Historians of the order

The order of St Lazarus in the Holy Land was the root from which the English province stemmed, and for this reason some discussion of it is necessary before the national operation can be properly quantified. This is particularly true for the years before 1291 when England was merely an adjunct of a much wider crusading venture and, indeed, for a hundred years after that when traditional links were still, rather tenuously, being maintained. The order, which still exists in a modified form in many parts of the world today, has had a long and unusual historiography with few attempts at impartial evaluation until recently. In 1649 the order in France published its Mémoires, Regles et Statuts and in 1772 it commissioned its first comprehensive history by Sibert. Since then historians such as Pétiet, Bertrand and Bagdonas have carried on the tradition, and with the advent of the Internet St Lazarus websites have proliferated, along with sometimes acrimonious exchanges between members of rival branches of the order. Although all of these provide useful information, particularly about post-medieval happenings, there is a marked tendency among these partisans to approach the sources uncritically and to make use of history to endorse present-day preoccupations. Even the normally sober Catholic Encyclopedia has commented that ‘the historians of the order have done much to obscure thequestion [of its origins] by entangling it with gratuitous pretensions and suspicious documents’.

Among modern historians of the Crusades, Forey has equated the Lazarites with ‘the major military orders’ because of their exemption from episcopal jurisdiction; yet, on the other hand, Nicholson has swung to the opposite extreme and has alleged that they were ‘hardly recognised in Europe as a military order’. To add to the confusion, Gilchrist has suggested that the principal English preceptory at Burton Lazars was taken over by the Hospitallers in 1414 when the houses of the order were confiscated by the crown as ‘enemy assets’. When non-specialists have fished in the muddy waters of the order of St Lazarus in this way they have invariably become unstuck.