Gone Medieval - The Templars in Britain

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

The Knights Templar have an enduring reputation―but not one they would recognise. Originally established in the twelfth century to protect pilgrims, the Order is remembered today for heresy, fanaticism, and even satanism. But the Templars were in fact dedicated peace-mongers at home, influencing royal strategy and policy, creating financial structures, and brokering international peace treaties. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Dr. Steve Tibble, author of Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain to redress the balance about this fascinating and vital part of their story.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The Templars are big box office in medieval history. I mean a military order of night monks who explode onto the scene and then spectacularly fall from grace. They maintain such a holdover our imagination that people still see them at the core of secret societies even today. So a new book on Templars is always going to catch my eye, but is there a new angle? Well, fortunately, Steve Tibble's

got me covered on this. His new book, Templars, The Knights Who Made Britain, focuses on the part of the Order's story that's often overlooked. In their pursuit of wealth and influence to drive war in the Holy Land, what impact did they have on places like Britain? Steve's here to explain why it's such a fascinating and vital part of their story. So welcome to Gun Medieval, Steve. Thank you, Matt. Lovely to be here. I mean, I can't wait to talk more. More Templars, and this is a bit of their story that I think often, as I said, gets overlooked or forgotten in their efforts to raise money for what they were doing in the Holy Land. They leave these footprints in nations all across Europe, don't they? Yeah, absolutely. It's an unforeseen consequence in some ways.

And one of the things I'd like to talk about today is the way in which things can happen, good things can happen, without anybody meaning to. It's not that anybody is trying to be Mother Teresa, but actually there are ways in which the Templars, in carrying out what was actually a very careful strategy, were able to do a lot of very helpful things over the long term, almost without meaning to. These are consequences of their desire to help the East and the Crusader states in the Holy Land meant that they inadvertently almost did a lot of very interesting and positive things in the West, not for any altruism. reasons, but selfishly, it just helped them bring help to the East. Yeah, what helped them happen to help everybody else as well. A happy coincidence. How does the Templar story begin in Britain? Why were they becoming established in Western European countries? Yes. Well, that's a good point, and it goes to the fundamentals of why the temples exist. If you think about it, a crusade is a great way of having a campaign, but it's a

completely rubbish way of state building. Basically, a crusade involves a bunch of people who are effectively military tourists going to a place, doing some things, very violent things, usually, and then going home. Now, that's fine if you want to make a demonstration. It's not fine if you want to, in the case of the Crusades, recover land and then defend it long term. So right from the very beginning. It's obvious to any military person who's thinking about it, that the crusade is a very flawed weapon. And if it's going to have any longer term consequences, it has to have other structures in place to help it. So if we look at the first crusade, the guys got out to the Holy Land in 1099 and recovered Jerusalem. As soon as they'd recovered Jerusalem, most people went

home. They just thought it was job done. I've took my box. I've seen all the holy places. I've got my place in heaven. I've got remission of sins. And I can go back and see my family again. And relatively small numbers stayed behind. And that immediately became evident as a huge strategic problem that basically capturing land is not the same as holding it. And the papacy effectively stepped in to try and bridge that gap. And that's where the beautiful logic of the military orders and particularly the Templars kicks in, because you have to find a way of shifting resources from the West and moving it to the East. And in the fractured world of medieval Europe, who's going to do that? The secular authorities find it very difficult to do this. If you're a king,

you've already got problems close to the home. If you're a baron or a knight, you haven't really got the resources to do it. You've got your family to look after. You haven't got a long-term corporate view. The papacy being a corporation wanted to create what was in effect, a kind of military corporation, to mirror their objectives. So relatively soon after the Crusader states were set up, the papacy tried to help by getting these military orders established,

and particularly the Templars. And a big part of that was obviously the military side, so they're there to be a semi-regular, semi-standing army that can be stationed in the east but can bring in volunteers and help from the West. But you also need money. You need horses. You need mercenaries. And there's a whole flow of resources. So it is really what we might call state building now that if you're going to build the state in the east,

even though your guys are hugely outnumbered, they're very poor, they can't do it themselves. You have to build that estate. You almost have to prepack some of it and ship it over from the West, which is to a very large extent what the Templars were about. And that very modern idea was what excited me when I was writing Templars and Knights who Made Britain because it's a case study of how you can do medieval state building in a corporate way. And I just found it amazing that this small group of people could achieve so.

