Quick Answer
Born in Blood argues that Freemasonry began as a survival network built by Knights Templar who escaped the suppression of 1307, and that this hidden society organised the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. It is well argued, honestly presented, thoroughly enjoyable, and rejected by the historians who study Masonic origins.
Key Takeaways
- The thesis is not accepted. John Hamill of the United Grand Lodge of England called the book's basic thesis seriously flawed while praising much else in it.
- The 1381 chapters are the strongest. Robinson's observations about how the revolt was coordinated and what the rebels targeted stand on their own merits.
- The etymologies are proposals. They are the most fun part of the book and none of them is settled.
- The Templar story predates Robinson by 250 years. It enters through Ramsay in 1736 and von Hund in the 1750s, and Masonic delegates formally dropped it in 1782.
- The documented origin is Scottish and unglamorous, running through operative stonemason lodges and the Schaw Statutes of 1598 and 1599.
🕑 15 min read
What the Book Argues
John J. Robinson published Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry with M. Evans and Co. in 1989. He was not a professional historian. He had been a farmer, a business executive and a Marine, and he came to the subject as an amateur with time and curiosity, which he says plainly.
The argument runs like this. On Friday 13 October 1307, Philip IV of France had the Knights Templar arrested across his kingdom. The order was dissolved in 1312 and its last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned in 1314. In England the suppression was slower and considerably less thorough. Robinson proposes that a body of Templars went underground there, that men whose entire order had been destroyed by church and crown would have needed a way to identify one another and secure shelter without exposure, and that the structure they built for that purpose survived, mutated, and became Freemasonry.
The mechanism he proposes is elegant. A fugitive network needs recognition signs, oaths of secrecy, a graded initiation to control what a member knows, and a plausible cover identity. Freemasonry has all four, and the cover identity would be a trade guild.
On Robinson's honesty: he does not claim to have proved this. The book presents itself as an argument from circumstantial evidence, offered by an outsider who noticed a pattern, and it invites disagreement. That framing matters when weighing it, and it is more scrupulous than the treatment the thesis has received from later writers who repeat it as established.
How He Got There
The book began as something else entirely. Robinson set out to write about the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and found a question he could not answer.
The revolt was extraordinary. Triggered by a poll tax, rebels from Kent and Essex converged on London within days of each other, opened the prisons, burned John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace, and executed the Archbishop of Canterbury along with the Lord Treasurer. What troubled Robinson was the coordination. Groups in separate counties moved in concert, in a period with no newspapers and limited literacy, and they behaved with a discipline that does not fit a spontaneous rising.
Then he noticed the targeting. The rebels went after the Knights Hospitaller with what looks like particular animus, burning their properties and killing their Prior, Robert Hales, who happened also to be Lord Treasurer and therefore a legitimate target on tax grounds alone. But the Hospitallers had a second relevance. When the Templars were dissolved, their estates were transferred to the Hospitallers. If any Templar network survived, it had a specific grievance against exactly the order the rebels attacked.
This is the best-constructed part of the book. The observation about coordination is a real historical puzzle, the Hospitaller pattern is a real feature of the revolt, and Robinson lays both out carefully before drawing his conclusion.
Where it breaks down is at the join. Everything above is consistent with a Templar network and it is also consistent with a good deal else: existing parish and guild structures, itinerant preachers, the organisational capacity of village communities that historians have since documented in detail, and the fact that the Hospitallers were wealthy landlords and their Prior was the man who collected the tax. Consistency with a hypothesis is not evidence for it when the same facts are consistent with the ordinary explanation.
The Language Argument
The second pillar is linguistic, and it is the part readers most enjoy.
Masonic ritual contains words that nobody has convincingly explained. The officer who guards the lodge door is the tyler. An outsider or intruder is a cowan. A particular salute is called the due guard. These are not ordinary English building-trade terms and their origins are genuinely obscure.
Robinson's proposal is that they are medieval French, the language of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy from which the English Templars were largely drawn, worn down by centuries of oral transmission among speakers who no longer understood them. On this reading the tyler is a cutter, the due guard is a phrase of divine protection, and several other unexplained terms resolve into French rather than into English craft vocabulary.
