Chapter 4: 1307-1312 · §1 Arrests in Wales
The King’s Sheriff at the Gates
On the cold morning of Wednesday, 10 January 1308, the sound of hoofbeats on the tracks leading to the Cleddau did not signal a returning brother or a merchant from Bristol. It was the start of a massive administrative shift. Following the orders of Edward II, who acted under pressure from Philip IV of France, the sheriffs of the Welsh and English counties moved at once to arrest every member of the Order of the Temple. In the lordship of Pembroke and the southern March, no sieges took place and no resistance was recorded. The brothers were mostly aging administrators rather than young warriors. They were taken into custody with a bureaucratic efficiency that suggests they were unprepared for the charges of heresy and blasphemy manufactured in Paris. These men had little reason to expect such a sudden end to their long-established legal standing.
The context of these arrests in Wales shows a king acting with reluctance. Unlike the French king, who wanted to destroy the Order to seize its wealth and cancel his debts, Edward II initially defended the Templars. He wrote to the kings of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon to express his disbelief in the accusations. The papal bull Pastoralis Praelantiae eventually made this position impossible to hold. By mid-winter, the orders had reached the Welsh marcher lords and the royal officials in the principality. The arrests were a legal obligation and not an ideological crusade. This tone of civil formality marked the whole process in the British Isles. There is no evidence of the torture that defined the French proceedings. Instead, the Welsh brothers were gathered and moved to central locations while royal clerks meticulously inventoried their lands and their goods.
Few names survive for the men caught in this dragnet within Wales. This reflects the small, skeletal nature of the Welsh preceptories by the early fourteenth century. At the time of the arrests, a handful of brothers and a larger number of lay servants and tenants likely managed the Welsh estates. These men were held in local castles, including the great fortress at Pembroke, before being moved toward London or York for formal examination. The records of the Exchequer for 1308 show the costs of their maintenance. The rate was fourpence a day for a knight and twopence for a serving brother. This was a dignified, if restrictive, confinement rather than a starvation diet. These conditions stood in sharp contrast to the horrific dungeons of the Temple in Paris where many French brothers were held and died during the same period.
The geographical isolation of the Welsh cells meant that news of the arrest of Grand Master Jacques de Molay in October 1307 had certainly reached them. They made no attempt to flee or to hide the assets of the Order. This lack of movement suggests they had a clear conscience or a fatalistic trust in the English legal system. When the sheriff’s men arrived at Slebech or Templeton, they found the granaries full and the chapel plate in its proper place. The inventories, which have been examined in previous sections, show no signs of the frantic liquidation of assets expected from a guilty or terrified organisation. The brothers were seemingly convinced that the storm would pass. They believed their service to the crusading cause would protect them from the king’s temporary displeasure and the accusations coming from across the Channel.
The interrogation of the Welsh and English Templars took place over several months and yielded none of the sensational confessions that fuelled the fires in France. Dominican and Franciscan friars appointed by the papacy handled the questioning. The brothers maintained their innocence regarding charges of spitting on the cross or the worship of idols. Most testimony in the British archives consists of brothers explaining the mundane details of their reception into the Order. Torture was not permitted under English common law. In its absence, the inquisitors were frustrated by a wall of consistent, boring orthodoxy. The Welsh brothers spoke of the Pater Noster and their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. By doing so, they denied the King and the Pope the evidence required for a swift condemnation of the Order as a heretical body.
By 1311, as the Council of Vienne approached, the situation for the Welsh brothers remained in a state of limbo. They were eventually gathered at the Tower of London or other major ecclesiastical centres. There, authorities pressured them to admit that the reputation of the Order was so tarnished that it could no longer exist. Eventually, most were reconciled to the Church. They made a general confession of their inability to clear themselves of public scandal instead of admitting to specific crimes. They were then pensioned off or sent to live in various monasteries of other orders. For these men, many of whom had spent their lives managing sheep and tithes on the Pembrokeshire coast, the end of their Order was an administrative termination of their identity. However, in Wales, this process did not lead to the stake.
The physical arrests and the quiet removal of the brothers mark the end of the Templars as a living presence in the Welsh landscape. The land itself remained. The granges were still producing wool and the mills were still turning on the Cleddau. The crown now possessed a vast, productive estate that it was not entirely sure how to manage. With the brothers gone to their varied places of exile and the Order officially suppressed by the Pope in 1312, the focus shifted from the bodies of the knights to the future of their property. This transition would prove far more contentious than the arrests themselves as local interests began to compete for the spoils left behind by the departed monks.
The legal struggle for the spoils of the Temple soon began as the Crown, the Marcher lords, and the Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem all asserted their claims to the vacant Welsh estates.