much with so little. And over such a great long period of time, they kept the Holy Land afloat for 200 years, where I think any sane person would have given it a couple of months, the Templars and the hospitlers and the brave guys out there did manage to keep a very beleaguered ship afloat for 200 years, for good or bad. And it's incredible how they, to my mind, reflect the structures of the Catholic Church in that you have those kind of local satellite offices, if you like, that are creating the revenue, and instead of that going to Rome for the glory of the church and the glory of God, all of that is simply funneled in a slightly different direction towards a military objective in the Holy Land. But they're almost like a mini

Catholic church, really, aren't they? Yeah, that's a very good point. I think all effective structures kind of mirror the paradigm of their time. So the temperance partly mirror the papacy. And that's a tool of the papacy. That was probably deliberate. You know, that there, a way of operating as the kind of sawed arm of the papacy, because it is such a modern idea. And that's where the Templars are wonderful, that although they're mirroring the local conditions that they meet, they're also incredibly modern.

They're actually ahead of us in some ways. I mean, the EU still hasn't got an effective army of any description, really. And what you find is the Templars become an international force fighting for an international body, which the papacy and Christendom, on an international level. And if you think with the tiny resources, that people had in the 12th century. And the very rudimentary structures they've working with,

it's just so impressive that they were able to galvanize that level of commitment and resource and foresight, actually. One of the things that always strikes me about the medieval world is that we have this kind of patronizing view, you know, that we're cleverer, because I can open up my laptop and talk to you or whatever, somehow that makes me clever. And in fact, I think it's quite the opposite.

It's the guys who wake up every morning and have almost nothing to work with. They're the ones that I really admire. They're the really clever ones. And, yeah, all the time I was writing the book, I was continually in awe of what such a small group of dedicated people could do. I tend to think we always pull on that idea that if a medieval person arrived in 23, they wouldn't understand technology and computers and all of that.

But I think if we were to land back in 1099, we wouldn't have a clue how to operate in that world. We wouldn't have a clue how to understand messages, signals that we're receiving, and just how to exist in that world. So stupidity works in both directions, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a much cleverer person who can wake up and get clean water for his children every morning than somebody who just turns the tap.

We take so much for granted. I just loved seeing how they were able to do relatively complex things. You know, the Templars in Britain, for instance, do a huge amount of quite complex banking and money transfers, their shipbuilding, they're into logistics, they're modernising rural estates, their diplomats, their lawyers, a tiny group of people doing this hugely professional job. And when push comes to shove, a lot of them got on a horse and go off to the Holy Land and die fighting on the front line. Effectively, the eastern front of Christendom, I mean, these are people who didn't live long, but they had an intensity that's incredibly impressive to me,

anyway. You know, I have a nice safe life and mortgages and life insurance and things. They didn't have any of that. And I'm just, yeah, permanently in all the book, in a sense, it's obviously an objective book, but it's very much, it's almost a love letter to the group of people that I don't always agree with, but I certainly admire their extraordinary commitment to getting things happening and their ability to achieve things. It's just outstanding. So as they arrive in Britain, they're present in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, all of these places. How are they accumulating land? What kind of ways are they getting their hands on land in these areas? Yes. Really, the fact that they have so much land, and I think it's hard to underestimate it. At one point, it's been estimated that the Templars were the biggest landlords in England, apart from the king. That's how significant they were. But it was not usually by purchase, certainly not in the early days. The idea of crusading was popular. It captured the imagination. But most people couldn't afford the time or the money to go to the Holy Land, but they still wanted to do something. And a lot of knights really could relate to the Templars in a way that they perhaps.

