The Inns of Court

by Cecil Headlam

A Round Church of the Order of Knights Templars (dedicated in 1185). The oblong nave is seen through the pillars of polished Purbeck marble (1240).

accurate copy of an older one. It also proclaimed an Indulgence of sixty days to annual visitors, the earliest known example, I believe, of this particular form of taxation. The Church was again dedicated in 1240. The rectangular portion of the Church, the Eastern portion added to the Western Round, was now probably reconstructed, supplanting a former chancel or choir, just at the period when the new Pointed style had ousted the round Norman.

The circular type of church is not peculiar to the Order of Templars, as we have seen, or even to the Christians, but the choice of it was due in this case to the practice of imitating the architecture, as the topography, of the Holy Places at Jerusalem. In England, Round Churches occur at Ludlow and Cambridge (1101), built before the Knights of the Temple were established. St. Sepulchre at Northampton is possibly a Templar Church, but the Round Church at Little Maplestead in Essex belongs to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and was built by the Knights Hospitallers.

The Temple Church escaped the Fire of London as by a miracle, for the flames came as near as the Master’s House at the East End. It escaped the fire of 1678, when the old Chapel[18] of St. Anne, once perhaps the scene of the initiation of the Knights Templars, lying at the junction of Round and Rectangle, was destroyed by gunpowder to save the church. But it could not escape the destroying hands of the nineteenth-century Goths. For here, between 1824 and 1840, the great Gothic Revivalists indulged in one of their most ineffable and ineffaceable triumphs of intemperate enthusiasm. The Round part of the Church was almost rebuilt, and the old carvings were supplanted by inferior modern work. The conical roof was added; the horrid battlements banished. The old marble columns were removed and replaced by new ones, to obtain which the old Purbeck quarries were reopened. This marble takes an extraordinarily high polish, and presents a surface so clean and lustrous as to be almost shocking in its contrast to our dingy London atmosphere, and buildings begrimed with dirt and soot.

The many brasses, which Camden praised, have disappeared; the rich collection of tablets and monuments and inscribed gravestones that once pleased the eye of Pepys, and formed a feast of heraldic ornament, has been dispersed, and found sanctuary in the tiny Churchyard without, on the north side of the Church, or in the Triforium. The floor of the Church was, at the same time, wisely lowered to its original level, and covered with a pavement of tiles designed after the pattern of the remains of old ones found there, or in the Chapter House of Westminster.

A continuous stone bench, or sedile, which runs round the base of the walls was added at this period, together with the delightful arcade above it, with grotesque and other heads in the spandrels. The wheel window—a lovely thing—was uncovered and filled with stained glass, and the windows in the circular aisle of the Round have since been filled by Mr. Charles Winston with stained glass which is good, but the colour of which it is absurd to compare, as Mr. Baylis does, with the blues and rubies of the glass of the best period. It is to be hoped that the remaining windows will not be filled with coloured glass, as Mr. Baylis[19] suggests, for the interior of the Round is too dark already.

The result of all this Gothic reconstruction is that, save for the old rough stones in the exterior Round walls, and some of the ornate semicircular arches, the Templars’ Church exists no more. The grandeur, beauty, and historical interest of their building can be gathered now from old engravings only; the monuments of many famous men, in judicial robes and with shields rich in heraldry, a representative gallery of unbroken centuries, which once crowded its floors, must be judged by broken and scattered fragments. What we have is a reconstruction such as the Restorers chose to give us—that is, a light and very pleasing Early English interior, fitted into a Round Norman exterior, beneath the remaining arcade of round arches and windows.[20]

If the enthusiasm of the Restorers, however, led them to destroy so that we can never forgive them for having taken from us original work for the sake of indulging their own fancy, yet it is evident that there was much for them legitimately to undo. There were plaster and stucco, and dividing gallery and whitewashed ceiling, and all the usual horrors of the eighteenth century, to be got rid of. The graves and monuments were historically interesting, but they crowded the little church unbearably. And at least the Restorers have given us beautiful work of their own, and a seemly and beautiful sanctuary worthy of the place.

The Round is entered by a western door—a massive oaken door superbly hung upon enormous hinges, quite modern. It closes beneath a semicircular arch enriched by deeply-recessed columns with foliated capitals of the transitional Norman style, though all this work, like the Gothic Porch which contains it, is modern restoration. The scene as we enter the Church is one of striking singularity. Near at hand is the arcaded sedile about the walls of the Round, and through six clustered columns of great elegance, made of polished Purbeck marble, which support the dome, we catch a glimpse of the polished marble columns in the Choir, the lancet windows in the North and South walls, and the three stained windows of the East End, beneath which the gilded Reredos glitters. And through the painted windows of the Round itself the light strikes upon a wonderful series of monumental recumbent figures, some of which are made of this flashing Purbeck marble too. It is a strange, unforgettable sight, that summons up unbidden the vision of the Red-Cross Knights, to the tread of whose mailed feet these pavements rang, when, beneath their baucéant banners, they gathered here to the Dedication of their Temple.

These monuments, though re-arranged and restored indeed by Richardson, 1840, are still of great interest. Nine only out of eleven formerly mentioned remain. Two groups of four each lie beneath the Dome, with the ninth close by the South wall, balancing a stone coffin near the North. Two of them belong to the twelfth century and seven to the thirteenth, and these silent figures wear the armour of that period—the chain mail and long surcoats, the early goad spurs, the long shields and swords, the belts, and mufflers of mail.