It is an attractive argument and it should be held loosely. Etymology by resemblance is a treacherous method, because a determined searcher can find a plausible French source for a great many English words, and the test of a derivation is documentary evidence of transmission rather than the fit of the sound. None of Robinson's proposals has been established. Several are ingenious. Our glossary of Masonic vocabulary gives the terms in their working context, and the guide to Masonic words covers the ritual language more fully.
The Scotland Question Robinson Skips
There is a version of the Templar survival story that predates Robinson and that he largely passes over, and it is worth knowing because it is where most readers will meet the theory next.
The Scottish variant holds that fugitive Templars reached Scotland, which was under papal interdict at the time and therefore beyond the reach of the bull dissolving the order, and that they fought for Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314. The story continues that they settled, that their descendants built Rosslyn Chapel, and that Scottish Freemasonry preserved their rites.
None of it appears in contemporary accounts of Bannockburn. The earliest versions of the Templar cavalry charge surface centuries later, and Rosslyn Chapel was begun in 1446, well over a hundred years after the suppression, by a family whose members testified against the Templars at their trial. The chapel's carvings have their own considerable interest and they are fifteenth century ecclesiastical work rather than a Templar cipher.
Robinson's English version is more careful than the Scottish one, and readers who accept his book frequently arrive at the Scottish story next and find it looks similar. It is worth keeping the two separate, and worth noticing that the more famous one has less behind it.
Practice: date the claim before you weigh it
Whenever you meet a historical claim about a secret survival, find the earliest source that states it. Not the earliest event it describes, the earliest text that describes the event. For the Templars at Bannockburn, that gap is several centuries, and the gap is the answer. This single habit does more work than any amount of subject knowledge, and it takes about ten minutes with a search engine.
What the Historians Say
The verdict from people who study this professionally is consistent and it is not hostile.
John Hamill, librarian and curator of the United Grand Lodge of England and one of the most careful writers on Masonic history, concluded that the book has many positive things to say about Freemasonry and that its basic thesis is seriously flawed. That combination is exactly right and it is worth noticing that the criticism came with genuine appreciation attached.
The documented account runs through Scotland. David Stevenson's The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century 1590 to 1710 traces the transition from operative stonemasonry to something recognisably like the modern fraternity, centred on William Schaw, Master of Works to James VI, whose Statutes of 1598 and 1599 reorganised the Scottish craft. Those documents survive. They record lodges, officers, obligations, and an interest in the art of memory that connects the craft to Renaissance intellectual currents. From there the trail runs to the admission of non-operative members, to England, and to the founding of the first Grand Lodge in London in 1717.
That account has documents behind it at every step. The Templar account has a gap of roughly three hundred years between 1312 and the first Scottish lodge records, and nothing in it.
The gap is the whole problem
A secret society is by definition poor at leaving evidence, and that is precisely what makes the hypothesis difficult to assess. Any absence of evidence can be attributed to the secrecy. A theory that explains its own lack of support is doing something other than history, however carefully it is argued. Robinson is more honest about this than most writers in the genre and the difficulty remains.
Where the Templar Story Really Began
Here is the part of the picture Robinson's readers most often miss, and it is more interesting than the thesis.
The connection between Freemasonry and the crusading orders was invented in the eighteenth century, and the invention is documented.
On 27 December 1736, Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Scot living in France and serving as Grand Orator to the Grand Lodge there, delivered an address giving Freemasonry an origin among crusading knights who had vowed to restore the Temple in the Holy Land. Ramsay was not writing history and did not present it as such. He was supplying a chivalric pedigree to a fraternity whose French membership was aristocratic and would prefer descending from knights to descending from bricklayers.
The Templar version proper arrived with Karl Gotthelf, Baron von Hund, who from the 1750s built an eight-degree system known as the Rite of Strict Observance on the claim that Freemasonry descended directly from the Templars and that unknown superiors still governed it. Von Hund said he had received the Templar degrees in Paris in 1743 from a Jacobite peer, and he was never able to produce the superiors he claimed to serve.
The end is the detail worth keeping. At the Convent of Wilhelmsbad in 1782, delegates examined the Templar origin claim, found it unsupported, renounced it, and reworked the ritual accordingly. Freemasonry investigated its own Templar descent, concluded that there was nothing there, and dropped it two hundred and seven years before Born in Blood was published.
Our article on the esoteric Knights Templar covers the order and the legends that accumulated around it, and Rosslyn Chapel deals with the most famous physical site the theories attach to.
What the Book Gets Right
A review that stopped at the debunking would be unfair, because Robinson gets several things right that better-credentialed writers get wrong.
His account of Masonic ritual is respectful and accurate in tone. He treats the fraternity as a serious institution with a moral purpose rather than as a conspiracy, which in 1989 was less common than it should have been.
His reading of the Templar suppression is sound on the essentials. The charges were extracted under torture, the process was driven by Philip IV's finances and his conflict with the papacy, and the order's destruction was a political operation rather than a religious one. That was the mainstream historical view then and it remains so.
And his later work made his sympathies explicit. A Pilgrim's Path, published in 1993, is a defence of Freemasonry against attacks from the religious right, and it is a more straightforward book than this one. Robinson was not selling a conspiracy. He liked the institution and wanted to give it a heroic origin.
That motive is worth naming because it explains the book's texture. Most writing that links Freemasonry to the Templars is hostile, treating the connection as evidence of something sinister. Robinson's version is affectionate. He thought he had found the fraternity a nobler ancestry than the building trade, and the warmth of that intention is on every page. It does not make the thesis correct and it does make the book pleasant company.
The Method Problem
The flaw in the book is not any single claim. It is the shape of the reasoning, and recognising the shape is useful well beyond this subject.
Robinson assembles a large number of facts, each individually true, each individually consistent with his hypothesis, and treats the accumulation as strength. The trouble is that most of those facts are equally consistent with the ordinary explanation, and a pile of items that fit two hypotheses equally well does not discriminate between them however large the pile becomes.
The test that would settle it is different in kind: a document, an unbroken institutional record, a piece of evidence that the standard account cannot accommodate. No such item appears, and the absence is explained by the secrecy the theory posits.
A reading habit worth acquiring: when a book presents many converging details in support of a hidden connection, ask what the ordinary explanation predicts for each detail. If it predicts the same thing, the detail is not evidence. This test disposes of a great deal of published material about secret societies, ancient civilisations and hidden histories, and it costs nothing to apply. Robinson survives it better than most, because he says openly that he is proposing rather than proving.
How to Read It
Read it as advocacy. It is a well-made case for a position, written by someone who tells you it is a case, and reading it that way is both enjoyable and instructive.
Read the 1381 chapters as history and the Templar chapters as hypothesis. The first are careful work on a genuinely puzzling event. The second are a proposal.
Read Stevenson afterwards. The real origin story, with its Scottish lodges, its Renaissance memory arts and its slow drift from working stonemasons to gentlemen members, turns out to be stranger and better documented than the romance. Our overview of what Freemasonry is covers that history, and Freemasonry and hermetic philosophy takes up the intellectual currents the early lodges were actually swimming in.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you enjoy a well-argued historical hypothesis and can hold it as one.
Read it if you are interested in the Peasants' Revolt, which is under-served in popular writing and which Robinson takes seriously.
Read it if you want to understand why the Templar-Mason connection is so persistent in popular culture, since this book is the main modern vehicle for it.
Do not cite it as history. Do not read it as an introduction to Freemasonry, for which the symbols guide and esoteric Freemasonry are better starting points. And be aware that a good deal of later writing repeats Robinson's thesis without his caveats.
Our position: an honest, likeable, well-constructed book built on an argument that does not hold. The 1381 research is worth having. The etymologies are entertaining and unproven. The central claim was examined and abandoned by Freemasons themselves in 1782, which is the fact most readers of this book have never encountered. Read it for pleasure, keep Stevenson for the history, and notice how much better Robinson behaves than the writers who cite him.
The most likeable book ever written about a theory that is wrong.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Born in Blood about?
John J. Robinson's 1989 argument that Freemasonry began as an underground survival network formed by Knights Templar who escaped the suppression of their order after 1307, and that this hidden society organised the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Robinson builds the case from circumstantial evidence and from the language of Masonic ritual.
Is the Templar origin of Freemasonry true?
