all right with Edward, who made no moves to force them, probably because he had no desire to share the anticipated glory with the men he was striving to dominate.
As the strung‑out army advanced through the north of England, foraging for many miles on either side of its route, Robert Bruce had ample warning of its approach. The English were looking for him, which gave Bruce the advantage of selecting his ground, a field where his men could relax and refresh themselves while the weary English troops tramped mile after mile to meet him. Bruce chose ground that placed his men between the approaching English and Stirling Castle with its small English garrison, a few miles to the north.
Having learned well from the campaigns of Wallace, Bruce set his schiltrons, those circles of men with twelve‑foot spears, along the top of a slope, between dense patches of woods. In anticipation of the charge of the vastly superior English cavalry, he had hundreds of potholes dug at random in front of his spearmen and covered with grass and brush like animal traps. His horde of camp followers, carters, cooks, and families was ordered to safety behind a nearby hill. Finally, remembering that Wallace's cavalry, his only defense against the English archers, had abandoned him on the field of Falkirk under their disgruntled commander, Bruce himself assumed direct command of his few hundred mounted knights. It was into this crucial force that legend says Bruce welcomed a group of fugitive Knights of the Temple.
At the bottom of the slope was the valley floor of marshy land, with just one hard road. The valley and its boggy bottom were intersected by a small stream, or "burn" in the Scottish dialect, called Bannock Burn. It was about to assume the highest place in Scottish military history.
Learning of Bruce's position, the English army turned toward him, and finally the vanguard arrived on the opposite side of the burn. The huge force was so strung out that it took three days for
1 54 BORN IN BLOOD
the rear echelon to close up. While they were gathering, a small force was sent to relieve Stirling Castle, which would give the English a fortified position at Bruce's back. Scouts reported the move, and Bruce acted quickly to intercept the English relief force. Its leader, Sir Henry de Bohun, rode out in front of his men to challenge Bruce to single combat. Bruce accepted the challenge and galloped out to take his stand in front of his men. Sir Henry lowered his lance to its rest and spurred his heavy warhorse toward the waiting Scottish king. Bruce had selected his light mount that day for swift pursuit and was armed with a battle ax having nowhere near the reach of de Bohun's lance. As the lance point reached him, Bruce deflected it with a back‑stroke of his ax and followed with a swift forward stroke of the broad blade, killing the English knight with a single blow. The raid to relieve Stirling was over, and as the news spread the Scots swelled with renewed pride in their warrior king.
On the English side the king, who was anything but a warrior, ordered the attack and unleashed his heavy horse. They slogged through soft ground on both sides of the stream, then spurred their mounts up the slope to the waiting spearmen. Horses tripped in the potholes, horses tripped over other horses, but at last they reached the bristling picket of spears. English and Scots locked into a mass from which neither side would back off. English reinforcements were poured in but couldn't get to the enemy on the limited six‑thousand‑foot front. The archers were ineffective because their massed flights of arrows had more chance of hitting their comrades than of striking the outnumbered Scots. The answer was to move the archers to the Scottish flank where they could pick their targets.
As the English archers moved across the field, Bruce readied his mounted knights, holding them in tight control. To get the maximum impact from the charge of the huge war‑horses, he needed the archers to be massed together to begin their arrow flights, not strung out and moving. Finally the archers were in place, prepared to decimate the Scottish spearmen, and Bruce gave the command his knights had awaited so eagerly. The English archers were bowled over by armored war‑horses trained to kick, bite, and trample, ridden by armored men who laid on the armorless archers with ax and mace. The bowmen broke and fled scrambling down the hill.
