Herald AV Publications

HAVPCD360 – The Dedication of the Temple

	Disk Title	The Dedication of the Temple
		Music from the Templars’ Jerusalem Breviary
	Choir	Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge
	Conductor	Jeremy White
	Location	Temple Church, Inner Temple, Fleet Street, London
	Date Recorded	24th & 25th May 2009
	Audio Tracks	20

The Temple Church, built around 1160 and consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalam in 1185, has been in the joint care of the Inner and Middle Temples, two of the four legal Inns of Court, for 400 years. It was originally built by the English Knights Templar, to replicate their round mother church on the site of Christ’s Resurrection in Jerusalem. So important was it as a place of spiritual significance that many knights were buried there ( you can see their effigies to this day ) and Thomas a Becket, when Archbishop, granted an indulgence of twenty days to all those who entered it.

The centrality of Jerusalem as the earthly replica of the heavenly kingdom comes through in the Templar liturgy that forms the basis of this recording. It is no coincidence that Jerusalem is the circular city at the centre of the mappa mundi. So to be in London’s Temple Church was, to the mediaeval mind, to be in the actual place for one’s own spiritual enlightenment helped no doubt by the uplifting qualities of singing the daily office, which Bernard of Clairvaux probably helped to compile. The Church retains its special atmosphere to this day and the Chant sounds wonderful in its ancient, round, acoustic – pure, perfect and complete.

Today the Temple Church serves its legal community in many ways. Members of the two Inns may be baptized, married and have their memorial services there. It is justly famous for its own choir of boys and mens voices who sing a high Anglican liturgy every Sunday during the legal terms. Inner Temple calls its students to the Bar there. The organ, the gift of a generous Scottish family, is a four manual Harrison&Harrison from whose loft many recitals are given. It was a popular tourist attraction even before Dan Brown put it on the Da Vinci trail.

The Church has also become a respected venue for the discussion of controversial issues, most notably the compatibility of sharia law with our own secular society. The Templar’s worthy adversaries in the second crusade would probably have approved.

The Templars, the greatest of the military orders of the Middle Ages, have long been the stuff of legend and fiction. Inspired by an ideal and a vision from the foundation of their Order in Jerusalem in 1120 to their wicked suppression in 1307-14, they have themselves been a potent source of inspiration in recent times, from Scott’s Ivanhoe and the revival of chivalric attitudes in the nineteenth century down to the more lurid examples of the present day.

The programme recorded here was inspired by the knowledge that the Templars were not only a military but also a religious Order. They thus united two of the three ‘orders’ of medieval society previously regarded as separate, that is, those who prayed, those who fought and those who worked. Each Templar took vows of poverty and chastity, like the members of a monastic order, and at the heart of each of their houses was a chapel. There the daily and yearly round of services, the Divine Office and Mass, were performed, sung where possible with Gregorian chant.

Clearly the Templars had other concerns than the celebration of the liturgy with all the splendour and ceremony of a great cathedral or monastery. They did not develop any characteristic liturgical customs or sing any special chants. But from the very few surviving liturgical manuscripts which can be associated with the Templars, it may be seen that they at least maintained the old Gregorian chant tradition. By great good fortune, two manuscripts have been preserved which contain the chant sung in the Temple in Jerusalem before the city fell in 1244. One of them is a notated Breviary with all the chants, prayers and lessons of the Divine Office. Most of the pieces in our concert have been transcribed from this manuscript, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. It includes rubrics for the services to be sung in domo Templi, and prayers for the memorials of three bishops of Jerusalem. It also contains a full Office for St Augustine, and was clearly made for the Augustinian canons who performed the liturgy in the Temple.

Since it also contains the Office of St Antony of Padua, canonized in 1232, the Breviary must have been made in the short time after Emperor Frederick II had negotiated a settlement with the Muslims and before the city was finally lost. It is not a very splendid manuscript, rather a utilitarian record of the liturgy, albeit a very comprehensive one, with 990 pages mostly written in double columns.