The Inns of Court

by Cecil Headlam

The Order was founded by a Burgundian Knight who had mightily distinguished himself at the capture of Jerusalem. Hugh de Paganis was his name. Only seven of his comrades joined the Brotherhood at first.

Their first profession was to safeguard pilgrims on their way to visit the Holy Sepulchre, and to keep the highways safe from thieves. A rule and a white habit were granted to this pilgrims’ police by Pope Honorius II. Crosses of red cloth were afterwards added to their white upper garments, and earned them the familiar title of the Red-Cross Knights. And for their first banner they adopted the Beaucéant, the upper part of which was black, signifying, it is said, death to their enemies; the lower part white, symbolizing love for their friends.

Their services were rewarded and their efforts encouraged by Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, who granted them quarters in his palace, within the sacred enclosure of the Temple on Mount Moriah.

Hence they came to be known as the Knights of the Temple, or Knights Templars. For Baldwin’s Palace was formed partly of a building erected by the Emperor Justinian, partly of a mosque built by the Caliph Omar, upon the site of Solomon’s Temple.

The Order increased rapidly in popularity. It spread over Europe and the East, accumulating property and privileges. It was most highly organized, and at its head was a Grand Master, who resided at first in Jerusalem. A visit paid by the Founder, Paganis, to Henry I. in Normandy led to the establishment of settlements in England. Cambridge, Canterbury, Warwick, and Dover are mentioned amongst others by Stow. Temples, ‘built after the form of the Temple near to the Sepulchre at Jerusalem,’ were erected in many of the chief towns in England. And this circular shape of church, modelled upon the Holy Sepulchre in accordance with a prevailing love of imitating the holy places at Jerusalem, as, for instance, the Stations of the Cross, was the design adopted for the Templars’ London Churches. The date of their first settlement in London is not certain, but about the middle of the twelfth century they are said to have established themselves in Chancery Lane, between Southampton Buildings and Holborn Bars. Their property, which was afterwards to be known as the Old Temple, embraced part of the site of what is now Lincoln’s Inn. The foundations of a round church were discovered in 1595 near the site of the present Southampton Buildings.

But it was not long before they moved to a pleasanter site, to the ‘most elegant spot in the Metropolis,’ as Charles Lamb declared. For, about the year 1180, the Templars acquired a large meadow sloping down to the broad River Thames, on the south side of Fleet Street, and stretching from Whitefriars on the east to Essex Street on the west. Here they built themselves a lordly dwelling-place and a splendid Church, again a round Church upon the same sacred model, part of which still stands. Across the way lay their recreation ground. For the site of the modern Law Courts—that Gothic pile which we can never wholly see, and in which Street just failed to design a truly complete, effective, and absolute building, and failed entirely to produce a building practically suited for its purpose—was known then as Fitchett’s Field. The scene of the labours of the Lawyers, who have succeeded to their inheritance, was once the tilting-ground of the Knights Templars.

Five years later, in 1185, in the presence of Henry II. and all his Court, the dedication of the Round Church of the ‘New Temple’ took place. The ceremony was performed by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem.

The surroundings of the ‘New Temple,’ when Henry graced it upon this occasion with his royal presence, were extraordinarily different even from the aspect they wore a century later.

Fleet Street itself was not yet in existence. Its neighbourhood was a mere marsh, and Fleet Ditch, at the bottom of Ludgate Hill, was spanned by no bridge. The two highways to the City, when the Templars first settled at this spot, were first and foremost the River, and, secondly, by land, the old Roman Way through Newgate, up Holborn Hill to Holborn Bars, striking southwards from St. Mary-le-Strand, past the Roman Bath, to the River. But seventy years later a new main route to the City was constructed, which passed by the boundary of the Templars’ plot. For the marshes were drained, a bridge was thrown across the Fleet, and the ‘Street of Fleetbrigge’ came into existence.

The grandeur of the ceremony of dedication and the splendour of the Templars’ Church itself indicate clearly enough the importance of the ‘New Temple’ as the headquarters of the Order in England, and also the waxing wealth and power of the Order itself.