didn't quite relate so much to other parts of the church. They were all pious. But when you saw there was its very muscular, knightly monastic order, then, wow, that's got a great appeal to a lot of the ruling class. And they could really relate to the job that the Templars and their crusaders in general were doing. So the Templars didn't need to buy a lot of land to start off with. They were given very large estates. And I think also the other thing to bear in mind is when the Crusaders got to the Holy Land. The Holy Land had been a war zone for hundreds of years before the Crusaders arrived. And there are a lot of deserted villages that are called Gastinai or Kiribat in Arabic. And different kinds of ennastic orders did have a heritage of taking a deserted site

and making it into something productive, putting people in there, putting infrastructure, putting buildings, and taking a piece of land that wasn't productive and turning it into something useful. A lot of people give the Templars estates, and that's great. The giving of the land makes them feel good about themselves because they're helping out, but they minimise the costs themselves by giving them rubbish land. So they might give them land that was particularly woods, for instance, which are obviously lovely, nice place to go for a walk, but not the most economically productive.

And the Templars in Britain in particular had this whole mechanism, which was called asserting. That's the process where you get permission to take down a wood and turn it into arable land. And that's a way of making long-term productivity gains. so they were able to do that. So people would give them estates, but they'd also give them little parcels of land that went actually very productive. And the Templars, because they were a corporation,

that's the other wonderful thing they've got going for them, is they can see far beyond the lifetime of an individual or the interests of a family. So they could turn these little pockets of land. First of all, they could make them more productive, but they could turn them into bigger estates. They could make efficiency. They could put investment in.

They could put more mills in, for instance. They could try and get permission to put market. it's in, and you see that many times with the Templars in Britain. They're not great inventors. They're not what you'd call early adopters, but they're right up there, and they've got an awful lot of efficiency. They're like an efficiency drive that can improve culture in that way. It sounds a bit like they're the medieval equivalent of the foreign investment that we might still want to attract into countries today, that's seen as a driver for economic growth, that you want all of that money and expertise coming into your country. And it sounds like the

Templars was to some extent providing that in medieval Europe. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, with the added benefit, they weren't foreign, by and large. I mean, these were people taken from local families. I think of them in a very similar way, Matt, and that is, I often think of them as private equity. They're small in number, but they're highly skilled. You don't have to necessarily agree with their objectives or you don't necessarily

want to go on a beach holiday with them. But they're really clever guys. They do buy and build strategies. is they've got a strategy and a corporate sense that allows them to take a bigger, hugely efficient view. And that's something we can come on to later, perhaps, is this whole thing about the way in which they helped bring professional services to Britain. This is an organisation that had lawyers, bankers, as well as people who could improve what passed for industrial efficiency back in 12th and 13th centuries. So if they're initially, they're getting land that baby isn't great, these small parcels, but then they're able to combine this to make the land, productive to create larger estates from it all. Can we still see evidence of them in the landscape

today? Are there places that people can go and see kind of templar estates? The word temple is normally a clue. So, you know, if you see temple something, that will be a temple place. There are a huge number of what they call commanders, every kind of estate headquarters dotted around the British Isles and in Southern Ireland. They vary hugely, of course. For instance, there's one walking distance from where I am at the moment, over in up Leiden near Bosbury. There's not much to see there. But there are some, say, at Crescent in Essex, where they have the most extraordinary barns. They're huge, even by modern standards. They're huge. And you can just see the beauty of their strategy in a way. You sort of have to be a corporation to have the investment power

and the foresight to be able to put in this kind of infrastructure. Actually, Crescings a good example. So Crescings in Essex, and that is a very big estate. It's about nearly one and a half thousand acres, well-managed, great barns, and so on. That was very close to another Templar operation, which was called Witham, also in Essex. And there, the order got permission to basically build up a town, build up a market, and create a thriving entrepoles so they could drag in the produce from places like their estate and Crescing and then start to ship it off, perhaps back down towards London. Similarly, at Bulldog, which I think is North Hertfordshire, my English geography isn't so great, which again is very close to those two places.

