The Temple Church

I completely and utterly lose it with  ( the very very good looking/ see previous post ) exh.   I am shouting and swearing into a mobile that barely works in a dark damp street near London Bridge.  Some logical part of myself knows this isn't a good idea, that falling into this black place of rage can do no good but another tiny part feels that it is about time, that finally something is being freed. It is powerful to feel the words gather speed on their spindly legs to the beat and power of wide wings though I wonder briefly if this is an actual madness, a late Van Gogh landscape, if I have slipped now into this tumult unable to recover

Later I find out that I misunderstood the text that triggered the outburst - that I am almost completely in the wrong.


On a grey day ( and there is going to be a theme here for it is a friday lunchtime - the only day I seem able to take a break )   I cycle out from work to get into a church.   I know St Mary Le Strand is closed on Mondays and Fridays so I am aiming for the church at Temple.   I have caught whispers of it's beauty and also Da Vinci code conspiracy theories in other research so I think it is going to be a good one.

Parking the bike just off Fleet St I am again in a part of London I have never been.  I think as I walk down a thin cobbled street that it is like being a secret agent with my own self-generated, slightly nerdy special mission to complete.  I am hidden in this snatched fraction of the day for no one knows where I am and I can't imagine telling anyone I work with where I have been.  On the east side at the gatehouse of the walled court I ask a security man if it is possible to visit the church - yes he waves me in.   Like Lincoln's Inn there is a courtyard - but less of a quadrangle - more a carpark with an irregular arrangement of very old and modern buildings that run into lawns.   I don't know where I am going and I follow the crunch of wet gravel in a straight line looking down to a view of the Embankment and the Thames.  Walk like a lawyer I think imagining the scurry of the white rabbit with a pocket watch - though there is no restriction to being here - I just don't want to look like a Dan Brown conspiracy tourist.   I climb some greasy steps to see if a hall with stained glass is a church - it isn't - then sidle between two buildings on a path into a courtyard alongside offices

I have often thought I would like to take photographs through the windows walking past empty offices.  I love the still empty air of the partitioned spaces and the seemingly neutral and 'timeless' aesthetic of computer, keyboard, desk and chair made jaunty by bright coloured talismans of family life or souvenirs of individuality. Here at lunchtime at Temple these arrangements of greige are crammed into small Dickensian rooms with bound papers spilling onto desks.

Under the shelter of a stone arch I find a map on the wall then have to back track up skiddy stone steps, through the same courtyard but on the other side alongside more office windows.  The central garden is planted beautifully with plumbago and dark dahlias all of it sodden by the rain. Through the windows I see:  a corporate lunchtime group perched at a round table with catered sandwiches, papers built in pillars curving against the window like a hoarders work in progress then in a tiny basement room two men struggling with a photo copier as if in a lover's clinch or knights in a cave against a dragon.  I turn the corner to find the round church - labrador yellow set back from a courtyard, a column topped by a statue of two knights on a horse in the centre of the square.  It marks the reach of the fire of London I find out later. The flames somehow stopping  an arm's length from the church.   Writing this I think can that really be true then check my map book because I know there is a map of the burnt out areas of the city.  Yes, the beautifully drawn map by Wencelaus Holler in 1666 shows the white space of land destroyed by fire lapping the ink drawing of the circular church /tower and  a few fine pen-nibbed trees surviving nearby.

At the door of the church however a poster announces tours and admission fees.   I need £4 to enter.   I have to  troop back out through an alleyway onto Fleet St to get the cash and then back again with the money.  As I enter the church there are two women on the door  both very helpful but proprietorial and a bit bossy of their ancient space.   There is scaffolding like a curtain across the view of the altar  straight ahead but as I turn my head to see into the round of the church I can see effigies slightly submerged in the stone floor and it seems the altar is almost a side show to this old, circular shaped place.  In the high, light,  buttressed circle there are 9 stone knights lying as if on very thin mats on a bare floor.  They are beautiful, the textures of their chain mail and socks like knitted stone just sleeping

