Templar Estates in Lincolnshire

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The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holder of figure 1, but it has not been possible to do so. Apologies are offered for this and any other omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in...

Unless otherwise stated, all manuscript sources are from The National Archives, Kew, UK

The spelling of place names and personal names varies between the various sources. For clarity and convenience, all place names have been standardised and modernised. Personal names have generally been treated likewise, apart from a few instances noted in the appendices.

I would like to thank Dr David Marcombe, without whose inspiration I would never have embarked upon such an extended study of the Templars in Lincolnshire. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dr Gwilym Dodd and Dr Richard Goddard, without whose expert advice and good-humoured encouragement I would have fallen by the wayside long ago. I would also like to thank Professor Helen Nicholson for...

The Inquest of 1185 commissioned by Geoffrey Fitz Stephen was the first survey of property belonging to the Knights Templar in England and so is a natural starting place for a book which traces the fate of Templar estates in Lincolnshire over a period of almost four hundred years. The changing fortunes of Templar lands in Lincolnshire cannot be fully considered without establishing their place...

In 1135, six years after Pope Honorious II had bestowed papal approval upon the Templars at the Council of Troyes, Henry I of England died. He was succeeded by...

The initial donations of sundry small parcels of land as recorded in the Inquest of 1185 did not lend themselves to efficient estate management. To overcome this problem, the Templars became adept at acquiring and exchanging land so as to consolidate estates, reduce travel time, and lengthen the effective working day....

The estate accounts of the former Templar lands in Lincolnshire for which William de Spanneby, the keeper of those lands, was responsible, begin on 10 January 1308, the day of the Order’s arrest. As a consequence, the initial accounts give an insight into the nature of the agriculture and estate management practised by the Templars, while subsequent accounts record the changes which took...

Essential to the success of arable farming was the part played by draught animals. Plough teams consisting of oxen and/or horses prepared the land for sowing and helped to suppress weeds. Carthorses and oxen, primarily the former, were responsible for the haulage of crops from field to granary and granary to market. Cows produced milk and, more importantly, the bullocks needed to replace...

The initial conundrum is what type of sheep did the Templars keep on their estates in Lincolnshire? The use of the word breed would imply a far greater degree of differentiation than had in fact occurred by the beginning of the fourteenth century, a fact which underlies Trow-Smith’s preference for the term ‘regional...

The foregoing chapters have dealt in some detail with the physical nature of the Templar estates in Lincolnshire and the mixed farming which was practised. They have dealt only incidentally with the three groups of people who depended upon the estates for their livelihood or benefitted from them as a result of royal patronage. Firstly, there were those who were intimately involved with the...

To understand the issues surrounding the transfer of Templar land to the Hospitallers, it is necessary to frame them within the broader context of the political machinations, both domestic and international, which characterised the early decades of the fourteenth century. The Templar lands were pawns in a game of shifting fortunes played by the crown, the baronage and the papacy, which began in...

The Report of Philip de Thame, Prior of the English province, was submitted in 1338 to Grand Master Elyan de Villanova (Helion de Villeneuve), who was resident at the Order’s headquarters in Rhodes. Today it is housed, appropriately, on the island of Malta, the home of the headquarters of the Order of St John from 1530 until the end of the eighteenth century. The purpose of the Report was to...

The present chapter develops four themes within the turbulent context of Tudor England. Firstly there are the circumstances which led to the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII and the response of the Hospitallers to the changing circumstances in which they found themselves. Secondly there is an analysis of the Valor ecclesiasticus (Church Valuation), the 1535...

No other accounts give any indication of dead stock.

William Rynel of South Witham: to receive for life in the same house 3d. daily for his food, one mark yearly for other necessaries, and an old garment of the brethren at Christmas yearly, 2d. daily for the food of his groom, 5s. yearly for the stipend of his groom, who is to serve in the house; for one messuage and 24 acres of land and meadow in South Witham; and to give them at his death...

To Roger de Wyngefeld. Order to pay, out of the issues of the Templars’ lands in his custody to John, Bishop of Lincoln for […] Templars lately delivered to him […] to place in certain monasteries to do penance, the wages for their maintenance from the day of St. Alban the Martyr last until the next parliament, to wit, 4d. each daily, as they were wont to receive previously,...

Whereas the king and queen have it in their thoughts to make it known to the world that as by the best right they profess themselves defenders of the faith, so in very act and deed they are defending and fighting for the faith; and remembering that before the dissolution of the hospital of St John of Jerusalem in Ireland a great part of its possessions and revenues was wont to be allotted...

This appendix lists the location of property itemised in the letter patent of 2 April 1557 as to be returned to the Hospitallers, and compares that listing with those in the Inquest of 1185, the accounts of the former Templar estates of 1308, the Report of 1338 and the Valor ecclesiasticus of 1535.

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