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR I 5 5
Perhaps the observers from Bruce's camp followers thought that the retreating archers meant a Scottish victory, or they may have been stirred to action by some patriotic zealot, but for whatever reason the Scottish noncombatants decided to change their status. Waving homemade flags, shouting and blowing horns, the unarmed men, women, and boys came pouring over their hill and into the woods on the English left. The English troops were threatened by what they took to be fresh Scottish reinforcements. Their left began to falter, and Edward II decided to leave the field. His household and bodyguard went with him, soon joined by other confused and poorly led units, until the entire invading army was in full flight. The jubilant Scots came bounding down the slope after them, plunging their spears into one back after another. It was the worst military disaster in English history, with an estimated fifteen thousand Englishmen lost, as compared to about four thousand Scots. The Battle of Bannock Burn ended the hopes for English dominion over Scotland, which maintained its status as an independent nation until the union of the two countries under one king almost four centuries later, in 1707.
As the survivors of Bannock Burn, including King Edward, made their way back to their homes, they traveled through a land in a state of near anarchy. The weakness of the king had permitted the erosion of central power by a group of ambitious barons, eager for their own personal gain but having not the slightest interest in engendering any increase in the voice in government for the common people. Their leader, Thomas of Lancaster, had managed to usurp for himself the great holdings of the earldoms of Lancaster, Lincoln, Leicester, Derby, and Salisbury.
The central government, almost microscopic in the terms by which we think of government personnel today, depended upon the nobles and knights to maintain law and order in the realm, but beyond protecting their own personal interests they were both indifferent and not up to the demands of the job. Outlaw bands proliferated. In some areas they comprised the only law and order available, and on several occasions they were hired as mercenaries by both ecclesiastic and secular lords to defend their properties. Outlaws so dominated some territories that local lords were ordered to have all trees and bushes cut back on either side of well‑traveled stretches of road to prevent ambush and surprise attacks. This was the age that made folk heroes of outlaws and
156 BORN IN BLOOD
furthered legends like those of Robin Hood. No one condemned these heroes for pouncing on wealthy abbots and bishops to relieve them of the pounds and pennies that had been extracted from their parishoners. No sin was here, because the legendary robbers did not enter churches to steal golden crosses and silver candelabra but only took what was perceived to be the personal wealth of greedy prelates. Bold robbers broke all the game laws, too, to take fresh meat whenever they liked, the dream of every peasant. It doesn't matter that the outlaws were not really like the fabled Robin Hood, but it does matter that it is in that context that they lived in folk memory. The peasant could act out his fantasies vicariously‑‑thrash an arrogant baron, take the gold away from a greedy bishop, treat his family and friends to a great feast of illegal venison. The popularity of Robin Hood and his like tells us much of how the common people felt about their lives and about those that man and God had set above them.
As to the outlaw bands, they were made up of men who were "out‑law," outside the protection of the laws of the land, which allowed anyone to beat, rob, or even kill them with no fear of legal punishment. Their only hope of protection from law‑abiding citizens was to band together with others of their kind. Templar knights and men‑at‑arms with no trade other than fighting, already condemned by both king and church, would have been ideal recruits. We do not know that any fugitive Templars did join the outlaws or form bands of their own, but we do know that such bands operated all around the areas of the Templar manors and commanderies.
Edward looked for allies and found two in the earl of Winchester, Hugh le Despenser, a lord of the Welsh marches (borderlands), and his handsome son, also named Hugh. Once again Edward was totally captivated by a homosexual lover, the younger Despenser, and permitted the older man to manage much of the affairs of the kingdom. The Despensers used that power to encroach upon the other lords of the Welsh marches to the extent that those lords allied themselves with Thomas, duke of Lancaster, and the other lords ordainers who followed him. Despenser organized a campaign against Lancaster and defeated the march lords, taking as prisoner one of their leaders, Roger de Mortimer. In the following year, 1322, Despenser organized a campaign against Lancaster and defeated him at the Battle of
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Boroughbridge in Yorkshire. Lancaster was taken back to his own castle at Pontefract and beheaded there. Roger de Mortimer managed to avoid the similar fate planned for him by escaping from his prison and fleeing to France, where he would soon be joined by a royal co‑conspirator.
Charles IV, king of France and brother of Queen Isabella of England, took advantage of the troubles in England to seize the duchy of Gascony. This was a great blow to Edward's purse, because the wine trade that operated through Bordeaux earned him more income than all of his English holdings. Isabella offered to go to Paris to negotiate with her brother for the return of the rich province, and Edward agreed.
