The Knights Templar (more correctly, The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, or The Order of Solomon’s Temple) are a well-known military order of religious knights. Their history (and pseudo-history) is well known, and following their suppression in the early fourteenth century, their properties were transferred to another order, the Hospitallers. As with the Templars, the commonly used name is a contraction of the more wordy The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem.
The origins of the Order are complex, but it survives to the present day. Traditionally, the Order began operating about 1099, following the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. They were based in an existing hospice run by a Brother Gérard de Martigues (about 1040-1120). It had been established about 1058 on the site of a Late Roman building traditionally identified as the Church of St John the Baptist, said to have been founded by the Empress Aelia Eudocia (about 401-460), wife of the Eastern Emperor Theodosius II (401-450), who lived in the city for the last seventeen years of her life after marriage had broken down. Brother Gérard looked after injured crusaders following their occupation of the city, and those who recovered founded the military order, taking its name from the hospitium he ran.
In 1113, Pope Paschal II recognised the knights as a Sovereign Order, as it had quickly become wealthy and had established daughter houses along the pilgrim route from western Europe to Outremer (the name of the Crusader state). By the later twelfth century, the Hospital had grown to be able to look after a thousand sick and injured knights. They also took on a role similar to that of the Templars, of providing military escorts to pilgrims arriving in Outremer. Of their many possessions, the Krak des Chevaliers in Syria is perhaps the best known and certainly the most spectacular.
After Jerusalem was recaptured by Saladin in 1187, the Knights moved first to Tyre and then to Acre in 1191. That city fell to the Mamluks in 1291, ending the existence of Outremer, and the Knights fled to Cyprus. To avoid political disputes on the island, the Knights chose to move to Rhodes, and after a four-year campaign, eventually took it from the Roman Empire (don’t call it Byzantine!) in 1310. Two centuries later in 1552, Sultan Süleyman-ı Evvel (Suleiman the Magnificent, 1494-1566) captured Rhodes and expelled the Knights, who fled to Sicily. Pope Clement II (1478-1534, himself a member of the Order) and Holy Roman Emperor Karl V (1500-1558) agreed to settle the Knights in Malta, Gozo and Tripoli. In 1566, work began on creating a new capital city and base for the Order, which became known as Valletta after its founder, Grand Master la Vallette.
The Order remained in Malta until Napoléon’s invasion as part of his Egyptian campaign in 1798. This was a devastating blow to the Order, as no single European nation was willing to give it land. Russian Emperor Paul I (1754-1801) gave the greatest number of Knights land in St Petersburg, where they remained until the Revolution in 1917. In 1834, some of the surviving Knights settled in Rome, establishing themselves as The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (otherwise known as The Sovereign Military Order of Malta), where it continues to operate mainly as a humanitarian charity, with Permanent Observer status at the United Nations General Assembly since 1994. 112 countries regard it as a sovereign state, issuing its own passports but with only three citizens (the three principal officers of the Order). Several other Orders – The Order of Saint John (Bailiwick of Brandenburg), The Order of Saint John in Sweden, Johanniter Orde in Nederland and Most Venerable Order of Saint John in England – claim with varying degrees of plausibility also to be descendants of the medieval order.
As they had across Europe, the Hospitallers gained many estates in England throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their holdings were increased after the suppression of the Knights Templar in 1312. Among those transferred to the Hospitallers was the preceptory at Temple Dinsley, said to have been the largest outside London, which was home to six brethren and twelve visitors in 1309. The manor of Temple Dinsley was carved from part of the lost manor of Waylay before 1147, and the manorial histories of other parts of Dinsley (Furnival Dinsley, now Maydencroft, and Dinsley, now St Ippollitts) make reconstruction of the history of Temple Dinsley challenging. Although many accounts state that the manor passed into various hands, we can never be certain which of the Dinsley manors is being discussed in the primary documents.
We do know that in 1330, the Prior of the Hospital of St John leased the property at Temple Dinsley to William de Langford for the remainder of his life. The Priors held the manor of the lords of the manors of Hitchin, Dinsley Furnival and King’s Walden, showing the complex and scattered nature of their holdings, a good reminder that a manor is defined legally, not geographically. Eventually, the Order was suppressed in England in 1540 and the manor sold to Sir Ralph Sadleir in 1542. He built a new E-shaped house on the site, although a plate in Sir Henry Chauncy’s The Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire, published in 1799, seems to show a line of low stone buildings lying to its east, roughly along the former parish boundary between Hitchin (of which Preston was a part) and St Ippollitts. Perhaps these were the remains of conventual structures.
