| Here Lies … England’s Last Templar? continued | [ back to previous page ] |
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Priory
Penitent ... In 1319, after six years, Stephen was moved to Christchurch Priory. A possible reason for the choice of Christchurch was that when its Augustinian Priory was first established around 1150, the first Canon was made Bishop Of Chichester, and it was his successor who had absolved Stephen in 1313. The 6-year delay can be explained by the fact the Templar Order may have been abolished in 1312, but the formalities of its winding-up were not completed until 1318, after years of legalistic wrangling over the fate of the survivors. There had been a plan to merge them with the Knights Hospitaller, later called the Knights Of Malta, whose symbol was the Maltese Cross – the device found on the other tomb slab discovered. In the end, the Pope wasn’t convinced of the Templars’ guilt, but felt the Order’s name had been irreparably damaged. In 1318, he ordered any surviving Templars not already sentenced be ‘inducted into a monastic order.’ Michael Stannard, who wrote the official Illustrated Guide To Christchurch Priory in 1985, reproduces in his 1999 The Makers Of Christchurch a 1319 list of those ‘ordained and probably joining the Augustinian convent as canons’ that includes de Staplebrigg, describing him as “an ex-Templar who received the first tonsure and seems to have been under supervision.” (The tonsure was the monastic “pudding bowl” haircut included in the initiation rite - see illustration.) Thus it was not until late in 1319 that de Staplebrigg was ordained, as an Augustinian novitiate. Another oddity is that according to the same reference he was not ordained at Christchurch, but at Breamore, up the Avon Valley towards Salisbury. The Church there is certainly an ancient one, classed as 11th century, with much of its Saxon fabric surviving today. Again, things prove not what they seemed: the Breamore church guide reveals that at Breamore there was then another Priory on the banks of the Avon – now disappeared without trace in the Reformation after getting into a dispute with Christchurch. (Christchurch Priory itself survived demolition in the Reformation as it was the local parish church.) Why the ceremony would be held at Breamore is unknown - could it have been to help conceal the presence of an ex-Templar at the Priory? There, the former knight lived out the rest of his life, which seems to have lasted three to four decades after the Templars’ downfall. A church record of pensions being paid suggests he was still alive in 1338. Later, Ken Tullett would decide after an experience he labelled ‘psychic intervention’ that Stephen lived till 1346, dying at age 60. If this is the case, Stephen would also have outlived the Pope, three Priors, and the king who had him arrested, surviving to see three king Edwards on the throne, and such national events as the start of The 100 Years War. He would have died just before siege ships returning from France to Weymouth and Southampton brought back the Black Death which wiped out a third of England’s population - regarded as divine punishment for the general wickedness of the times. |
 For
unknown reasons (perhaps to keep proceedings quiet), the captive
ex-Templar seems to have been ordained at Breamore, up the Avon
Valley, where another Priory stood. Pictured is Breamore church,
which Pevsner's Buildings Of England calls “by far the most
important and interesting Anglo-Saxon monument in Hampshire.”
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“Fratrum
Ordinis, quondam millicie” Regarding his status in the Order, Ken Tullett offers as evidence the quote “Stephenum de Stapelbrigge Fratrum Ordinis quondam millicie”. Millicie can be translated as Knight, though it is not the original Latin word, which is miles, militis, Latin for a soldier, later used to mean a professional warrior, i.e. a knight. (Miles is the word applied to the legendary Arthur in church chronicles.) Quondam, a word also used in a famous Arthurian motto (translated as the ‘once and future king’) means “former or onetime.” It is possible millicie meant a warrior who was not a knight in the aristocratic sense, i.e. a sergeant-at-arms. We can translate this memorial phrase as “brother of the Order, sometime warrior.” Nothing is recorded of where or when he fought, in the Scots or Welsh Wars, or overseas. During the 2001 dispute over the identity of the tomb, one opposing view was that it was unlikely a Templar would have been buried in the Priory under the insignia of a disgraced, officially heretical order. The finding of grave slabs in rubble suggests these came from the crypt, though Ken Tullett suspected Stephen was buried alongside the South Choir Aisle, in an area known to have been used to bury the Priory’s own canons. (There are a number of early tombs there, one with a skull and crossbones.) One reason for suggesting this location is that during restoration work in 1907 – six centuries after the Templars’ fall – there was a find of such interest that a postcard was issued. A tomb, hollowed out of a block of Purbeck marble, was found, for a man over six feet tall and with shoulders fifteen inches broad. This, Ken argued, was the frame of a warrior rather than a cleric. It is possible that, like many a disgraced man, he found renewed respect by dedicating himself to good works. Like the Hospitallers, the Templars had also nursed the sick, an offshoot of their original role of protecting the pilgrim routes. There was local opportunity here, for this was a place where people came to be healed. Tutton’s Well on Christchurch Harbour was said to be good for eye ailments. Leprosy had been brought back to England from the mideast at the time of the Crusades, and could also be picked up by pilgrims. Because it was near the Crusader port of Southampton, the Priory ran a Leper Hospital, with a hospice at Holdenhurst for isolation or terminal cases. Did he have local admirers or sympathisers who helped him to the end, subverting official church procedure? Or was he given his somewhat unorthodox memorial, because he kept true to the Templars’ original ideals, so that he was, in that sense, the last Templar? |
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Strange
Dreams Up till now, we have avoided bringing in the supernatural, but it is impossible to tell this story without mentioning this aspect, which led to the church’s and town’s name being changed. Christchurch priory was originally named 'The Monastery of the Holy Trinity of Thuinam' – alluding to the townsite being ‘tween the Avon and Stour. Its name was changed to Christ’s Church Of Twynham after a legend the new church was built with the help of a carpenter who would mysteriously appear every day to help, but never draw pay. The workmen decided it was Christ himself, come to help out, and named the church after him, and the town of Twynham then renamed itself Christ Church. (A beam He somehow lengthened after it had been cut too short to fit is still on display in the Priory, though it is now moved up out of reach as generations of pilgrims had whittled it down for souvenirs.) Michael Hodges in his book Ghosts Of Christchurch Hundred (2002) reports a former vicar seeing a vision of a procession of monks at the Priory bearing a body for burial. Priory archivist Ken Tullett himself had an experience suggesting one such presence was ‘Brother Stephen’ himself. In 1999, he was working in the Priory Museum in St Michael's Loft, the former novitiate training chapel where the grave slab found in 1996 was stored, when a strange event occurred. (This is described in 'A Templar Held Prisoner At Christchurch Priory' by Mike Hodges in the Christchurch History Society News Jan/Feb 2004.) From above him came a mysterious loud report (something not uncommon in descriptions of séances, where it is characterised as someone breaking through the barrier between worlds). He found himself doing what spiritualists call automatic writing, composing lines in a strange language, which he had analysed. It was Mediaeval French, and began “My name is Stephen. I was born in Montreuil on December 6th, 1286. I died at Thuinam aged 60….” That night, he had a dream about the de Staplebrigg family in Montreuil - though Stephen’s claimed maternal surname de Tournais suggests his mother was from Tournai, the French-speaking part of Flanders. Ken was baffled by this experience, but after discussing it with several people, chose not to pursue it. (He may have been aware of the case where Glastonbury Abbey archaeologist Frederick Bligh Bond lost his position after admitting he had used monkish automatic writing to locate ruins.) Another dream where de Staplebrigg appeared was pursued and became the inspiration for a book. Andrew Collins’s 21st Century Grail: The Quest For A Legend begins with a ‘psychic’ friend telling him of a 2001 dream where he was in a cavern and encountered Aleister Crowley, the occultist who was a member of a neo-Templar Order. In the dream, Crowley introduced him to a Templar knight … Stephen de Staplebrugge. Stephen’s spirit outlined clues to the mystery of the Grail, which he identifies with the idol the Templars called Baphomet. Andrew Collins discusses Stalbridge as the knight’s home and identifies a mediaeval image (painted on wood) of a bearded head found at nearby Templecombe as that of either John the Baptist, or Baphomet. Collins put together a scenario whereby de Staplebrigg was involved (presumably between 1307 and 1313) in the secret transport of the sacred Templar idol Baphomet out of England. He argues it was being taken to the Templar-dominated area around Rennes le Chateau – the locality made famous by the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Though Collins had no idea Ken Tullett had been involved with “automatic writing,” he did pursue the de Staplebrigge connection further for the revised edition of his book, partly based on research by Ken and Ray Lax. |
The
distinctive mediaeval monastic tonsure.
