Templars & Hospitallers

The Knights Templar (c. 1119 – 1312)

Founded in Jerusalem in about 1119 as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, the Templars were the first of the great military orders. Their original purpose was to protect pilgrims on the roads to the Holy Land; within a generation they had become a wealthy international institution with estates, castles and banking operations right across Latin Europe.

Their sign was a red cross on a white mantle. In the West they did not fight — they farmed. English and Welsh preceptories such as Slebech and Garway were estate headquarters whose rents, wool and harvests were remitted to the Order's central treasury to fund the war in Outremer.

In 1307 King Philip IV of France, deep in debt to the Order, had the French Templars arrested on fabricated charges of heresy. Under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V dissolved the Order at the Council of Vienne in 1312. In England and Wales the arrests were less brutal, but the Order's property was confiscated all the same.

The Knights Hospitaller (c. 1099 – present)

The Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem — the Hospitallers — were founded a little earlier than the Templars, growing out of a Jerusalem hospital that cared for sick pilgrims. They became a military order after the First Crusade and, unlike the Templars, they survived: after the loss of the Holy Land they held Rhodes, then Malta, and continue today as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

Their sign was a white cross on a black mantle (later the eight-pointed Maltese cross). Their English headquarters was the Priory of Clerkenwell in London, and they ran a network of commanderies across Britain — the equivalent of Templar preceptories.

1312: the Templars' land passes to the Hospitallers

When the Templars were suppressed, Pope Clement V ordered their property transferred to the Hospitallers. In practice the transfer took years and was contested by lay lords who wanted the land back, but in Wales the change went through fairly cleanly. The great preceptory at Slebech and its dependent granges — Templeton, Freystrop, Rosemarket, Amroth, Maenclochog — simply changed hands. The buildings, the field systems and the routines of the estate carried on.

This is why so many Welsh sites are best described as Templar, later Hospitaller: the fabric on the ground was raised by one order and inherited by the other. A Hospitaller survey drawn up in 1338 (edited by Larking and Kemble in the nineteenth century) is one of our best documents for what the two orders actually held in Wales.

Sites that were only ever Hospitaller

Not every military-order site in Wales was Templar first. The manor on Gower — Llanmadoc paired with Llanddewi — appears in the records only as a Hospitaller holding, run as a dependency of Slebech. They are frequently listed online as "Templar" sites; the surviving documents do not support that, and this gazetteer labels them accordingly.

Not the Cistercians

One further point of confusion: the great monastic houses of medieval Wales — Whitland, Strata Florida, Valle Crucis, Tintern — were Cistercian, a contemplative farming order, not a military one. They shared the medieval taste for well-run agricultural estates but had nothing to do with the Crusades, and their land is not covered here.