Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 130

This book is partly based on Michael Jefferson’s 2016 University of Nottingham doctoral thesis and in parts reads like a dissertation, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The Knights Templar, like King Arthur, suffer from being the subject of far-fetched popular histories, so this well-researched scholarly book is welcome. It tells of political wrangling, spiritual provision and agricultural management.

The Templars were major landholders in Lincolnshire, understanding how their estates worked both under them and subsequent landlords illuminates medieval agrarian land management. Today the tower of a Templar preceptory still stands within a farmyard at Temple Bruer and without Jefferson’s research we would not know how this structure fitted into the wider landscape. Historians are limited by their written sources and in this case that is strikingly clear. The book is by necessity framed around five surveys carried out between 1185 and 1535.

The story of the Templars cannot be told without the Hospitallers (the estates of the former were granted to the latter in 1312 and formed the bulk of the Hospitaller holdings in Lincolnshire) and Jefferson, in his introduction, explains how both orders worked and evolved. He rightly points out that the story of the Templars in the Holy Land has been told on many occasions (Helen Nicholson’s The Knights Templar or Malcolm Barber’s The new knighthood for example), but his is a rare insight into the estates that supplied and sustained them.

Chapter 1 concentrates on the 1185 survey of Templar properties by Geoffrey Fitz Stephen, the Master of the Templars in England. The real shame is that we do not have records of the initial donations of small parcels of lands that formed the holdings, but the 1185 survey is sufficiently early that when compared to the early fourteenth century records, allows us to see the process whereby the Templars consolidated their scattered donations. As Jefferson says (p. 41): ‘The Templars became adept at acquiring and exchanging land so as to consolidate estates, reduce travel time, and lengthen the effective working day’.

The second chapter summarizes the estate accounts after the Crown had seized the estates with the fall of the Templars and date to 1308–13 (these were the focus of Jefferson’s original thesis). These form the bulk of Jefferson’s evidence and he takes four chapters to analyse them, which he does very successfully. Chapter 3 looks at the evidence for arable production and how soil fertility was maintained through crop rotation and manuring (but oddly with no record of marling) as well as controlling weeds by frequent ploughing. Readers of the Review will probably be aware of the discussions surrounding the relative success or failure of late medieval farmers to maintain soil nutrients and the evidence here is useful when investigating that debate. Templars were also building windmills to replace the less efficient watermills. Once the Crown got control of the estates, they squeezed every penny out of them with little regard to longer-term planning.

The fourth chapter looks at livestock and here Jefferson argues that the use of either mixed horse and oxen plough teams or ones solely made up of horses on estates with lighter soils or hillier ground (which in Lincolnshire generally means the Wolds) confirms that the Templars were managing their estates innovatively. This corroborates Langdon’s theory published both in this journal and elsewhere that the use of horses and appropriate harnesses in the twelfth century onwards was a product of good estate management and led to higher yields. There are obvious gaps in the survey evidence, for example almost no pigs are recorded and Jefferson notes (p. 89): ‘The manor of Willoughton had a herd of forty-two cattle but recorded no cowherd, which seems highly improbable’. The fifth chapter looks at sheep rearing, a sizeable part of their income (mainly wool but also cheese), and by using the size of fleeces produced concludes that small horned sheep were the norm, perhaps settling the debate as to whether the larger Lincolnshire Longwool had a medieval equivalent. The sixth chapter looks at who worked the estates and lived on them.

Chapter 7 tells of the tortured process whereby the Hospitallers, who had been granted the Templar’s property by the Pope, battled to gain control of the estates. With the benefit of hindsight we can see how they were cheated; the 1338 Hospitaller report on the Templars’ estates in England (tackled in detail in chapter 8) lists far fewer than there should have been. The last chapter deals with the Valor Ecclesisticus compiled in 1535 when the Hospitaller estates were dissolved and a final document of 1557 that relates to Mary Tudor’s short-lived attempt to re-establish the order.

The conclusion of his study is that the Templars practised innovative estate management, trying to control disease that affected their flocks of sheep, consolidating their scattered holdings into nucleated estates and built an infrastructure to process their agricultural surplus to finance the Order.

At the end the primary sources are reprinted, useful for future researchers (some tables even list how many carts, pots and bowls were stored in individual buildings). There are numerous maps, these would have benefited from colour and some are taken from other historical atlases. I was a little disappointed when I first thumbed through the book that the author was not able to reconstruct the estates in more detail, perhaps mapping out the boundaries of the preceptories and manors. For descriptions of the physical remains of the estates in Lincolnshire you would also need to look elsewhere (for example Philip Mayes’ monograph on the South Witham Preceptory).

Overall, this is a very useful study for anyone wishing to test theories about medieval estate management and agricultural practices, as well as anyone who wants to know more about the Templars.