the gathering rain, compiling a mental inventory of all the curios that Teddy Murray had revealed in Garway Church.
Beginning with the green man, the familiar stone face with entwined foliage, inexplicably found in churches. This one was in the chancel arch and, with those stubby horns, he wasn’t typical. There was also a cord or vine with tassels resembling fingers, so it looked like he was making a funny face at you, waggling his fingers at either side of his head.
What the green man had to do with the Templars Teddy couldn’t explain, but this was a Templar church so it must have had some significance.
Everything
in a Templar church was significant. They’d moved on to the matching long stones set into the chancel steps, the altar steps and one window ledge – these identified by Teddy as the lids of Templar stone coffins, now part of the fabric of the church. Teddy laughing, in his element now, the historian, the tour guide.
‘Someone said you can throw the Templars out of the building, but you’ll never get the building back from the Templars.’
Giving her the primary-school version, for which she’d been quite grateful.
The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon: founded in the early twelfth century, the time of the crusades, ostensibly to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, had allowed them to establish their headquarters at the al-Aqsa mosque, believed to be the site of the original Temple.
They’d begun, it was said, with only nine members, led by one Hugh de Payens. Monastic soldiers, red crosses on their surcoats, growing over the next century into something internationally powerful, influential and
very
wealthy.
Too wealthy and too powerful, by the thirteenth century, for the King of France, Philip IV, and the pet pope he’d acquired, Clement V, accommodated at the time in Avignon. The French Templars had all been arrested in a series of simultaneous dawn raids on Friday, 13 October 1307, accused of a black catalogue of heresies.
‘Hang on …’ It hadn’t taken much calculation. ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s exactly—’
‘I’m afraid it does. Seven hundred years ago next Saturday. I was hoping we’d have a permanent minister in place by then, but it was notto be. It therefore falls to me to conduct some sort of memorial service for the poor chaps.’
‘You don’t sound totally enthused.’
‘It is so obvious?’
‘And the problem is … what?’
‘Fanatics, Merrily. The known facts about the Templars are relatively few – the amount of wild speculation has been quite monumental in recent years.’
‘
The Da Vinci Code
?’
‘And its source,
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
. All the preposterous theories undermining the central tenets of Christianity as we know it.’
‘Mmm.’
Everybody knew about it now: the alleged bloodline of Jesus from his alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, the female disciple whose crucial role was supposedly written out of the scriptures by the Roman Catholic Church. Jane had been quite taken with the idea that the real reason for the suppression of the Knights Templar had been their guardianship of this secret knowledge … and the whereabouts of the tomb of Christ, unrisen.
Whether or not you accepted this, Teddy Murray had said, the charges against the Templars were surely made up.
‘Like many of those levelled at various abbots by Henry VIII’s people during the Reformation. What kings tended to covet most in religious organizations was their money.’
The last Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, had been burned alive in Paris, but the persecution had been less extreme in Britain, where most Templars had been allowed to join other monastic orders – except, apparently, the order of Hospitallers of St John to which the properties of Garway had been transferred.
De Molay was now seen as a martyr and Friday the Thirteenth … ‘Because of this? That’s the reason for
Beginning with the green man, the familiar stone face with entwined foliage, inexplicably found in churches. This one was in the chancel arch and, with those stubby horns, he wasn’t typical. There was also a cord or vine with tassels resembling fingers, so it looked like he was making a funny face at you, waggling his fingers at either side of his head.
What the green man had to do with the Templars Teddy couldn’t explain, but this was a Templar church so it must have had some significance.
Everything
in a Templar church was significant. They’d moved on to the matching long stones set into the chancel steps, the altar steps and one window ledge – these identified by Teddy as the lids of Templar stone coffins, now part of the fabric of the church. Teddy laughing, in his element now, the historian, the tour guide.
‘Someone said you can throw the Templars out of the building, but you’ll never get the building back from the Templars.’
Giving her the primary-school version, for which she’d been quite grateful.
The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon: founded in the early twelfth century, the time of the crusades, ostensibly to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, had allowed them to establish their headquarters at the al-Aqsa mosque, believed to be the site of the original Temple.
They’d begun, it was said, with only nine members, led by one Hugh de Payens. Monastic soldiers, red crosses on their surcoats, growing over the next century into something internationally powerful, influential and
very
wealthy.
Too wealthy and too powerful, by the thirteenth century, for the King of France, Philip IV, and the pet pope he’d acquired, Clement V, accommodated at the time in Avignon. The French Templars had all been arrested in a series of simultaneous dawn raids on Friday, 13 October 1307, accused of a black catalogue of heresies.
‘Hang on …’ It hadn’t taken much calculation. ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s exactly—’
‘I’m afraid it does. Seven hundred years ago next Saturday. I was hoping we’d have a permanent minister in place by then, but it was notto be. It therefore falls to me to conduct some sort of memorial service for the poor chaps.’
‘You don’t sound totally enthused.’
‘It is so obvious?’
‘And the problem is … what?’
‘Fanatics, Merrily. The known facts about the Templars are relatively few – the amount of wild speculation has been quite monumental in recent years.’
‘
The Da Vinci Code
?’
‘And its source,
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
. All the preposterous theories undermining the central tenets of Christianity as we know it.’
‘Mmm.’
Everybody knew about it now: the alleged bloodline of Jesus from his alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, the female disciple whose crucial role was supposedly written out of the scriptures by the Roman Catholic Church. Jane had been quite taken with the idea that the real reason for the suppression of the Knights Templar had been their guardianship of this secret knowledge … and the whereabouts of the tomb of Christ, unrisen.
Whether or not you accepted this, Teddy Murray had said, the charges against the Templars were surely made up.
‘Like many of those levelled at various abbots by Henry VIII’s people during the Reformation. What kings tended to covet most in religious organizations was their money.’
The last Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, had been burned alive in Paris, but the persecution had been less extreme in Britain, where most Templars had been allowed to join other monastic orders – except, apparently, the order of Hospitallers of St John to which the properties of Garway had been transferred.
De Molay was now seen as a martyr and Friday the Thirteenth … ‘Because of this? That’s the reason for
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