After Sir Edwin Sadleir sold the manor in 1712 to Benedict Ithell of Chelsea, the new owner had a new mansion built immediately to the east. The original house was demolished some time between 1815 and 1832, while Ithell’s was a typical Queen Anne style mansion, the core of which survives to the present. Later alterations include a kitchen in the early nineteenth century, re-roofing before 1840, a drawing room to the west and bay window to the north in the early 1870s, and a new kitchen and scullery block to the east in 1884. After H G Fenwick bought the house in 1908, he engaged Lutyens to carry out extensions and cross-wings at each end between 1909 and 1911, then after it became a school in 1935, further extensive alterations and additions have been made.
During the building work of 1884, skeletons, gravestones and parts of a pewter chalice and paten were found. One of the ‘gravestones’ (actually a coffin lid dating from the early thirteenth century) was taken to St Martin’s Church in Preston, where it is now on display. More discoveries were made during work for Lutyens’s extensions, when medieval floor tiles were uncovered; foundations of the sixteenth-century house were found at the same time, suggesting that the discoveries were made beneath the west wing.
Encaustic floor tile
Six of the tiles are in the collection of North Hertfordshire Museum and five are in the British Museum, which also has the pewter chalice and paten fragments. Although the British Museum identifies them as having been made at Mill Green in Essex (for two of them, it places the production centre in Shropshire!), it is more likely that they were made locally. In many cases, tilers with large ecclesiastical commissions would travel to the site and set up a kiln there, as this was cheaper than trying to transport heavy items across country. If they were brought from outside Preston, then there were tilers in Hitchin who could easily have supplied them.
The style of tile in the photograph was popular in the later Middle Ages, and this example probably dates from between 1325 and 1375. The image is of the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei) carrying the vexillum (a flag that was originally a Roman military standard), showing the triumph of Christ over death and sin. Other designs from Temple Dinsley include two fleurs-de-lys (symbolising the Blessed Virgin Mary), a shield emblazoned with a bear (?) and lion rampant in chief, lozengy in field, an obscure crouching animal with another above its back, a wyvern and several geometric designs. All seem to be of the same date.
The date of the tile belongs to the early years of the Hospitallers’ tenure of Temple Dinsley. They may be evidence for a refurbishment of existing buildings or for new construction on the site. Work by the Temple Dinsley Archaeological Project, which ran between 2000 and 2010 failed to find any trace of the conventual buildings, either through geophysical survey or trial trenching. While the scale of Lutyens’s landscaping around the house may have removed most traces, it is possible that elements remain beneath Benedict Ithell’s house.
Once again, what started as a simple investigation of a relatively ordinary (if high status) object in the museum’s collection, has raised more questions that we are not (yet) able to answer.
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
The present parish of Kimpton lies in the south-west of North Hertfordshire District, the main settlement area today occupying a valley running west to east. A now lost river, the River Kyme, once flowed through the valley but now runs in a culvert beneath the High Street. Before that, the High Street cannot have existed, and it periodically suffers floods after heavy rain, most notably in 1795 and 2001. We do not know when the river was diverted underground, but it must have been before about 1600, when the earliest maps fail to mark it.
Where was the village when the river still flowed along the valley bottom, to join the Mimram on the edge of the parish? Maps provide an obvious clue: the parish church of Ss Peter & Paul lies to the northeast of the village centre, on a south-facing slope. Lidar shows that it sits inside an artificial-looking embanked rectangular enclosure very similar to a group at Pirton shown in recent years to be early medieval in origin. At Pirton, they have been dated to the end of the early medieval period (8th or 9th centuries) and probably belonged to people of high status, perhaps the type referred to as þegns (thegns or thanes) in documents of the period. In this case, the church may have originated as a proprietary church, belonging to a local landowner.
Proprietary churches caused much discussion in the eighth century over how bishops might manage the priests there, something the owners often resisted. With ecclesiastical reforms in the tenth century leading to the development of the familiar parish system between then and the twelfth century, proprietary churches were gradually brought into the system as the main parish church. This is possibly what happened at Kimpton. Although the present building dates mostly from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the writer observed work on the church in 1989 that revealed a foundation trench on a different alignment running beneath the wall of the Victorian vestry and earlier than the original north wall of the church. This is a good sign that there was an earlier building – not necessarily the precursor to the church – here in the past.