The Templars built an entire new town. They had a new model for the layout for the agriculture. They put in mills. And very cleverly, they had it all well positioned, actually up the old Roman road, the Omen Way, so that the goods could be transported down to London, where you get a better price. So you're not having to mess around with the local market. You can really go to where the bigger markets are.

So these are guys who are really operating, I think, is a significantly different level, doing a lot to change the landscape in a positive way. And again, not through any altruistic reasons, but because it's driven by efficiency. I have to stress, this efficiency was not for its own sake. I think one of the things that's always come back to haunt the Templars, which has been one of the reasons why there are so many conspiracy theories, is that they've always been associated with money, treasure. it's only a short step from that to hidden treasure and a short step from that to Holy Grails and so on. The brothers themselves were incredibly austere in many ways

in the way they lived. They needed money, but it was to take to the east. So the money was generated for a very specific purpose, and it wasn't to line the pockets of the order. The individuals in the order were relatively not exactly poor, but they were not rich people. And the order itself, if you look at the local orders, possessions when they were closed down,

simple actually and quite conservative with a small sea. But they were associated with money and with the unpopular things that you do when you become efficient. As a private equity firm would be, you know, you're not doing it to make friends, you're doing it to achieve an objective. That sort of came back to bite them at the end when they found out they didn't have quite as many friends as they might have wanted. I was going to ask next about how that power that they were accumulating seem to transform into political impact. But it sounds like that's almost the natural progression of where they were. Once they're getting their hands on land and money, politics is the natural place for that to go. So how easy do they find that? And what is their

reason for wanting to get more involved in politics in places like Britain? Yeah, absolutely. Back to your earlier point about foreign investors. I mean, you really want to embed yourself in a society if you're going to get the best out of it. The different aspect of political power, I think, is that it's to do with the crusading movement. In a way, the logic of having estates and money and logistics is quite clear, as in you make money in place, A, you need logistics to take into place B, and then you spend it buying merceners in place, C being the Holy Land. So there's a very clear movement there. The political side of things is very similar, but it's not always so clear. So basically what you want, if you're the papacy and

their Templars, what you want is to have peaceful, stable societies in the West. I mean, you basically want that anyway. But in this instance, you particularly want it because a stable society is more productive, so it can send more money to help the crusading cause. And a stable, peaceful, undistracted country is the kind of country, where it's a kind of country, where a king can wake up one morning and say, ah, I know I'll launch a crusade, I'll really help out on the ground. So there are kind of military and political reasons that totally go together. And again, it's not altruism, but you want peace in the West to enable you to prosecute war in the East. It's a natural symbiotic balance between the two. And that's one thing I was so

impressed with when I was writing the book, is just seeing how the Templars managed that very difficult balancing act the whole time, with a kind of. of ruthless adherence to strategy that is very rare to see. And I think, you know, a lot of our governments nowadays talk about strategy as if they're really clever. They've got huge resources and they talk about strategic this, strategic that. And usually it's just very embarrassing and poor when you look at their performance. Whereas you take something like the Templars, they didn't leave an email trail, they didn't have strategy documents that have survived particularly. But you can see clear strategy unfolding. And it's beautiful.

to see it unfolding over a 200-year period and more. Yeah, it's nice. Again, you don't have to agree with the strategy. I just enjoy seeing it played out and seeing that human beings can actually pursue something and see it through. And I guess, again, one of those kind of unexpected side effects, consequences of the way the Templars work is that they do seem to get themselves involved in efforts to find peace in Europe. And that's because they want war somewhere else. but nevertheless there is a benefit in them trying to find peaceful resolutions to things. So in Britain during this period we've got things like the anarchy going on and then we've got obviously Henry II's problems with his sons and with the King of France