In France, Isabella met and fell in love with Roger de Mortimer. Mortimer wanted revenge and the return of his lands. Isabella was totally disgusted with her husband's relationship with the younger Despenser and thoroughly detested both the young man and his father. Together, Isabella and Mortimer hatched a plan to seize the English throne for the underage Prince of Wales, with themselves as regents and rulers of England. Isabella sent for the prince on the excuse that he should do homage to her brother for the Gascon province. As soon as the boy was with them, Isabella and Mortimer put together an army of mercenaries and invaded England in September 1326. They were made welcome by a people angry at the arrogance of the Despensers and the king's neglect of almost every royal duty in his consuming preoccupation with his lover. The Despensers, father and son, were quickly taken and met death by strangulation in the hangman's noose. The king himself was imprisoned and forced to abdicate in favor of his fourteen‑year‑old son. After a year in various prisons, Edward II was finally murdered at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire on September 22, 1327. The rough knights who did the job apparently decided that since he had chosen the way he wanted to live, he could bloody well die the same way, as they held him down and pushed a red‑hot iron spit up his rectum.
The rcign of Edward II was perhaps the most dismal and deplorable period to be found in English history, but as such was a blessing for men on the run and in hiding. We have seen that the fugitive Templars, who may well have been joined by fugitive brothers from the continent, had ample motivation to run to
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escape the chains and tortures waiting for them. We have also seen that the shambles that was the government of Edward II was ideal for fugitives who could only benefit from the demise of law and order. Scotland would welcome them, but only in a clandestine sense, in that their presence would have to be kept secret from the religious orders, who would most certainly have followed the pope's orders and turned them in. But what about the fugitives themselves? What were their needs and fears as they sought refuge, new identities, new homes? Under the circumstances, would those needs be better served by a secret society than by the security of individual effort? In the search for the Great Society, there was a need to look at the problems of the man on the run from the point of view of the man doing the running.
CHAPTER 1 1
~V~
MEN ON THE RUN
The one common characteristic of fugitives on the run is their mental state, which is one of unrelenting stress, never knowing when to expect the hand on the shoulder or the door crashing in. The outward manifestation of that stress is panic, a state that interferes with thinking and acting in a rational, constructive manner. The most effective antidotes for that panic are a plan and some assistance from fellow human beings. The fugitive with no plan and no objective, all alone, is in constant danger of betraying himself. The most successful escaped convicts or prisoners of war have always been those who spent as much time planning what they would do after the escape as they spent on planning the escape itself. Those who have escaped by grasping a sudden opportunity, finding themselves outside with no idea of what to do or where to go, have almost always been recaptured quickly.
The Templars were fortunate in having almost three months' warning of their impending arrests, which gave them time to plan both individually and in concert with their comrades. They also had funds and means of transportation. They had friends and connections in all parts of Britain, which was, as we have seen, by no means a single political unit. Their biggest problem would be one of discovery by the other religious orders, whose holdings constituted fully one‑third of the land surface of Britain. It was not that all of the other orders bore them any special animosity so much as that the Templars were living proof that the pope
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could and would punish a religious order with imprisonment, pain, death, and loss of property. This was no time for any order to overlook any opportunity to demonstrate loyalty and obedience to the Holy See. No fugitive Templar could expect another religious to look the other way.
Another problem that must have arisen was the diversity of the men involved. The order to arrest the Templars and their associates included representatives of almost every free stratum of medieval society. Members of the order included the full brothers, the knights who, as a condition of their membership, had to prove their lineage as members of the knightly class; the sergeants, drawn from the bourgeoisie; and the clerics, the Templar priests who could come from any of several classes so long as they were freeborn. Beyond these, the arrest orders included other Templar associates who might give information about their activities, such as their servants, the stewards and tenants of Templar manors, the craftsmen who operated the Templars' forges, saddleries, mills, and so forth, and the mercantile employees who supervised buying, selling, and shipping, and who operated their franchised markets.
