The Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries

The fourth book in my Lady Apollonia’s West Country Mystery Series is entitled Templar’s Prophecy.  The book’s cover, shown on the left, features the medieval tomb effigy of a knight of that order that we found in the Templar Church of the Temple district of London, the exterior of that church is shown above.

You can read an earlier posting about the Knights Templar by clicking the May 2017 Archive using the link on the right below.  In that month’s archive, go to the May 30 post concerning the Knights Templar.  I mentioned there that my husband and I had visited various sites of Templar churches in England as well as in Spain, on the pilgrimage route from France to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.

These ancient churches display the great power and wealth which the Templars amassed between the 12^th century when they were founded and the early 14^th century when they were dissolved by Pope Gregory.  Templars were a religious military order founded in 1119 to provide support and protection to pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land.  Within twenty years of their founding, a papal bull had exempted the order from local laws, from paying taxes, and from all authority except that of the pope.  Such exemptions enabled them to gain the power and amass the wealth mentioned earlier.

Another example of a Templar church in England is the one in ruins in Bristol as shown on the right.  Similarly, we encountered connections with the Templars in Scotland in Roselyn Chapel, south of Edinburgh.  We also found an ancient Templar construction in a castle in Ponferrada, Spain, shown at the end of this posting.  In addition to churches and castles, we encountered place names such as Templecombe in Somerset, England.  This village, northwest of Yeovil, became an administrative center for the Templars in 1185 to manage their lands in the southwest of England.

Although the origins of the religious order in the twelfth century were military, no more than ten percent were knights who were well respected for their fighting skills.  They wore a distinctive white mantle with a red cross.  The other noncombatant members of the order managed a large economic infrastructure throughout western Christendom.  Their wealth and power grew over the decades, resulting in over a thousand Templar facilities scattered across Europe and in the Holy Land.

The power of the crusaders in the Holy Land waxed, then waned between the end of the eleventh century and the end of the thirteenth century, coming to an end at the Siege of Acre in 1291.  In Templar’s Prophecy I introduce a fictitious young crusader who was captured at Acre.  His grandson plays a role in my story which is set a century later.  After losing their fortification at Acre, the Templars military function was significantly reduced, but their power and wealth were well established.

Various monarchs of the period borrowed money from the order, and this led to their downfall.  King Philip IV of France destroyed them in his country in 1307.  With the cooperation of a French pope, he charged them with heresy and saw to it that their leader was martyred, largely so that he did not have to repay his huge debt to them.  A few years later the religious order was destroyed, so it was difficult to include Templars in a story set in the late 14^th century.  But if you go back and read my posting of February 8, 2021, the prologue of Templar’s Prophecy, you will gain some insight in how I attempted to do it.

See you next time.

In my last post, I introduced the early history of Cirencester in the Roman and Saxon periods, but Templar’s Prophecy, the fourth novel in my Lady Apollonia West Country Mysteries, is set in AD 1395 in medieval Cirencester.  This post will talk about that period in the town.

Cirencester’s population at the time of the Domesday Book in AD 1086 was about 350 persons, but it grew over the centuries to an estimated 2500 by the fourteenth century.  The main economic engine of the town was the wool trade which provided the reasons to have my heroine, Lady Apollonia, living in Cirencester.  English Cotswold wool was brought to Cirencester where it was woven, fulled or cleaned and thickened, and then dyed.

For four centuries in the medieval period, there were two great churches which sat almost side by side in the northeastern part of Cirencester, north of the great marketplace.  Just outside the walls which enclosed Cirencester Abbey was the Church of Saint John the Baptist which grew to be the largest parish church in Gloucestershire.  A picture of its impressive tower and south porch is shown on the upper left.

Yet even this mighty parish church building would have been dominated in medieval times by the greater church of Cirencester’s Saint Mary’s Abbey.  The abbey was built on the site of a minster church which dated back to Saxon times.  It was founded by King Henry I as an Augustinian abbey in AD 1117 and was enlarged in the 14^th century to become the largest Augustinian abbey in all of England.  Dissolved by King Henry VIII in the 16^th century, only grass parkland remains where the church and other abbey buildings once stood, as you can see in the picture below.

One Norman gate to the abbey grounds, shown below, and parts of the abbey wall remain today.  Some remnants of the once mighty abbey can be found elsewhere: a tithe barn on the outskirts of the town and some buildings in the town which utilized stone quarried from the abbey.

In its day, Saint Mary’s Abbey was immensely powerful.  The abbot, in the 13^th century, gained control of the wool fair, an annual event which attracted buyers and sellers, both domestic and foreign.  The abbey drew income from all its transactions, and this market did very profitable business because Cotswold wool was particularly prized in Europe.  The economic power which the abbot had often brought him into conflict with townspeople, and I have tried to weave some sense of that conflict into my story.

There were several medieval hospitals in Cirencester.  The Hospital of Saint John, shown below, was founded by King Henry I and received significant support in goods and personnel from Cirencester Abbey by the early 13^th century.  Such a hospital tended to the needs of elderly and sometimes feeble people of the town.  There were two other medieval hospitals in Cirencester which also have remains today:  Saint Lawrence. a leper hospital and Saint Thomas.  In the early medieval period, there was also a castle, but that had been destroyed, well before my story, at the time of the Civil War between King Stephen and Queen Matilda.

Please join me for my next post when I plan to discuss the Knights Templar on which the title to my book is based.