and all of that kind of thing. Do we see the Templars getting actively involved in efforts to find peace within nations and between nations? Absolutely. Every reign you can pretty much draw out examples. So for instance, just going through the ones you just mentioned there, so Stephen and the Anarchy, the Templars were. trusted by everybody. They're always walking a fine line. Their default position is to support the

status quo because kings are anointed, they're God's representatives on earth, but also they're the ones who can call a crusade. So there's a practical as well as a philosophical reason for supporting the status quo. But equally, they're not partisan. Their objectives are much bigger. They're internationalists playing in different nations, they kind of rise above it. And you do find that, say, in the anarchy, Stephen and his Queen Matilda, as opposed to Empress Matilda, were very generous to the Templars. They could see the Templars were good people doing what they thought was good work, and they were people that were highly trusted, and they were very generous patrons, gave them lots of land. But equally, the Templars had good relations with the Empress Matilda

and her party. And they managed to maintain that, which to me is extraordinary. You know, there's a war going on, rumbling away and really unpleasant things. But the Templars managed to rise above it. And if there are things like prisoner exchanges or a garrison needs to surrender and want safety, people do trust the Templars to stand in there and they'll make sure that everybody's okay. And that's true throughout the 200 years that they're operating in England, really. If you say the reign of King John, he's going through one military debilternation. Barclay after another in northern France, and the Templars are doing everything they can, alongside their brothers in France, to try and broker some kind of peace, to try and bring it all

to an end, quickly so that John, who's allegedly going to go on crusade, can actually do it. I don't personally think he ever had any intention of doing it, but the Templars and the papacy were very keen to bring peace so that the French king and the English king could be undistracted and do more to help the crusading movement. And you mentioned again that as they embed themselves in nations, they bring all of that professionalism. So things like banking services, things like legal expertise, how to manage estates in the most efficient kind of way. So do we see them having an impact on the administration of somewhere like England? Do they leave a mark in the ways that England kind of develops

through this period? Yes. I think they do in a general sense. I wouldn't want to overclaim on the brother's behalf. I mean, they weren't there to improve the banking system. They weren't there to improve legal standards. These were all consequences of other activities and other objectives. But they did help to professionalise everything. For long periods of time, they acted as part of the Exchequer. In the New Temple, their headquarters in London was a major professional site. So I think we can see that professionalism rippling through English history in that way. England was already moving in that direction, so I wouldn't want to pretend that they were the only force or even the dominant force doing that. But they were a force for good in the

gradual institutional professionalisation of the British arts. What comes across in the book is just how successful they are at what they are doing. They are incredibly good at what they're doing. It's kind of a repeatable template. They become this almost supranational body who are just operating in so many different countries, they're like Amazon of the medieval period. They've just got fingers and offices and warehouses absolutely everywhere. Does that, the secular power that comes with that and that association with money that you mentioned before, does that end up contributing to their downfall? Yeah, it's a very good point to make. The Templars are an incredibly well-old machine when that

machine has a role to play. When that machine has a job, they're the men you want on your side. The big Templar problem wasn't Satanism or heresy or even being unpopular. It was redundancy. I think the key word is redundancy. Effectively, once the Crusader states had been lost and the last big cities fell in 1291, it's as if Amazon still existed but didn't have a market for its goods anymore. So they haven't got a role and they didn't move quickly enough to find one. So all the things that they were accused of just a few years later,

when King Philip of France wanted to wind them up, wind them down. Nobody had ever made any reference to that of any significance before 1291, when the Crusader States ceased to exist. So while they had a job, they weren't always terribly popular because, you know, taking money and giving it to someone else is not necessarily that popular. I think there was a recognition that they were doing that for a cause. Once that cause was no longer feasible, once it was obvious that European powers had left the Middle East, pretty much for good, then they became redundant. You don't need to look for conspiracies. You don't

need to look for Holy Grails. That was how the Templar Order finished. They just ran out of things to do. I'm going to make a very British point here and probably make myself sad in the process, but they sound a lot like Woolworths. Warwood's is a hugely popular shop. He grew up with them all on the High Street, kind of place you go into, have a look around, but maybe don't buy very much stuff. And then they didn't seem to reinvent themselves for an internet age very well. And so they disappeared off the High Street. And everyone was really up. upset when they went, but actually nobody had been buying anything from which is why they went. And it feels like the Templars maybe fell into that trap because the Hospitaller's and the

