The Invented Footprint

Richard Fenton, the Pembrokeshire lawyer and historian, published his Historical Tour through Pembrokeshire in 1810. This book provided one of the first systematic efforts to link the ruins at Slebech with the scattered records of the military orders. Fenton wrote when the medieval church of St John was still a substantial ruin, and he viewed the site with a disciplined, though sometimes romantic, eye. He collected accounts and recognised that the Cleddau estates were significant because of their international links. His work appeared at a specific time when the Enlightenment demand for hard facts met the new Romantic obsession with Gothic mystery. He acted as a bridge between these two schools, trying to document physical remains while the prevailing culture began to value the atmospheric and the ancient over the strictly proven.

Fenton and his later successor, William Rees, faced the difficult task of reconstructing an order that had been wiped out four hundred years earlier. The arrests of 1308 and the dissolution in 1540 created a void. Local memory and the imagination of the Georgian gentry soon filled this gap. While antiquarians spent their time transcribing old charters and tracing the land grants given to Flemish settlers in 'Little England', a different story took hold in the public mind. This popular narrative did not look for Templars in the crown ledger-books. Instead, it claimed to find them in every remote, circular, or oddly aligned ruin across the Welsh landscape, regardless of what the surviving administrative documents actually said about the owners of the land.

This split between facts and myth shows clearly in how people misidentified various Welsh parish churches. The Templars were known for building round churches based on the Holy Sepulchre, like the Temple Church in London. Consequently, local writers attributed any strange architectural feature in a rural Welsh church to that order. The small, vaulted chapels on the Pembrokeshire coast and the isolated cells in the Gower were often called 'Templar' by tradition. They did this even though the 1338 Hospitaller survey listed these places as possessions of the Order of St John or as secular buildings. The name 'Temple' acted as a magnet for place-names. It attracted folklore that had no basis in the 1308 inventories or the legal transfers of 1312.

Recovering the documentary truth was a slow, difficult job. It depended on men like L.B. Larking, who edited the 1338 report written by Prior Philip de Thame. This document corrected the growing myths by providing a cold, fiscal record of how many sheep lived at Llanmadoc and the exact earnings of the Slebech ferry. However, the publication of these records in the mid-nineteenth century failed to stop the romantic trends. The two ways of thinking started to merge. Antiquarians would identify a Hospitaller site correctly but then claim, without any evidence, that it must have belonged to the Templars first. They assumed a continuity between the two orders that the archives did not support, preferring a longer lineage over the documented reality of the land.

In Wales, this caused a strange historical ghosting. The Hospitallers held the land for over two centuries, yet the public imagination usually ignored them in favour of the Templars, who held it for a shorter time. The 'Templar myth' appealed to Victorian scholars influenced by the growth of fraternal groups and the revival of interest in the crusades. When they looked at the ruins of Slebech, they did not see a working farm or a commandery. They chose to see a place for secret rituals. This was a projection of nineteenth-century interests onto the fourteenth century. It ignored the practical, administrative work the Order performed within the Marcher lordships, where they functioned as landlords and farmers rather than as mysterious occultists.

William Rees published his major work on the Order of St John in Wales in 1947. He had to clear away thick layers of antiquarian speculation to reach the medieval facts beneath. Rees changed the field by focusing on land-holding, tithes, and the legal status of the liber burgus at Templeton. He proved that the history of these orders in Wales was a matter of economic management and frontier diplomacy. It was not a collection of hidden mysteries as earlier writers had suggested. Even now, the labels on many Welsh sites are the ones left by romantic antiquarians. This shows that a well-told myth often lasts longer than a dry account roll, even when the roll contains the verified truth of the matter.

The tension between the proven estate and the imagined sanctuary defines how we see these sites today. We possess the rigorous scholarship of twentieth-century historians and the evocative, inaccurate dreams of nineteenth-century travellers. To visit Slebech or the Gower chapels is to see two different versions of the land at once. One version is recorded in the dry Latin of the Hospitaller archives. The other was built by the gothic imagination of the early antiquarians who wanted the ruins to tell a more dramatic story than the rent collectors ever wrote down.

The persistence of these legends suggests that the military orders occupy a space in the Welsh mind that is not entirely governed by the survival of parchment.