I discover these are Knights Templar from the ancient order founded in 1119 by Hugh de Payens from Champagne and Godfrey de Saint Omer from Picardy to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. and that this church is a Templar church founded in 1185.  When Jerusalem came under Muslim control in 638 bandits and fanatics preyed on the travelling christians and this new order formed to defend them.  They became the most feared knights as their devotion to scripture gave them the willingness to die. The statue I had seen outside the church is the emblem of the order -  the two knights together on a horse; a symbol of slightly disputed meaning - either their humble beginnings when horses had to be shared or the charity shown when a knight takes up a wounded Christian.   Initially a round church modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was established in Holborn in 1128 on the site of an old Roman Temple.  When this site became too small for the increasing numbers they moved to the present site building a larger round church set amongst grand halls, cloisters and walks.   The church was consecrated February 10th 1185 in a ceremony by Heraclius Patriarch of Jerusalem and it is believed likely that Henry 11 was also present at the consecration.

In an address given in 1885 to celebrate the seven hundredth anniversary of the consecration of the church I find contemporary concerns:
'The Templars have bequeathed us, as legacy, this lesson which we must not forget in the hour when we would fain recall the days of their grandeur and fresh enthusiasm: there is no promise of continuance for any institute, any party, any church, any creed.'  the sermon by Alfred Ainger 10 Feb 1885.

For only two years after the consecration of this chuch in 1185  the Holy City of Jerusalem was captured by the Saladin the great sultan of Islam and when the pure Gothic chancel extension to the nave was consecrated in 1240 in the presence of Henry III there were less than eighty remaining years before the Knights of the Temple were no more.

It seems The  Knights Templar evolved an early banking system - not unlike using travellers cheques -  so pilgrims could redeem money against valuables deposited with the Templars rather than carrying wealth on their dangerous pilgrimages.  The order became very rich and powerful, taking valuables from their conquests, gifts from the wealthy initiated into the order and offering loans to monarchs.  However, with wealth and power came envy and hostility and the Order was disbanded when King Philip 1V of France put thousands to death in the 14th century in order to plunder their wealth for his war against England.
With this sudden demise I find conspiracy theories:   the knights become a part of Switzerland, taking their banking expertise to the Swiss, the knights sailed to America, went to Scotland, became involved with the Freemasons. Dan Brown's plots seem to use ideas that they held dangerous secret knowledge against the Church which the Church wanted buried.   I even ( and quite unexpectedly) find a complicated tale that the Knights Templar were imprisoned in the castle local to my home town and built tunnels under the streets -  that a stone Owl perched on a building in the high street holds a Freemasons secret message.   Though I am interested in the reference to the symbol of the stone owl -  when I drive out of London with the boys to see my mum and dad we always look for and laugh at a stone owl balanced on the corner of a Barclays bank in St John's Wood - I have always told them it is real, to check if it has flown away but they are now old enough to tell me stories about it too.

Looking up from the knights on the floor I see a ring of 'gargoyles' around the walls of the circular church.   Beautifully modelled they are disturbing and funny.   A man stretches his mouth wide to poke his tongue out, another man is cross eyed.  The mad, blind. toothless and terrified are all gathered.  A devilish goat,  a simple king, faces with lolling expressions even a man having his ear bitten by a dog.  I feel I have found a secret, something really special.

'I love the gargoyles' I say to the women on the desk as I buy a postcard.   'Grotesques', she corrects me correctly but primly.  'They are replacements put there in 1862'.  I am surprised for they seem so very authentic.

I find the Templar Knight described by Bernard of Clairvaux, a nephew of one of the founding knights as:
' Truly a fearless knight, and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armour of faith just as his body is protected by the armour of steel.  He is thus doubly-armed, and need fear neither demons nor men.'

