Part I — Origins · 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 have to begin two thousand miles away and a generation earlier — in a stripped-out wing of the al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, in the winter of 1119. The First Crusade had ended two decades before with the storming of the Holy City, and the roads between the coast at Jaffa and the shrines of Bethlehem, Nazareth and the Jordan were now full of pilgrims. They were also full of bandits. In the spring of 1119 a party of some three hundred unarmed pilgrims was massacred on the road from Jerusalem to the river, and the shock of it seems to have finally moved King Baldwin II to act.
The response was small and unpromising. A Champenois knight named Hugues de Payns and eight companions — Godfrey de Saint-Omer among them — presented themselves to the king and to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and swore before them the standard monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, together 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, which had itself been built over the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. From that address they took their name — the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. Within a decade they would be known simply as the Templars.
For the first ten years they were, by their own admission, nearly invisible. William of Tyre, writing seventy years later from the perspective of a much richer institution, records that they had no distinctive habit and had to beg alms in the streets. It is easy to forget, standing at Slebech, that the order which would one day own a hundred and seventy-year lease on half of south Pembrokeshire began as nine men so poor that a chronicler thought it worth mentioning that two of them shared a single horse.
Two things changed that. The first was patronage: Baldwin sent Hugues de Payns to Europe in 1127 to recruit and to raise money, and the mission was extraordinarily successful. Hugues rode through Anjou, Normandy, Flanders and England, and 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 — the same network that would, ninety years on, reach into the wet fields of west Wales.
The second change was recognition. In January 1129, at the Council of Troyes, the Templars were formally acknowledged as a religious order and given a Rule, largely drafted 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, written a few years later, gave the order its theological identity: this was not war for its own sake, but a discipline of arms sanctified by monastic obedience. The Templar was to be a monk who happened to carry a sword.
The Rule that came out of Troyes is worth pausing on, because it explains a great deal of what you see (and don't see) on the ground in Wales. It forbade personal property, hunting, coloured clothing, ornaments on bridles. It required silence in the refectory, communal sleeping in a lit dormitory, and attendance at all the canonical hours of prayer. It said nothing about castles. The Templar image we have inherited — mailed knights charging across the desert with a red cross on a white surcoat — is real, but it belongs to only one end of a long institutional spine. At the other end, and far more numerous, were the estates: preceptories run by a handful of brothers, chaplains and paid servants, whose job was simply to make the land pay so that the fighting arm could be supplied.
By the middle of the twelfth century that estate network was vast. In 1139 Pope Innocent II issued the bull Omne Datum Optimum, which exempted the Templars from all secular jurisdiction and from the payment of tithes, and placed them directly under the authority of the papacy. It was a decisive gift. It meant that when a Welsh Marcher lord — or a Welsh prince — granted the Templars a manor, that manor passed out of the ordinary web of feudal obligation. The Templars answered to Rome and to no one else. They could hold courts, take tolls, run mills, ferry travellers, and remit the profits abroad, and neither bishop nor sheriff had any standing to interfere.
This is the machine that arrived in Wales. By the 1140s it was moving into England in earnest: the London Temple was under construction by 1160, and preceptories were being founded at Cressing in Essex, Temple Bruer in Lincolnshire, Garway on the Herefordshire border. Garway is the point at which the story becomes ours. It sits ten miles from Monmouth, in the valley of the Monnow, and it is the eastern threshold of what will become the Welsh Templar landscape. From Garway the order looked west, into a country that Norman lords were still, painfully and incompletely, trying to hold down.
Two questions naturally follow, and they will occupy the next two sections of this history. First: why did those lords give the Templars land in Wales at all — what did they hope to get out of it? Second: what was Wales like, in the middle of the twelfth century, when the first Templar charter was drawn up? The second question is the more important, because it explains the first, and it is where we go tomorrow.
Next in the series: §2 — Wales in the twelfth century: a country half-conquered.