Teutonic Knights managed to reinvent themselves and carry on, and the Templars become a kind of medieval Woolworths. That's a very redolent image. In their defence, I would have to disagree slightly. I would say their ending was Woolworthian, but they didn't live like Woolworths. You know, when they were operational, they were elite. So they were more like Apple. They lived like Apple and died like Woolworth, if you want to use kind of corporate branding. The fact that they were unpopular while they were operating didn't actually matter that much. I think the particular problem was that they were the most military of the military orders, and they didn't have a fallback position,

particularly. The hospitalers, they had a broader kind of social care view, and they also took on a slightly different military view when the Crusader states fell. They occupied roads and were able to carry on with doing something significant and military. The Teutonic Knights had Eastern Europe to think about. The Templars, because they were the most military of the military orders, got blamed most when the Crusader states fell because it was a military collapse. And going back to your branding point, you know, the brand had failed. Every brand is a promise. And the Templar promise was, we were bringing you military success. We're military elite. And it was a very good brand. And the brand succeeded up to a point. They were elite. They did extraordinary things as a tiny band of men.

But ultimately, the brand failed because it failed to deliver the promise. The promise of the Crusader states collapsed. And when that happened, the master in charge was a guy called Jacques de Moley, who was a dyed in the wall, not very imaginative military commander. So they really needed somebody slightly more flexible at the helm when it came to it. And by the time the order was closed down. You had this kind of military guy in charge who refused to take on other tasks. The papacy, loads of different observers were quite keen on the Templars and the hospitalists to merge, because there wasn't really any reason for them to be separate anymore. The Templars refused to do that. So you can understand why they didn't want to go along with it, but equally, if you're

going to reject that as a way forward, you have to have an alternative way forward, and the Templars didn't really have one. So although I love the Templars dearly for the kind of crazy guys they were, you have to say, okay, they probably had come to the end of the road, not because they were Sataness, but just because they'd run out of things to do and didn't have the imagination to diversify. It was really France that seemed to be driving their downfall. So how different was their position in Britain as the order fell apart? Was there the same kind of distrust and dislike of them, or did it take a bit longer for their prestige to fade in Britain? Ironically, the order is probably almost identical in many ways in England and France,

but its relationships, the way that the trials panned out, were so different. It's a wonderful case study, actually. If you look at what happened in France, they were accused of incredible things, literally incredible, but because the French judiciary were used to dealing with heretics, there was an early recourse to torture. Torture is the key thing there. I don't suppose any of us are big fans of torture, but if you ever did think that it was a good way of getting information out of somebody, this will really prove to you why it's bad, because basically people will say whatever you want them to say if you torture them. And what you find in France is that many of the Templars were tortured to death rather than perjure themselves, and the ones who were left realized that they were heading down the same route.

So they basically just agreed with everything the torture has said. So you do get these bizarre confessions that are mutually self-contradictory. And the French Templars were honest. A couple of them even said on the record, all your charges are crazy. It's all a stitch up. But if you want to threaten me with torture, I'll sign any document you want and I'll confess to everything. They were just totally blunt about that. In Britain, in England, the English judicial system, because there wasn't the heretic issue,

there'd been a much less involvement of torture. and the English Templars and the Irish Templars weren't tortured. They were questioned sometimes harshly. But interestingly, so if you ask a bunch of Templars in France and torture them, they'll all say, yes, we're Satanists. Those same men, if you put them in England, not a single one confessed. There were literally no confessions for years. So I think in a way, what is clear is that both sets of Templars, they were very close to each other. They were either all as innocent or as guilty as each other.

