The Proceedings against the Templars in the British Isles, Vol. 1: The Latin Edition; Vol. 2: The Translation (review)

Controversy has followed the Order of the Knights Templar from the time of the arrest of the French Templars on October 13, 1307, until today. Their name has become mired in myth, legend, and fantasy, and their original function—to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land—has been largely forgotten, as has their role in medieval society as military monks who took monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Representatives of the Order arrived in Britain in 1128, and the king and his nobles vied with each other to give them land. As the Templars were late-comers to the British land-market this was often land that had to be reclaimed from the waste, marsh, or fen. Over the years they did this and became efficient farmers, sending the profits from their estates to their brothers in the East. Apart from the occasional squabble with neighbors (revealed in local court records), they were unobtrusive landlords in the countryside. In London, however, high-ranking members of the Order became advisers, accountants, and bankers to the monarch. When the French king Philippe IV arrested the French Templars, King Edward II of England procrastinated on the grounds that the Templars had always been good friends to his family. After pressure from Pope Clement V, he eventually arrested the English Templars in January 1308 and held them on loose house arrest until the arrival in 1309 of the papal inquisition. The text of these volumes that are transcribed and translated in a work of great scholarship by Helen Nicholson is the evidence from the trials of the Templars in England, Ireland, and Scotland.

Five versions of the proceedings exist. The most complete of these is Ms Bodley 454 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. There are three versions in the British Library, which are either incomplete or damaged by fire, and there is a version in the Vatican Library (Armarium XXXV.147), which is a summary of the proceedings in Britain sent to Clement V for use at the Council of Vienne in 1312, when he disbanded the Order. All five versions are used in this edition. In the introduction to volume 1 Nicholson gives the provenance and history of the manuscripts and describes these in detail. She also discusses versions already in print, including the flawed version by David Wilkins. The editorial conventions are carefully explained, and the text adheres as closely as possible to the original manuscript, including marginalia, insertions, additions, and line breaks. The footnotes to the Latin versions show where the text differs from Wilkins’s version, and there are extensive notes showing how the contractions and abbreviations of the Latin words have been interpreted. This is of inestimable value to scholars working on medieval Latin texts.

Volume 2 is a word-for-word translation of the Latin versions. Therefore, those unversed in Latin can compare these and establish where contradiction lies, whereas Latin readers can compare the editor’s interpretations of difficult passages with their own.

The British Templars were tried on eighty-eight charges obtained from the interrogation of the French Templars, which were acquired by mental and physical torture. In the introduction Nicholson includes a useful and very relevant discussion on the use of evidence obtained by torture. She concludes that as historical evidence the proceedings of the trials of the British Templars need to be used with care and should not be accepted as sound historical evidence. She suggests that an important aspect of the trial evidence is that it shows how the papal inquisition proceeded and overcame its difficulties in England, where torture was not permitted. She also shows that the Order was one of centralization with a tight structure.

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