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The
Great Mystery Despite all the modern books about the Templars, the central mystery remains: were they innocent or guilty of blasphemous worship? The modern Templar books suggest the Order continued underground after 1307, worshipping in a ‘Gnostic’ tradition. Today there are various rival neo-Templar “chivalric” orders, each claiming to be the Templars’ real successors, and trying to recruit influential members such as politicians, police chiefs, NATO brass, and celebrities. Historian Helen Nicholson, author of the latest academic study, The Knights Templar (2004), says some of these neo-Templar orders are simply criminal fronts, and other authors have argued the real Templar-successor organisation was Freemasonry, which has a Templar ‘degree’ or rank. Historian JJ Robinson in his 1989 Born In Blood argues the surviving brothers of the English Templars formed an underground network of safe houses called Frere maisons or “brother houses” to help one another, and that the hand-signs and other devices they used were the original basis of Freemasonry with its secret signs. English Freemasonry itself officially denies this, but does have a London branch, Quatuor Coronatorum, which publishes a journal devoted to study of its possible historical origins. In 1907, for the 600th anniversary of the Templars’ downfall, their journal included a paper by a pro-Templar writer, E. J. Castle KC, “Proceedings Against The Templars, 1307-11,” which drew on trial records he had uncovered. Since quoted in other sources, the barrister’s article reported the evidence of one “Stephen de Stapelbrugge, an English Knight,” as testifying "there were two modes of reception, one lawful and good and the other contrary to the Faith." Now we can glimpse a possible explanation for that double initiation. There has long been a conspiracy theory regarding groups who use secret rites that they have a public face and a private face, representing their outer circle and their inner circle. That is, the organisation has a “white” official order doing good works, and a secret elite “black” inner order which exists to wield power for its own sake, by illicit means. This is the most sensational charge levelled at the Freemasons (e.g. by Stephen Knight in The Brotherhood), that they have a secret inner circle called the Royal Arch. Because of the research done into the Templars by Andrew Collins and others, we now know more about the English Templar trials, for these books reproduce trial testimony. And it turns out Stephen was a key witness – what today we would call a whistleblower - on the matter of these double initiations, and "the secret doctrine of the Order.” This inner order was not called the Priory Of Sion, as The Da Vinci Code and its sources would have it, but the Templi Secretum, the Secret Temple. He testified it was the inner order he was secretly received into the second time. At his second induction, the Magister Templi or Master of the Temple told him, "It is necessary for you to deny that Jesus Christ is God and man, and to deny Mary, his mother, and to spit on the cross.” He added that an idol of a head, called Baphomet, was then brought out for them to kiss while the brothers shouted 'Yah Allah'. Then the new brother was led to the library to learn things that had to be hidden from the Order’s own ecclesiastics. It’s been suggested the Templars picked up Eastern, Islamic beliefs during the Crusades, where they were used as interpreters. Some argue Baphomet was just Old French for Mohammed. Regarding the name Baphomet, Bible scholar Dr Hugh Schoenfield argued the Templars used an old code called the Atbash Cipher to conceal its true meaning from outsiders, the deciphered version being (wait for it, Da Vinci Code fans) - Sophia, Greek for Wisdom. This would make sense in the light of the next step, taking the candidate to a library. Historians says that normally, illiteracy was encouraged in the Templar Order as it made men easier to lead. But, as the Jesuits knew, initiating someone when young made them easier to teach. De Stapelbrigge testified that from 1307 to 1311 he was sheltered along with other fugitives, travelling by night and resting up by day, attending to the Order’s business. ‘During this time, the bretheren's duties were manifold, and ever did they think that the Magister Templi, Jacques de Molay, and the fallen brothers in France, would be absolved of the evil crimes levelled against them, and that their full dignity would be restored.’ It was while attending to business at Sarum (Salisbury) the King’s officers seized him and took him to Newgate Gaol, from where he was handed over to the Pope’s inquisitors. After two years he was sent to an Augustinian priory in Surrey. But when he heard the Pope had dissolved the Templar Order (in 1312), he escaped, “in the knowledge that his fellow brethren still convened in secret to exact the duties of Our Lord God and the Blessed Saints, and to make plans for a new order to continue the ideals of the old.” Eventually he was recaptured by the Salisbury bailiffs and carted back to London. This time the ecclesiastical court, of 15 Bishops, wanted to know more about the inner order, the Templi Secretum. But this time he refused to testify, even though he was kept in filthy conditions in gaol for another five years. Finally, in 1319, he went to Christchurch, to live his days as a novice “until his life became lost in the mists of time, and no more was known of him until he was awoken from his slumber in the year of Our Lord 2001 by those who now search for the relics of the Order….” |
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