And when he had gone one of the first acts of the king was to seize as an "escheat" the Castle and honour of Wallingford which Brian Fitz-Count and Maude his wife, having entered the religious life, had ceased to hold.
The sun was setting in the valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim—the mountains of blessing and cursing. In the entrance to the gorge, thirty-four miles from Jerusalem and fifteen south of Samaria, was the village of El Askar, once called Sychar.
An ancient well, surmounted by an alcove more than a hundred feet deep—the gift of Jacob to his son Joseph—was to be seen hard by; and many pilgrims paused and drank where the Son of God once slaked His human thirst.
The rounded mass of Ebal lay to the south-east of the valley, of Gerizim to the north-west; at the foot of the former lay the village.
As in that olden time, it yet wanted four months of harvest. The corn-fields were still green; the foliage of leafy trees afforded delicious shades, as when He sat weary by that well, old even then.
Oh what memories of blessing and cursing, of Jacob and Joseph, of Joshua and Gideon, clung to that sacred spot! But, like stars in the presence of a sun, their lustre paled at the remembrance that His sacred Feet trod that hallowed soil.
In a whitewashed caravansary of El Askar lay a dying penitent,—a pilgrim returning from Jerusalem, then governed by a Christian king. He seemed prematurely old,—worn out by the toils of the way and the change of climate and mode of life. He lacked not worldly wealth, which there, as elsewhere, commanded attention; yet his feet were blistered and sore, for he had of choice travelled barefoot to the Holy Sepulchre.
A military party was passing along the vale, bound from Acre to Jerusalem, clad in flexible mail from head to foot; armed, for the rules of their order forbade them ever to lay their arms aside. But over their armour long monastic mantles of scarlet were worn, with a huge white cross on the left shoulder. They were of the array of the Knights Templars. Soldiers, yet monks! of such high renown that scarcely a great family in Europe but was represented in their ranks. Their diet was simple, their discipline exact; they shunned no hardship, declined no combat; they had few ties to life, but were prepared to sacrifice all for the sake of the holy warfare and the Temple of God. Their homes, their churches, lacked ornament, and were rigidly simple, as became their vow of poverty. Never yet had they disgraced their holy calling, or neglected to bear their white banner into the heart of the foe; so that the Moslem trembled at the war-cry of the Templars—"God and His Temple."
Such were the Templars in their early days.