Another clue is that the road to Welwyn, which continues the line of the High Street to the east, runs slightly uphill to the south of the River Kyme as it emerges from the ground just before its confluence with the Mimram. Perhaps the original route kept to the slightly higher ground before migrating into the valley bottom after the river was covered over.
A more radical solution might be to look for evidence of earlier routes through the parish. The present road layout existed by 1766, when Dury & Andrews published their map of Hertfordshire, although there were then very few buildings on the south side of the High Street. Apart from the High Street, many routes run north to south across its line, including the road to Whitwell and ultimately Hitchin, which runs alongside the eastern edge of the church enclosure. At least one of these lines, running north from Blakemore End, has been seen as Roman.
R H Reid, a member of the group of amateur Roman road hunters who called themselves the Viatores, proposed in 1964 that a road ran from the Roman city of U̯erolami̯um to Ickleford and on to Bedford and, eventually Irchester in Northamptonshire. He excavated a section across the proposed line at Heron’s Farm, south of Gustardwood, in August 1959 and showed that this was a properly engineered Roman road. It had a base of pebbly clay 0.10 to 0.23 m thick, topped with a tightly packed layer of gravel, flint pebbles and angular flint between 0.13 and 0.25 m thick. There was a camber (the curvature of the surface) of 0.36 m across the width of 5.5 m, and a supposed shallow ditch to the west, although the published section does not inspire much confidence, showing it to be about 1.1 m wide and only 0.2 m deep. Nevertheless, this section of the road is real enough.
Lidar data confirms the line of the road north through Blackmore End to south of Kimpton Hall, where landscaping (perhaps medieval gardens) has obliterated it. It then follows the northern part of Hall Lane, where it has worn into a hollow way as it descends into the valley. The line is lost north of the High Street and Kimpton Park, established in 1346, has hidden any traces that might have shown on Lidar. The route that Reid proposed went north towards Whitwell and through Gosmore to Hitchin. Not one stretch of this line can be shown to be Roman, and parts belong to an eighteenth-century road past Stagenhoe.
R H Reid proposed a second road through Kimpton, running from Coleman Green to Baldock. He took it on a strangely contorted route along the eastern parish boundary, past Abbotshay in Codicote, and east of Rye-end Farm. There is nothing on the supposed line to show a Roman origin until it reaches Rush Green, where it falls into line with the previously known course. Instead, Lidar data shows a clearly engineered road on the western edge of Prior’s Wood in the southeast corner of the parish, which aligns almost precisely with the section north-northeast from Rush Green. Beyond the northern edge of the wood, it turns to a more northeasterly alignment, probably to negotiate the valleys of the River Kyme and River Mimram.
Reid also suggested third route, which he called a ‘lateral way’, between Friar’s Wash and Ayotbury, largely following the southern parish boundary. There is nothing to show that this is Roman, and many of the claimed sections of agger (the raised foundations of engineered roads) are nothing more than denuded field banks. We can discount this as an ancient road.
But what of the road through Blackmore End? Where did it go after crossing the River Kyme in the valley bottom? Aerial photographs show a complex of buried ditches west of Park Wood, including some double ditches that look like tracks or roads. They are evidently the remains of a village or hamlet and their form suggests a Roman date. Projecting the main double-ditched feature to the southeast reaches Kimpton High Street exactly where the road through Blackmore End reaches it. It is reasonable to conclude that this was where the road headed, not in the Hitchin direction but aiming towards Breachwood Green. We must leave tracing it further in this direction for another occasion, but it would pass very close to the likely site of the sixth-century burial mentioned a few weeks ago.
There are no reported finds from the area of the cropmarks, either made by detectorists or casual walkers. The cropmarks indicating the settlement were best visible on Google Earth™ in 2012 but can be seen on several others by enhancing the contrast, which shows that the marks are not random difference in crop growth but instead reflect buried features. They appear to show a settlement consisting of enclosures separated by trackways, although there is not enough detail to give us a complete plan.
