To understand the issues surrounding the transfer of Templar land to the Hospitallers, it is necessary to frame them within the broader context of the political machinations, both domestic and international, which characterised the early decades of the fourteenth century. The Templar lands were pawns in a game of shifting fortunes played by the crown, the baronage and the papacy, which began in the spring of 1312 when a papal edict was issued authorising the transfer of Templar lands to the Hospitallers. This chapter deals with the tortuous process of effecting that transfer.

On 22 March 1312, the papal bull Vox in excelsio suppressed the Order of the Temple following the decision to do so having been made at the Council of Vienne. On 2 May 1312, the papal bull Ad providam was issued which granted all former Templar lands to the Hospitallers with the exception of property in the realms of the kings of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Majorca. Four days later, on 6 May 1312, a papal letter to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, the bishop of Lincoln and others issued a ‘mandate to defend the Hospitallers who have been placed in possession of the Templars’ property in their respective dioceses’. This was an extraordinary turn of events. In less than six weeks the pope had not only suppressed the Templars but also ordered the transfer of their lands to the Hospitallers. Clement V apparently assumed the lands would be transferred immediately, but this belief was ill founded. In fact, the transfer of former Templar property in England to the Hospitallers, in accordance with the papal edict, was met with considerable resistance by the king, the baronage and the descendants of donors to the Templars. So began a process of reclamation by the Hospitallers which was to be both lengthy and litigious. The transfer was still incomplete in 1338, eleven years after the accession of Edward III, following the deposition of his father, Edward II, in 1327. The Report of Philip de Thame, prior of the Hospital in England, to Grand Master Elyan de Villanova in 1338 was intended to clarify the situation by providing an inventory of all Hospitaller lands in England including those which had belonged to the Templars.