Warrior Monks on the Lincolnshire Heath

The Secret World of Temple Bruer, a Knights Templar Preceptory

Stand on the open heathland six miles north of Sleaford, and you can still feel it: the particular silence of a place that once held great power. (Well, actually not that silent, the birdsong in the hedgerows was almost deafening when I went there).

A single limestone tower rises above the farmyard, weathered but still standing tall, its spiral staircase worn smooth by eight centuries of footsteps.

This is Temple Bruer: the most important Knights Templar preceptory in England outside London, and a place that has fascinated me ever since I began researching the medieval world of Nicola de la Haye.

If you haven't yet seen Heritage Lincolnshire's remarkable reconstruction of Temple Bruer, I urge you to visit their resources page at heritagelincolnshire.org/resources/temple-bruer. Their video (which I’ve added above) and images bring the vanished preceptory back to stunning life — the round church, the gatehouse, the sprawling agricultural complex that once made this remote corner of Lincolnshire one of the wealthiest and most strategically significant places in the medieval kingdom.

A Brotherhood Born from the Crusades

To understand Temple Bruer, you first have to understand what a Templar preceptory actually was. The Knights Templar were founded around 1118, in the heat and dust of the Holy Land, with a singular purpose: to protect Christian pilgrims on the dangerous roads to Jerusalem. But an army requires money, and the Templars were nothing if not brilliant administrators. Their solution was a network of preceptories, a series of working estates spread across Europe, each generating the income that kept the crusading enterprise alive.

Temple Bruer was one of those estates. Founded between 1150 and 1160 on land granted by William of Ashby, its very name tells its story: bruer or bruyère, the Norman-French word for heath, the scrubby, wind-scoured landscape that the Templars transformed into an economic powerhouse.

A Self-Contained World

The Heritage Lincolnshire reconstruction reveals just how substantial the preceptory complex was: a walled enclosure with a crenellated gatehouse, a round church modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, agricultural buildings, workshops, a chapter house, and accommodation for the brothers. It was, in every meaningful sense, a small independent state, which was intentional.

A papal bull issued by Pope Innocent II, Omne Datum Optimum, granted the Templars extraordinary privileges. They paid no taxes, owed no tithes, and answered to no king, just the Pope. Borders were open to them, and the laws of their host nations didn’t apply within their walls. This was the foundation of their spectacular rise, and ultimately, the source of the resentment that destroyed them. Because in medieval times, greed, avarice, and jealousy were part of the fabric of well-born life.

Life inside the preceptory was governed by a strict Rule. The knight who led Temple Bruer, the ‘preceptor’, commanded in the manner of a military commander, but the majority of those living here were not fighting knights at all. They were working monks: men who had taken vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and who spent their days in prayer, labour, and the meticulous management of an agricultural empire. The canonical hours structured every day from Matins before dawn to Compline at nightfall. In between, there was always work.

Sheep, Wool, and the Wealth of Nations

What made Temple Bruer so extraordinarily rich was its land. The Lincolnshire heath was ideal for sheep, and the Templars were pioneers in breeding what would become the famous Lincolnshire Longwool, a breed whose fleece was the finest in England, and whose wool commanded premium prices across Europe. At its height, the Templar estate covered some 4,000 acres, and the order held over 10,000 acres across Lincolnshire as a whole.

The wool was transported along the old Roman roads, particularly Ermine Street, which connected London to Lincoln and York, to the ports at Grimsby, Boston, and King's Lynn, where Templar ships carried it across the Channel. By the time Grand Prior William de la More was overseeing the preceptory in the early 1300s, Temple Bruer also held the right to hold a Wednesday market and an annual fair. It was a commercial hub as much as a spiritual one.

But the Templars hadn’t forgotten their martial origins. The open heathland around Temple Bruer, particularly at the nearby Byard's Leap, served as military training grounds — not for jousting tournaments, but for something far more serious: war games, with substantial forces engaged in simulated battle. The brethren here were always soldiers as well as monks.

The Round Church and Its Secrets

The crown of the complex was its church, and it was unlike almost anything else in medieval England. The Templars built round naves wherever they could, in deliberate echo of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a constant reminder of what they existed to protect and reclaim. Archaeological excavations at Temple Bruer have revealed the foundation of a circular aisled nave roughly fifteen metres in diameter, with a ring of eight columns and steps descending to a crypt below.

The interior walls of the surviving tower are covered in graffiti stretching back centuries — masons' marks, symbols, possible apotropaic or 'witches' marks' that locals may have carved after the Templars' arrest, hoping to ward off whatever evil they believed those warrior monks had invited in. Sealed into the altar area of the ground floor is a stone cat, easy to miss, impossible to forget once found.

It is exactly the kind of place that demands to be written about (and I did…)

The Fall

The end, when it came, was brutal and swift. In January 1308, Edward II sent the Sheriff of Lincolnshire with twelve knights and their forces to arrest the Templars at Temple Bruer. Among those taken was William de la More himself, the Grand Prior of all England, who was held briefly in Lincoln before being transported to the Tower. The charges were lurid: idol worship, blasphemy, corruption. Most failed to stick. But the order's fate had already been sealed by the debts kings owed them and the greed of Philip IV of France. Pope Clement V suppressed the Templars entirely in 1312, transferring their properties to the Knights Hospitaller, who held Temple Bruer until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1540s.

Temple Bruer in My Books

The Templars have been woven through my Nicola de la Haye series from the beginning. In the second in the series, Lady of the Castle, Templar knights play a part. But it’s in the third in the series, Lady of England, where they play a significant role in the dangerous politics of Nicola's world.

I’ve even set a key scene at Temple Bruer itself. To stand in a place, to feel the wind off the heath and run your hand along that ancient limestone, is to understand it in a way no amount of research alone can give you. I hope that scene carries some of that knowledge onto the page.

The Heritage Lincolnshire reconstruction, which you really must see at heritagelincolnshire.org/resources/temple-bruer, has given all of us who love this period a remarkable gift: the chance to see Temple Bruer as it was, full and living, before time stripped it back to that single proud tower. It is scholarship and imagination working together in exactly the way that historical fiction tries to.

The Templars built to last. One tower still stands. But some stories stories don't stay buried.

Rachel Elwiss Joyce is the author of Lady of Lincoln and the forthcoming Lady of the Castle and Lady of England, the second and third books in the Nicola de la Haye series.

Purchase Link for Lady of Lincoln is here: https://books2read.com/u/4980nW

Lady of Lincoln by Rachel Elwiss Joyce, the first book in the Nicola de la Haye Series