One final point to note is the name of the River Kyme. The river-name expert Eilert Ekwall was in no doubt that Kyme is a back-formation from the village name (in other words, it was never an independent river-name). Although Cyma is a genuine Old English personal name, there is river-name Kyme in Lincolnshire, which Ekwall derived from a hypothesised Old English *cymbe, ‘a hollow’. If the river-name came first – which is what we usually find, as in nearby Luton, named from the River Lea – could Kimpton be the tūn (‘enclosed farm’) on or close to the River Kyme? The next possibility is that because many river-names belong to an older stratum of place naming than Old English village names, *cymbe may not be Old English but from the Celtic dialect Brittonic. An earlier *Cumbi̯a (‘valley-river’) would develop regularly into *cymbe, and this possibility seems the most likely etymology.
This analysis of the landscape of Kimpton points towards an understanding of how settlement shifted over time. The earliest village, in Roman times, lay to the west of Park Farm, next to a road that came up from the south before crossing the River Kyme and turning to a more northwesterly alignment. This was perhaps the first village community in the valley.
Later, perhaps in the eighth or ninth centuries, a local lord established a chapel in his defended enclosure that later became the parish church. As the River Kyme vanished underground, perhaps partly through human agency and perhaps partly through a lowering of the water table, so a new route along the valley bottom became the focus for the settlement by the later Middle Ages, developing into the focus of the current village.
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
Human stone (or lithic) technology rarely produces tool types that are chronologically distinctive. The microlith (‘tiny stone’) is one of the few diagnostic types. Early Mesolithic peoples in Europe developed them as the glaciers were retreating at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age. The traditional view was that they show the poverty of these people, living at a time when the big game animals such as mammoth had become extinct and before the bounty produced by farming.
Before the 1970s, this was the standard view of the European Mesolithic. We will find out later how and why our ideas about the people of this era – from about 11,000 to 4000 BC in Britain – were wrong for so long. The first person to subdivide the Stone Age was John Lubbock who, in 1865, introduced the terms Palaeolithic (‘Old Stone Age’) for the period when stone-using peoples were hunter gatherers and Neolithic (‘New Stone Age’) for the time when the first farmers still made their tools from stone. In 1866, Hodder Westropp proposed that there was a middle period, the Mesolithic, between the end of the glacial climate and the introduction of farming.
The idea of a Mesolithic was controversial, and many prehistorians denied that it existed as a separate period. By the middle of the twentieth century, though, it had come into regular use in northern Europe, while southern European prehistorians prefer the term Epipalaeolithic (‘beyond the Old Stone Age’). The main objection to the name is that it implies a teleological approach to history: the distinction is often made that Mesolithic societies are those who later develop (or are replaced by) farming, whereas those that remain hunter-gatherers cannot be described this way. This naming of the period wrongly presupposes the inevitability of farming, as if all societies follow the same historical trajectories, and that there is an evolutionary progression; a similar objection can be made about Epipalaeolithic, as if such societies necessarily developed from Palaeolithic. These views belong in the past, in Whig interpretations of history or in Marx’s universalising approach.
Today’s object comes from Hitchin and consists of a type of microlith usually described as geometric, as it is one of several forms that resemble geometric shapes. In this case, it is a scalene triangle, a three-sided shape where each edge is a different length. Geometric microliths are typical of the Early Mesolithic (about 10,000-6150 BC), when they were one of a number of flint tools made at this time. Microliths were not tools in their own right but elements of composite tools, in which two or more microliths would be mounted in a haft using a glue such as birch resin. People also made tools from bone and antler, but these rarely survive on dryland sites.
Priscilla Ransom (1871-1951), widow of Francis Ransom (1860-1935), gave three items, including this one, to Hitchin Museum, where they were accessioned on 1 May 1939. The entry originally read ‘Flint microlith’, but someone later added an s in pencil, so perhaps she brought in two more at a later date. It also gives the provenance as ‘Local’ and ‘The Chilterns’, added later in pencil, has been rubbed out. This is where the Ransoms were living from 1910, so it is unclear if they made the finds there. The house was built in 1894 and originally called Broadview, so it is unlikely that the Ransoms or the builders found the flints while they were digging its foundations.