and I personally think they're entirely innocent. The other issue in England was that Edward I mean, Templars had a great relationship with the Kings of England and they'd worked very closely with them and similarly in Scotland. And Edward I, who just died a few months before Philip did his coup d'etat in France against them, would have been a great protector. And sadly, he died. And I think that may well be one of the reasons why Philip felt bold enough

to take the action that he did. I don't think Edward would have ever stood for any of that. He had a lot of very close Templar friends and advisors. He'd fought with them in the East. His son Edward II, similarly, he was in a very weak position, but he still didn't believe. He made it pretty obvious he didn't believe that the temples were guilty. And when he was instructed to round them all up,

his real action, he carried on using them as advisors and basically got out his roller decks and went down the list and sent letters to all the other kings that he could think of, saying, surely, lads, we can't take this seriously, this can't be true, I can't believe any of this. So in England, the presumption was that they were innocent, and they started from a very different place. The key thing, judicially, is torture. With the lack of torture, the English Templars didn't confess at all. The process went on for years and years in England without any Templar dying under interrogation. It went on so long

that quite a few of the Templars did die, but they died of old age because they were pretty old as a group by then anyway. And three of them were slightly vulnerable, and I think they were lent on until they gave very mild confessions saying that, or perhaps they knew somebody in Spain who'd done something naughty. But it was really because they just wanted

to get it over and done with. I think by the time the order was closed down, the brand was so irredeemably damaged, and they were so obviously redundant that closing them down had to happen, but nobody really wanted to do it in a big way in England or Ireland. Certainly in Ireland, the guys were given pensions and just basically given a pat on the back and told to go off and enjoy themselves.

Whereas in France, they were in dungeons or burnt to death or tortured to death. And just to end on, how would you characterize the legacy of the Templars in Britain? You know, you subtitle the book, The Knights Who Made Britain. I might want to subtitle it from now on, live like apple and die like Woolworths, because I think that's a fantastic line. But how would you characterize their kind of enduring legacy in the British Isles? I think they have a very profound influence in a variety of ways. To me, it would mainly be around professionalism on masses of different levels. They were with the Kings of England training their troops.

So Richard the Lionheart's army gets out to the Holy Land on the Third Crusade, and miraculously it's able to operate in the most complex manoeuv that are specially designed to meet Turkic cavalry. And you find at the Battle of Arsouf, there are. operating like veterans at the Battle of Jaff. You've got infantry that are behaving in a way that's calculated to win a battle only against light cavalry. Now, these were battle situations the guys in England would have never have faced. So they're getting a lot of advice in training from the Templars. The Navy, Robert de Sabley, the Templar Grandmaster at the time was one of Richard the Limehart's

vassals. He obviously helped diplomatically training the Navy and so on. So you have a naval influence, a military influence. We see an agricultural influence that we've talked about. You get a significant banking and financial influence. I'd say the Templars are one of the starting points. The city with the Big Sea and the kind of financial professional services that you may and may not agree with, but certainly fund a lot of other things in the UK.

So I think there's a very broad level of professionalism that they brought. And extraordinarily, that numbers, the tiny numbers that we're talking about. When the Templars were closed down, I think there were 144 people put under house arrest. That was the extent of the order in Britain. But to see the colossal impact and influence those people had on generations of different kings and administrations, yeah, I just find awesome. Yeah, absolutely. And that really comes across in the book as well. So that's a great place to explore some of these notions and ideas in even more depth. So thank you very much for joining us, Steve, to talk to a little bit about the Templars in Britain.

It's been fascinating, and I can't recommend your book highly enough to anyone who wants to find out a little bit more about how this military order from the Near East ended up in the fields of England. Thank you, Matt. Really enjoyed that. That was great. Steve's book, Templars, The Knights Who Made Britain with the additional subtitle now of Live Like Apple and Die Like Woolworth. He's out now with a cover that will really catch your eye. I love the cover. Grab a copy and find out even more about the impact that the Templars had. on the kingdoms of Britain. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday,

so please do join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere

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