SIR RICHARD HASTYNGS PRECEPTORY 20th ANNIVERSARY

The Richard Hastyngs Preceptory is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, having been consecrated on 13th September 2006. Twenty years ago at the consecration, the then Provincial Prelate, Peter Staniforth, gave this Oration.

In consecrating a new Preceptory, we should all hold in mind those salient facts and judgements about the Knights Templar. What is well known about them provides the context in which future members of this Order will operate. Present-day ritual centred on a religious military order founded in 1119 to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land against Muslim attack inevitably reminds us of present-day Middle Eastern religious and political dissonances. However, within that twelfth-Century context of conflict, the Knights Templar lived under monastic rule, quartered originally near the site of the Jerusalem Temple. Our Masonic appreciation focuses on their godly perspective, resonances of their devotion to Christ appropriate to our lives and the present day, coupled with their common life together - a world apart from dissonance and recrimination.

The sustained daily activities of the Knights Templar were mainly military and administrative.  Despite their godly intentions, they found themselves maintaining the property, power and influence of the Latin kingdoms within the Holy Land. As these objectives became increasingly expensive to fulfil, so they began to raise funds from trade as mercenary force protecting trade as well as travellers to the holy sites. It is said they became the world's first international bankers, holding property in Europe and conducting their internal affairs in strict secrecy.

Why was - and is - Jerusalem so important? On maps drawn on parchment in the Middle Ages, Jerusalem is shown at the centre of the world. The Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral testifies to our world in this era fired by faith in the one true living God. Jerusalem was then, and remains today, the city sacred to three religions that have both godly kinship and human divergence: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For each, Jerusalem is the site of momentous events - mostly shared! but with different interpretations - that formed the indissoluble and developing bond between God and man. The present Dome of the Rock on the site of successive Israelite Temples, covers the outcrop where, around 1800 years before the birth of Jesus, Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. Commanded at the last moment to stay his hand from execution or child sacrifice, Abraham is seen as the initial respondent towards God's loving and sovereign initiative of revelation for Jew, Christian and Muslim. He is the first pilgrim on the right path towards the fulfilment of God's promise that “AII nations of the earth shall bless themselves by [his] descendants as a reward for [his] obedience."

First mention of the Templars in England was made in connection with the visit of Hugh de Payens, Master of the Order, in 1128. The foundation house in London was outside Holborne Bars, and Hugh appointed a Prior to preside over the English branch of the Order. The Templars' European property portfolio and wealth included much in the British Isles - a complicated patchwork (sometimes of obscure provenance) of lands, houses and manors, some remarkable round churches, hospitals and infirmaries. Much of these holdings are documented only in annals of seizure by and forfeiture to others in that wave of atrocities - fuelled by Church ambition and political greed - that led to the Order's rapid and complete suppression in 1312 by royal instigation and papal edict.

This new Preceptory in Leicester bears the name of Richard Hastings, Master of the Temple in England at the accession of Henry II in 1153, to whom the Order was greatly indebted for grants of property. In slightly less than sixty years, land had been acquired in London and extensively throughout the country. 

Their possessions, for revenue purposes, were divided into districts, with holdings in London being called the "Bailllia". Hastings was in the thick of it religiously and politically. Members of the Order were playing their part in diplomacy and finance - the skilful role that was so remarkable a feature of their career throughout Europe. Hastings was a friend and confidant of Thomas Beckett - even on his knees urging his friend Thomas to submit to the King and successfully persuading him to accept the Constitutions of Clarendon. To begin with, the Order was well regarded and patronised. Among the first patrons in this country were Earl Robert de Ferrers, Bernard de Balliol, King Stephen and Queen Matilda. Henry II was a great benefactor, conferring on the Order munificent gifts including the advowson of St. Clement Danes.

In 1184 the Templar house was transferred to Fleet Street and henceforth became known as the New Temple. The church building, round like the one in Holborne, was dedicated in 1185 by Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, to the honour of God and the Virgin Mary. The New Temple itself was the Order's principal London possession, with holdings and rents extensive enough to be justifiably called a "manor". In 1200, Pope Innocent Ill issued a Papal Bull declaring the immunity of persons and goods within the houses of the Knights Templar from local laws. This ensured the New Temple became a royal treasury as well as a repository for the Order's accumulated revenues, and banking advanced and advanced.

It is difficult to come to clear assessments as we follow the rise and fall of the Knights Templar. Allegorically, the demise of the Templars parallels in microcosm the fate of the Temple at Jerusalem. In both, the potential for God's glory and love to be shed abroad in hearts and minds throughout the world has foundered on human frailty, worldliness and calumny- both Temple and Templars becoming a battleground. The scale of the Herodian Temple had been stupendous, towering over the Kidron Valley, the culminating achievement of one of the most extraordinary figures of the ancient world. Just as Herod turned from benevolence to despotism and tyranny, so ten and more centuries later the Templars were made victims of a similar experience - the descent from the heights of unrivalled patronage to the depths of vilification and persecution.  Our task is to grasp their original vision and charism and appropriate it ourselves in the cause of Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth.