Chapter 1: Before Wales · §1 The birth of the Order
Before Wales: the birth of the Order
To understand why a small ruin beside the Cleddau matters, we must begin two thousand miles away and a generation earlier in 1119. During that winter, the order formed in a stripped-out wing of the al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The First Crusade had ended twenty years prior with the storming of the Holy City, leaving the roads between the Jaffa coast and the shrines of Bethlehem, Nazareth and the Jordan crowded with pilgrims. Bandits also crowded these routes. In the spring of 1119, attackers killed some three hundred unarmed pilgrims on the road from Jerusalem to the river. This slaughter moved King Baldwin II to act.
The response was small and unpromising. A Champenois knight named Hugues de Payns and eight companions, including Godfrey de Saint-Omer, presented themselves to the king and the Patriarch of Jerusalem. They swore the standard monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, along with a fourth vow to protect pilgrims on the roads of the Holy Land. Baldwin gave them quarters in a wing of the royal palace built over the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. From that location they took their name: the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. Within ten years, people called them the Templars.
For the first decade they were, by their own admission, nearly invisible. William of Tyre wrote seventy years later from the perspective of a much richer institution, noting they had no distinctive habit and begged for alms in the streets. It is easy to forget, standing at Slebech, that the order which eventually owned a seventy-year lease on half of south Pembrokeshire began with nine men. They were so poor that a chronicler noted two of them shared a single horse. This humble start gave no hint of the vast power and wealth that would eventually reach the Welsh borders.
Two things changed their fortunes. The first was patronage. Baldwin sent Hugues de Payns to Europe in 1127 to recruit men and raise money, and the mission succeeded. Hugues rode through Anjou, Normandy, Flanders and England. Everywhere he went, great lords granted the new order land, rents, mills and men. By the time he returned to the East, he had the beginnings of a European estate network. This was the same system that would, ninety years later, reach into the wet fields of west Wales to fund the order's military work in the Levant.
The second change was recognition. In January 1129, at the Council of Troyes, the Templars were formally acknowledged as a religious order. They received a Rule drafted largely under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, the most powerful churchman of the age and the Templars' great advocate. Bernard's short treatise In Praise of the New Knighthood gave the order its theological identity. He argued this was a discipline of arms sanctified by monastic obedience. The Templar functioned as a monk who happened to carry a sword into battle, blending two previously separate roles into a single force.
The Rule from Troyes explains a great deal of what remains in Wales. It forbade personal property, hunting, coloured clothing, and ornaments on bridles. It required silence in the refectory, communal sleeping in a lit dormitory, and attendance at all canonical hours of prayer. The document said nothing about building castles. The popular image of mailed knights charging across the desert with red crosses on white surcoats is real, but represents only one end of a long institutional spine. At the other end stood the estates: preceptories run by a few brothers and paid servants who made the land pay.
By the middle of the twelfth century, that estate network was vast. In 1139, Pope Innocent II issued the bull Omne Datum Optimum. This document exempted the Templars from all secular jurisdiction and the payment of tithes, placing them directly under the authority of the papacy. It was a decisive gift. When a Welsh Marcher lord or a Welsh prince granted the Templars a manor, that land left the ordinary web of feudal obligation. The Templars answered to Rome and no one else. They held courts, took tolls, and ran mills, sending the profits abroad without interference from bishops or sheriffs.
This is the machine that arrived in Wales. By the 1140s, the order moved into England in earnest. The London Temple was under construction by 1160, and preceptories were founded at Cressing in Essex, Temple Bruer in Lincolnshire, and Garway on the Herefordshire border. Garway is where the story joins Welsh history. It sits ten miles from Monmouth in the valley of the Monnow, forming the eastern threshold of the Welsh Templar landscape. From Garway, the order looked west into a country that Norman lords were still trying, painfully and incompletely, to hold down by force.
Two questions follow, and they occupy the next two sections of this history. First, we must ask why those lords gave the Templars land in Wales and what they hoped to gain. Second, we must describe what Wales was like in the middle of the twelfth century when the first Templar charter was drawn up. The second question is more important because it explains the first. We will examine the political and social conditions of the Welsh borderlands next. These conditions dictated how the order settled and how they managed their new properties amidst the ongoing conflict between the Welsh and the Marcher lords.
Before those knights could hold a single acre in Wales, however, the country itself had to be half-conquered — and it is to that divided landscape that we turn next.