To complicate matters (there is always a complication with these archaeological accessions), these same three objects appear in the Letchworth Museum Accessions Register on 26 February 1940, without a donor’s name. There, they are described as ‘A. Tattooing Lance (Riddy Field, Hitchin). B. Toe Cleaning Scraper (Riddy Field, Hitchin). C. Scraper & Borer combined’. The first is a lanceolate microlith, Hitchin Accession Number 92/1, the second is the one we’re looking at today, and the third is a rhomboid microlith, 92/2. According to the card index Sites and Monuments Record maintained by the former Archaeological Service of the museum, these finds were made in Riddy Shott. This was the name of the field immediately east of The Chilterns. Other early prehistoric finds in Letchworth Museum also came from Riddy Shott or Riddy Field, which may be the correct findspot for these three microliths. The name Riddy perhaps derives from Old English ryding, ‘an artificial clearing (an assart)’.
Riddy Shott is on the east side of the most prominent hill in Hitchin, known since the nineteenth century as Windmill Hill. The western side has a steep concave scarp into the valley of the River Hiz, while the western has a gentler slope down to the River Purwell. Many of the finds of Mesolithic material across north Hertfordshire have come from higher ground, as here. Does this mean that people frequented the hills more than the river valleys? Probably not. The valleys were rich in resources – reeds for basketry and thatch, foodstuffs (both animal such as fish or wildfowl, and plants) – that would have been attractive to these people. However, we also know from environmental studies carried out by Museum of London Archaeology in the early 2000s that the Hiz valley was damp and marshy at this time. There is no reason to think that the Purwell valley was any different.
The remarkable site at Star Carr, near Scarborough, developed from the 90th century BC on the edge of a now vanished lake. People were cutting down trees to make a clearing where they built houses, using timber to make a platform on the shore and dumping large amounts of timber into the lake. Over the next 800 years, they continued to cut down trees, live on the slightly higher ground above the water level and enlarge the area of activity. They processed animals for food, skins and tools made from bone and antler, used willow and aspen to make houses and waterside platforms, some of which came from coppiced woodland, made cord from nettles and used reeds growing at the water’s edge. The people indulged in occasional feasting, which was perhaps when they wore the famous antler masks made from deer skulls.
It is now obvious from the ongoing work at Star Carr that Early Mesolithic societies were anything but simple, impoverished hunter-gatherers. They could live in permanent village-like settlements, where they managed the landscape by coppicing woodland, altering the edges of a lake and undertake a broad variety of craft activities. Star Carr is unlikely to be unique. The number of tranchet axeheads found at Weston before the 1920s – more than six exist in the museum collection – suggests that the local Mesolithic people were exploiting the woodland there. We used to believe that these axeheads dated from the later Mesolithic (after about 6150 BC), when it was thought that the first houses were built, but the research at Star Cass shows this to be mistaken. Their use perhaps spans the whole of the period. The field name Riddy Shot may show that the land was formerly wooded, so this may have been another area where Mesolithic people were coppicing trees, millennia before medieval farmers made a more permanent clearing.
As well as managing the woodland, the Mesolithic people who dropped microliths at Riddy Shott must have taken resources from the nearby streams. Whether their activity there was as complex as at Starr Carr is unknowable on present evidence However, the 2003 geoarchaeological work in Hitchin town centre uncovered an organic deposit west of Biggin Lane that contained molluscs and charred grains, radiocarbon dated to the Early Mesolithic. Charred grains likely show human agency and point to food preparation taking place close by. Perhaps there was indeed a settlement away from the marshy land surrounding the River Hiz and, as at Star Carr, people were using the wetlands to dispose of rubbish.
Ethnographic evidence shows that hunter-gatherer societies need not be ‘simple’: some North American groups lived in town-like settlements, some had aristocracies, some focused on accumulated wealth through hard work. We fall back into teleological thinking if we assume that Mesolithic peoples were merely waiting around after the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age for farming to turn up. There was nothing inevitable about the westward spread of domesticated crops and livestock from the Middle East, a process that took millennia.
Moreover, the development of microlithic technology shows a huge technological jump from early ways of using flint. In the Palaeolithic, tools were made from single pieces of flint and were unusable once they were broken. Using microliths, tools became modular, allowing the user to remove and replace just the broken or blunted element. It was also a more efficient use of flint, allowing many more tools to be made from a single core. Indeed, as the Mesolithic developed, we see the increasing miniaturisation of microliths into what is known as narrow-blade types, where individual pieces might be only a few millimetres wide.
Our view of the Mesolithic has changed dramatically over the past fifty years. We can now appreciate that these pioneer permanent inhabitants of Britain modified their landscape, created village-like settlements and had a sophisticated technology. We can only begin to guess about the sort of complex societies they lived in.
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews