A Templar's Chronicles

Scrolls  I - XXX

NON NOBIS, DOMINE, NON NOBIS

SED NOMINI TUO DA GLORIA

On Friday 13th October 1307, in one fell swoop, all the Templars in France were arrested in the early hours of the morning, on the orders of the King Philip IV of France, known as Philippe le Bel.

Many would be tortured unto death, others burnt as heretics, very few indeed would survive. One survivor was Jean Jacques de St Georges, past Commander of the port city of Acres and right hand man of the Grand Master Jacques de Molay.

In desperate hiding with a few other Templars also spared by the hand of destiny, de St Georges, nicknamed "the lion", puts quill to parchment and decides to record first hand, the last days of the Order of the Temple.

This he does faithfully, writing all he has witnessed and whatever news reaches him in hiding, first, in France, and then, in Kilwinning, Scotland, land of the excommunicated Robert I, known as the Bruce.

In a Templar's Chronicles, we follow the fate of these scrolls from Scotland to Cyprus and to Rhodes where their destiny becomes entwined with that of the Knight Hospitallers.

And, so, eventually to Malta, where, on the 26th July 1887 they are purchased as interesting junk at a public auction in a private house in Valletta.

The buyer, an English sea captain, was an Ancestor of Professor Henry Black, worshipful master of the lodge of St John the Baptist and St Mary.

From his youth, Henry realises the significance of the scrolls, as eventually, would his son, lawyer Fredrick Tonna Black.......