I wonder if the grotesques represent this.  When Philip 11 suddenly and harshly disbanded the Templars   'The charges of heresy included spitting, trampling, or urinating on the cross; while naked, being kissed obscenely by the receptor on the lips, navel, and base of the spine; heresy and worship of idols; institutionalized sodomy; and also accusations of contempt of the Holy Mass and denial of the sacraments. Barbara Frale has suggested that these acts were intended to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a Crusader might be subjected to if captured by the Saracens. According to this line of reasoning, they were taught how to commit apostasy with the mind only and not with the heart.' Barbara Frale, 'The Chinon Chart: Papal Absolution to the last Templar, Master Jacques de Molay', Journal of Medieval History, 30 (2004), 127.


Though I also find  Bernard ( 1090 -1153) moaning about the grotesques.'What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters under the very eyes of the brothers as they read?  What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, strange savage lions and monsters? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man?'  I see several bodies with one head and several heads with one body. Here is a quadruped with a serpent's head, there a fish with a quadruped's head, then again an animal half horse, half goat....Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities we should at least regret what we have spent on them.'

Much of the church has been destroyed or restored or replaced.  After the departure of the Templars the land and buildings were rented to lawyers and their tenure made official in 1608 by James 1.  Christopher Wren tinkered the original structure after the Fire of London though the fire had not damaged the building at all and on 10th May 1941 incendiary bombs set light to the roof, setting fire to much of the church and cracking the dark Purbeck marble columns by the intense heat.   The columns and the church have been restored though it seems the original columns had a 'light outward lean, an architectural quirk,' which was reproduced in the replaced columns.

This takes me so long to write.   I am not sure why.   I thought I would love the mystery and tales of these knights but every night I sit to write and I just feel weary -  I fiddle and fiddle with a few words but without the passion I normally feel for this project .   Every day on the way to work I cycle past St Margaret's in Parliament Square.   I didn't care for it much when I wrote about it and now I love it's almost organic form, the intricate tracery like the delicate structure of a mushroom in the shade of the Abbey.  I have learnt so much from the churches I think but worry I have written myself into a cul de sac.

I am reading  ''A jury of Her Peers' American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx' by Elaine Showalter for I am thinking how to write or what to write.   I have barely any time to read or write anything at all and I only seem to be able to write this blog slowly.  I am worried it won't add up to anything much.  Though  I send it to an agent who always says nice things about my writing, and he does but as always he says it is ( sadly ) unpublishable.  I guess I want to write something that is publishable that I want now to be published.

Reading 'A Jury of Her Peers' I find comrades alongside my slightly solitary life for described are the early challenges of being a woman and a writer.
I find  'Anne Bradshaw vouched for by her brother in law that she had neglected no housekeeping chore in their making 'these Poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments'


Lydia Maria Child  a writer and American abolitionist in 1864 listed she had:

Cooked 360 dinners
Cooked 362 breakfasts
Swept and dusted sitting room and kitchen 350 times
Flilled lamps 362 times
Swept and dusted chamber and stairs 40 times.
Beside innumerable jobs too small to mention.'

Though what I identify with is the beady eye alongside families, the difficulty of getting everything to square.

I hear a well heeled writer at work say he has never dusted anything in his life.  Oh I think with a quick flash of spite but somebody will have done.  Some people will have done that for you  - for it seems to me that dust is matter that should be considered by all.

In the time I take to write this I see the first sprouts of scaffolding appear above the fence of the boarded up site on the corner of Horseferry Road where the court was, then a bright yellow digger and a crane installed.   The crane looms high above the west tower of the Houses of Parliament catching the light bright against the blue sky, the gold tips of the tower behind glinting in the same sunlight.  The space is still there but it is being filled in above dark green hoardings and portacabins built on stilts.

Unexpectedly the day before I finish writing this I have to research photographs of Jerusalem for a Christmas themed travel piece on the Holy Land.   Oh I think seeing pictures of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem and The Temple Mount, I never thought about this.   It is described as a tacky place, too full of tourists and too full of the warring concerns of different faiths but in the pictures I find it beautiful.  Someone in the office says over my shoulder that they went with their family on a coach trip out of a water park in Egypt and it was like stepping into another time, but sacred.   In these dark, disputed candle lit places I think that despite the dusting of the faithful there must be old traces, old matter, dead skin mingled and collected like sand.

Amen