Rise and Fall of The Knights Templar in Lincolnshire
The financing of wars, particularly in places as far away as the holy lands, was an expensive enterprise. The Templars financed their military campaigns through the income generated by their estates all over Europe, including several in Lincolnshire. Most of these served primarily as a means to generate income, but the Temple Bruer estate on the Lincoln Heath (a relatively featureless landscape largely free of trees) was different in that it was particularly suitable for use as a base for the practising of military manoeuvres. It thus became the centre of the Templars’ estates in Lincolnshire.
The Templars were suppressed at a time when England was on the brink of economic disaster. However, the great change in emphasis from arable to sheep farming was part of the recovery from that disaster. The lifetime of the Templars was one in which the climate allowed expansion. This was the period when villages were set up on uplands and fens, villages which became what we know as deserted medieval villages.
Nonetheless, much wool was grown on the Lincolnshire uplands, the Wolds and the Heath. That wool was sold through Boston to Flanders and woven into cloth. At Temple Bruer, the Templars were leaders in the sheep farming industry, an economic powerhouse that made Lincolnshire a rich county at the time, breeding Lincoln Longwool sheep. This was a period when Lincolnshire was populous and an economically leading part of England.
The economic growth broadly coincided with the decline in the reason for the Templars’ existence. The heyday of the Crusades was over and people’s thinking had moved on. But the Templars’ wealth remained. They developed into banking. Some potentates were reluctant to repay monies borrowed and a general jealousy of the Templars’ wealth developed.
The community at Temple Bruer was broken up on 10 January 1308 when Edward II sent knights to arrest the monk-knights for alleged crimes, of which none of significance was substantiated. Nonetheless, the Templars in general were too wealthy and kings, particularly Philip IV of France owed them too much money for the order to survive and it was suppressed in 1312 by Pope Clement V.
Beresford and Hurst listed Bruer as a Deserted Medieval Village in their definitive work, but it is not clear that there was a separate existence as a village.
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