The Templar officers alone could draw on the central Templar treasury, although local preceptors and stewards might have some funds available. Many of the others might have nothing and have to be assisted in some way. As to transportation, each knight had at least three horses. He had his powerful trained war‑horse, his hack or other light, swift horse for travel, and a packhorse to carry his armor and weapons, with other supplies. The fleeing knight had more than enough ready transportation. That was not true of the bulk of the other Templar fugitives, who would have had to move on foot or by boat.
In spite of his obvious advantages, the knight also had his own special problems. His hair was close‑cropped at a time when long hair was the fashion, but he could at least contrive to wear some kind of head covering until it grew out. His beard was a different matter. The fashion was to be clean‑shaven, so the Templar's full, untrimmed beard would mark him in a crowd. He could shave it off, but if he had recently reached Britain after spending years in the Middle East he would have looked just as strange beardless, with a face the color of mahogany above, and a snow‑white chin and cheeks below. Applying dirt or stain, or staying out of sight
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until his tan skin paled, would have been absolutely necessary, because there was no way that his pale cheeks and chin would tan to match the rest of his face under a British winter sun.
Clothing was a concern, too. The normal dress of all three degrees of the Templar order was a cowled robe, as was appropriate to an order of monks. They did, of course, have battle dress, but they wore that hot, heavy garb only when necessary. A look into a Templar dining hall would have revealed a gathering of silent, robed monks, not a vociferous gustatory gathering of armored knights like that in the great hall of King Arthur's court. To flee the papal arrests, the fugitive members would need complete new wardrobes suitable to the roles they would be assuming.
An even more challenging consideration would have been that of language. The Templars were essentially a French‑speaking order, and French was the language of the British nobility and monarchy. It would be another fifty years before legal trials in England would be conducted in English rather than French. Some of the knights and Templar priests must have possessed a working knowledge of English in order to supervise their properties and employees, but any one of them would have revealed his social stratum with the first sentence or two spoken in his Frenchaccented English. Undoubtedly the Templar knight who knew no trade but fighting would find his safest home among his own kind. He might pledge himself in feudal contract under a different name to one of the barons of the realm, who would welcome an experienced fighter and probably not be concerned that the recruit was being sought by the church and the English crown. There were plenty in England who might welcome him, and there were also Norman‑French barons in Wales and Scotland and even in Ireland, where, for example, the great landholding Norman family of de Burghe had not yet had its name evolve into what now appears to be the purely Irish name of Burke.
To the man on the run, safety frequently is represented by geography. He must get out of enemy territory or beyond the reach of the law. For a fugitive from the church, however, there was no completely safe haven in all of Christendom. His safety would have to come from secrecy, from a new name, a new home, a new means of livelihood. This would be extremely difficult in a world of small communities (London itself, the largest city in Britain, had a population of just about twenty‑five thousand).
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The fourteenth‑century fugitive would have needed help, including assistance from friends who would support him and swear to his new identity. That particular sort of problem is dealt with by one of the Old Charges of Freemasonry, which says that a visiting brother is not to go "into the town" unless accompanied by a local brother who can "witness" for him (i.e., vouch for him to the local authorities, who had the right to arrest strangers of unknown business in the town).
On the run, the fugitive would have one overriding concern, which was to not be caught. That meant traveling off the main tracks, preferably with a guide or with directions provided by a friend. In a village or smaller town he would be most vulnerable, because a stranger would be easily spotted. His next major concerns were something to eat and a safe place to sleep, with the latter far more stressful to him. Eating can be done at odd times, on the move, and even postponed for long periods. Sleeping cannot be put off beyond the point at which the human body absolutely demands it, and then the fugitive is at gravest risk. The toughest, strongest, most experienced fighting man alive is as defenseless as any child when sound asleep. Safe lodging would have been an imperative.
At the hundreds of Templar properties throughout Britain, the local employees would certainly have been aided by their own families and friends in order to remain in hiding in nearby areas. Those families and friends would also b