Historians of Freemasonry reject it. The documented trail runs through Scottish and English stonemason lodges, the Schaw Statutes of 1598 and 1599, and the founding of the first Grand Lodge in London in 1717. No evidence connects any Masonic lodge to the Templars, and Freemasonry itself makes no such claim.
What is the strongest evidence Robinson presents?
The 1381 material. He shows that the rebels moved with unusual coordination across counties and attacked Hospitaller property with apparent selectivity, and the Hospitallers had received the confiscated Templar estates. As an observation about the revolt it is genuinely interesting. As proof of a Templar network it is circumstantial.
What are the etymology arguments?
Robinson proposes that several unexplained Masonic terms make sense as medieval French rather than as English craft vocabulary, including the lodge guard called the tyler, the outsider called a cowan, and the salute called the due guard. It is the most enjoyable part of the book and the derivations are proposals rather than established etymologies.
Was John J. Robinson a Freemason?
He presents himself in the book as an outsider with no Masonic connection, which is part of its framing and part of its appeal. He later became a public defender of the fraternity, and his 1993 book A Pilgrim's Path argues against religious-right attacks on it. He lived from about 1918 to 1996.
What did Masonic historians say about it?
John Hamill, librarian and curator of the United Grand Lodge of England, wrote that the book has many positive things to say about Freemasonry and that the basic thesis is seriously flawed. That is close to the general verdict among people who study Masonic history professionally.
Where does the Templar and Mason story actually come from?
From the eighteenth century. Andrew Michael Ramsay's oration to the Grand Lodge of France in 1736 gave Freemasonry a crusader origin story, and Baron von Hund built the Templar version into his Rite of Strict Observance from the 1750s. Delegates at the Convent of Wilhelmsbad in 1782 examined the claim and abandoned it.
Is the book worth reading?
Yes, read as a well-constructed argument rather than as history. Robinson writes clearly, presents his reasoning openly, and is honest that he is proposing rather than proving. Readers who want the actual origins should go to David Stevenson's work on the Scottish lodges instead.
What was the Peasants' Revolt of 1381?
A large English rising triggered by the poll tax, in which rebels from Kent and Essex marched on London, opened the prisons, burned the Savoy Palace and executed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Treasurer, who was also Prior of the Hospitallers. Robinson's book began as a study of it.
Why do Templar theories keep reappearing?
Because the order's end is genuinely dramatic and genuinely unresolved: arrests in 1307, confessions under torture, dissolution in 1312, and a Grand Master burned in 1314. A vanished organisation with a treasury nobody accounted for invites narratives, and the same gap has generated Rosslyn Chapel, the Holy Grail and the Ark stories.
Does Freemasonry claim Templar descent?
No. Some Masonic bodies, notably in the York Rite, work degrees using Templar imagery and titles, and they do not assert historical continuity with the medieval order. The symbolic use and the historical claim are different things and are frequently confused by readers outside the fraternity.
What should I read for the real history?
David Stevenson's The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century 1590 to 1710 is the standard modern account. For the Templars themselves, Malcolm Barber's The Trial of the Templars covers the suppression from the documents. Read either alongside Robinson and the contrast is instructive.
Try the two-hypothesis test on your next book
Take any book claiming a hidden connection and go through its evidence one item at a time, asking what the boring explanation predicts. Anything both hypotheses predict equally is not evidence for either. What remains is the actual case, and it is usually far smaller than the book. This one exercise will change how you read an entire genre.
Sources & References
- Robinson, J. J. (1989). Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry. M. Evans and Co.
- Robinson, J. J. (1993). A Pilgrim's Path: Freemasonry and the Religious Right. M. Evans and Co.
- Stevenson, D. (1988). The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590-1710. Cambridge University Press.
- Schaw, W. (1598 and 1599). The Schaw Statutes. Surviving records of the Scottish operative craft.
- Ramsay, A. M. (1736). Oration delivered to the Grand Lodge of France, 27 December 1736.
- Barber, M. (1978). The Trial of the Templars. Cambridge University Press.
- Hamill, J. Commentary on Born in Blood and on Masonic origin theories.
- Records of the Convent of Wilhelmsbad, 1782, on the renunciation of the Templar origin claim.