This weekend just gone, I appeared on the GBNews breakfast show with Anne Diamond to discuss the Knights Templar. Or more exactly, I was giving my views on the discovery of some Templar graves in the English county of Staffordshire.
Edward Spencer Dyas, a local historian, has unearthed five Templar graves at St Mary’s Church in the village of Enville. Two years ago, he claimed to have found other graves and I blogged about that previously. Dyas commented last week:
“This find has been confirmed to me as being a unique discovery. The oldest Templar Society in Britain who keep records of all Templar sites has confirmed it had never previously been recorded. I believe these discoveries make Enville one of the most nationally important churches in the country.”
DISCOVER: Me with William Shatner on TV!
Not everybody is convinced. All Templar finds are contentious. In the TV interview, I was asked why there are dead Templars in Enville. I explained that the Templars had a network of “preceptories” (kind of medieval agri-businesses) all over Europe that funded their military crusade in the Holy Land. At Enville, we could be seeing the remains of such a preceptory.
Anne Diamond made the point that most Templars weren’t knights but ordinary brothers – or “sergeants”. They toiled on the land and in workshops to create the wealth that kept the order afloat. Many would have died never seeing the Holy Land or the sacred city of Jerusalem.
