Donning the Armour of God: A Case Study of the Crusader Orders in Medieval London (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Templars’ Estates in the west of Britain in the early fourteenth century
The Military Orders, vol. 6.2: Culture and Conflict in Western and Northern Europe, ed. Jochen Schenk and Mike Carr (London: Routledge: ISBN: 978-1-47-247638-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-31-546625-5 (ebk)),, 2016
This article represents a progress report on my research into the Templars’ properties in England and Wales, as recorded after the arrests of the Templars in Britain and Ireland and preserved in the UK National Archives at Kew. The detailed descriptions of the Templars’ properties drawn up when the Templars in England and Wales were arrested, combined with the accounts for their properties made by royal officials, permit a unique insight into agricultural practice, production and employment during the period 1308–13, and into the operation of this religious order, its religious life and role in wider society. The goal of this research is to publish the records for England and Wales (the records from Ireland were published in 1967), to make them available to all scholars with an interest in medieval estate records; but with the particular intention of establishing exactly how wealthy or poverty-stricken the Templars in England and Wales were in 1308, and what property the Hospitallers inherited in 1313.
The Knights Templar in English towns
Urban History, 2022
The Military Order of the Knights Templar acquired property within English towns, established residences and chapels for its brethren there and developed new urban settlements and markets. This article argues that the role that the Templars played as urban landlords in England has been seriously understated, and that the Order made an impact through their urban property holdings, their privileges and their urban chapels, and in establishing new towns, which were integral to the wider exploitation of their rural resources.
Book Review: Steve Tibble, Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain (Yale University Press, 2023
Dr Tibble's work is a refreshing take on a subject that, despite being well-covered in academic literature, has the enduring tendency to encourage misunderstanding and 'pseudo-history' outside of scholarly circles. It can be a challenge to combine academic rigour with popular appeal, but the two are excellently balanced in this book. Writing in an engaging and highly readable style, Tibble charts the history of an organisation that, from its humble beginnings, rose rapidly to become a hugely powerful and influential corporation across Europe and the Near East, before its dramatic suppression and dissolution in the early fourteenth century. The Order of the Knights Templar was formed in Jerusalem, around twenty years after the armies of the First Crusade had conquered the city and its surrounding territories (the 'Latin East') from the Muslims. Created to assist in the defence of these territories, this 'military order' combined an elite military vocation with the fierce spirituality, discipline and unity of a monastic lifestyle. Though their beginnings were limited to protecting Christian pilgrims, extensive support from the Papacy, the wider Church and lay society allowed the Templars to grow and extend their remit considerably, participating in crusades, garrisoning castles and acting as financiers, diplomats and tax collectors.
Crusades, 12, 2013
Scholars usually consider the military orders as essentially involved in the agrarian economy and seigniorial society. However, this understanding is not entirely correct. All military orders were connected to the urban world from their origins and they built close spiritual and economic ties with urban societies. The aim of this article is to present some of the most recent research that has reappraised the role of the military orders in medieval towns. This survey is limited to the cases of the Temple and the Hospital, and it considers the question mainly in southern Europe (northern Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and southern France), including some brief comparisons with the Holy Land. The article first discusses the ways in which commanderies contributed to the "urban fabric" by examining the conventual buildings and the orders' policies of urbanization. Then, it turns to the social and spiritual networks and to the economic practices that the brethren managed to develop in places where several other churches were already deeply rooted. Finally, the study of urban commanderies enables us to better understand the transition from traditional monasticism to the new mendicant orders, with whom the military orders shared many similarities. Despite a few exceptions, it is nevertheless true that the economic activity and the spirituality of the military orders were in complete harmony with the urban expansion of the High Middle Ages.
Journal of Medieval History, 2020
For almost 400 years the Knights of St John of Jerusalem – the Knights Hospitaller – maintained a priory in Kilmainham, Co. Dublin, as their principal residence in Ireland. Nothing survives of it above ground. The priory’s early history and topography are mainly shrouded in mystery, but a fourteenth-century registrum illuminates the workings of its community and the character of its members, and provides the archaeologist with valuable evidence relating to the appearance of its architecture and lay-out when it was at the peak of its prosperity. Yet, the Registrum has never been subjected to detailed scrutiny by archaeologists. Recent research on the Hospitallers in Ireland on the one hand, and on the organization of domestic space in medieval contexts in Ireland on the other, has prompted this first-ever comprehensive appraisal of the evidence in Kilmainham’s Registrum. The Journal Article appeared online on 14 July 2020.
Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 20, 2017
This volume is based upon a conference convened at the University of Kent in April 2015 to celebrate the conclusion of a major programme of archaeological excavation targeting the Anglo-Saxon royal centre and monastery of Lyminge, Kent. The aim of the conference was to contextualize the principal findings of the Lyminge Project by drawing upon a range of historical and archaeological perspectives on early medieval monasticism in northwest Europe, with a geographical emphasis (though not exclusive focus) on Kent and neighbouring regions of the continental North Sea basin. In planning the conference, the organisers were conscious of following close on the heels of a number of high-profile academic networks and initiatives examining the Christianization of the ‘Insular’ British Isles with the spread of monastic culture forming one of its pivotal themes and institutional contexts.1 On the other hand, it was felt that the initiative had something genuinely distinctive to offer by shifting the spotlight of attention from Northumbria and the Celtic-speaking regions of the British Isles to Kent, a geographical zone which has been somewhat neglected in recent evaluations of Insular monasticism.2 This refocusing, it was hoped, would offer an opportunity for scholars to come together to look afresh at Kent as an early medieval monastic province, to re-evaluate the external (in particular) Frankish influences that shaped it and its own shaping influence on the expansion of monastic culture in the Insular British Isles. One of the key objectives of the current volume is to provide a fresh and current overview of the Lyminge Project and its contribution to early medieval studies at the end of the data-gathering phase and before the initiation of a large and complex programme of post-excavation analysis which lies ahead. For this reason, with the exception of Broadley’s contribution on the Anglo-Saxon glass, the editors decided against soliciting additional ‒ or, in the case of the three speakers who were unable to offer their papers for publication, replacement – contributions on the grounds that it would have resulted in an undue prolongation in the publication process. If the end product falls some way short of a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of recent historical and archaeological scholarship on early medieval monasticism in north-west Europe, then it is hoped that it provides a useful entry-point into some of the key debates and research agendas shaping the field as outlined in the rest of this introduction.