Quick Answer
The book that put Templars at Bannockburn and made Rosslyn Chapel a pilgrimage site, written by two-thirds of the team behind Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Scottish origin of Freemasonry is real and was established independently by proper scholarship. The Templar link that gives the book its title is a chain of possibilities presented as a conclusion, with no contemporary evidence at the crucial joints. Read it to see how the story is built.
Key Takeaways
- Freemasonry is Scottish. That part is true, and not because of this book.
- Templars at Bannockburn rests on an unexplained charge and Masonic tradition.
- The method is accumulation: possibilities stacked until they read as fact.
- Rosslyn's carvings are real. Their meaning is the argument.
- Same authors as Holy Blood, whose central document was a forgery.
🕑 17 min read
What This Book Is
The Temple and the Lodge was published in 1989 and runs a little over three hundred pages. It is the book that connected two things that had been kept apart by historians: the suppressed Knights Templar and the origins of Freemasonry.
The argument runs in stages. Templars fleeing arrest in 1307 escape by sea with their fleet and treasure. They reach Scotland, where Robert the Bruce is excommunicated and therefore outside papal reach. They fight for him at Bannockburn in 1314. They persist underground for centuries, transmitting their traditions into the Scottish stonemasons' lodges, which become Freemasonry, which then shapes the founding of the United States.
Each link in that chain is argued in turn, with the confidence rising as the book proceeds.
It is clear, readable, and it has been enormously influential on how the Templars are imagined in popular culture.
What the book does not do. It does not cite contemporary documents for the crucial claims about 1307 to 1314, because there are none. Readers should notice where the footnotes thin out, which is exactly where the argument most needs them.
Who Baigent and Leigh Were
Michael Baigent was a New Zealand-born writer with a background in psychology who moved to England and became a photographer and researcher. Richard Leigh was an American novelist and short-story writer living in London.
They met working on a television documentary about the mystery of Rennes-le-Château in the 1970s, and with Henry Lincoln produced The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982.
The two continued writing together after Lincoln stepped back, producing this book, The Messianic Legacy, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, and others.
Baigent later became editor of a Masonic journal, and both men sued the publishers of The Da Vinci Code for copyright infringement in 2006 and lost. Leigh died in 2007, Baigent in 2013.
Neither was a trained historian, which is not disqualifying in itself and does bear on how sources are handled.
The Shadow of the Earlier Book
Necessary context, because the method here is the method there.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail argued that Jesus survived the crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene, and founded a bloodline protected by a secret society called the Priory of Sion.
The documentary basis for the Priory was a set of parchments deposited in the French national library. These were later shown to have been fabricated in the 1950s and 1960s by Pierre Plantard, who admitted as much under oath in 1993.
The earlier book's central evidence was therefore a hoax, and the authors had built a bestseller on it.
This does not make every claim in the later book false. It does mean that a reader should know the authors had previously been thoroughly taken in, and had not developed the source-critical habits that would have prevented it.
The Templars Briefly
For readers who need the outline before the argument.
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon were founded around 1119 in Jerusalem to protect pilgrims, became a military religious order under a rule associated with Bernard of Clairvaux, and grew over two centuries into a large international institution.
They held estates across Europe, developed early banking functions including letters of credit, and were answerable to the pope alone rather than to any king or bishop.
That combination of wealth, independence and military capacity made them both useful and resented. When the crusader states fell in 1291 the order lost its purpose while retaining its assets.
The esoteric reputation the Templars now carry is almost entirely later, and much of it descends from this book and its predecessors.
The Suppression of 1307
The historical event the whole book pivots on, and the authors describe it accurately.
On Friday 13 October 1307, Philip IV of France had every Templar in the kingdom arrested simultaneously in a coordinated operation. The charges were heresy, idolatry and sodomy, extracted by torture.
Philip was heavily in debt to the order and had precedent for this kind of move, having expelled the Jews the year before and seized their assets.
Pope Clement V, a Frenchman under Philip's influence, eventually dissolved the order in 1312. The last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned in Paris in 1314.
The suppression was uneven across Europe. In England it was slow and half-hearted. In Portugal the order was simply renamed. In Scotland, under an excommunicated king at war with England, enforcement was minimal.
All of this is standard history, and Baigent and Leigh present it well.
The Missing Fleet
The first speculative link, and the one the rest depends on.
The Templars maintained ships at the port of La Rochelle. When the arrests came, the ships were not there, and neither was the treasure the order was assumed to hold.
The authors argue that the fleet must have sailed before the arrests, carrying men and treasure to safety, and that Scotland is the natural destination.
The difficulties are several. The size of the Templar fleet is unknown and was probably modest: a handful of vessels for transporting supplies and pilgrims rather than a navy. Whether any treasure existed beyond the order's documented estates is unclear. And the absence of ships from one port on one day is weak evidence for a coordinated escape.
The claim is possible. That is the most that can be said for it, and the book proceeds as though possibility had become probability by the end of the chapter.
Why Scotland
The argument for the destination, which is more reasonable than the argument for the voyage.
Robert the Bruce had been excommunicated in 1306 for killing a rival in a church. A papal bull dissolving the Templars would carry little weight in a kingdom whose ruler was already outside the church's communion.
Scotland was at war with England and would welcome trained soldiers. Templar properties existed in Scotland before 1307, so a network was available.
Against this: the excommunication was lifted and reimposed several times, Scotland's clergy remained in communion with Rome, and a body of heavily armed foreign knights would have attracted notice somewhere in the surviving record.
The authors' response to the absence of records is that fugitives do not leave records, which is true and also unfalsifiable.
Bannockburn
The book's most memorable claim and its least supported.
At the battle of Bannockburn in June 1314, near the end of the fighting, a fresh force appeared on the field and the English broke. Contemporary accounts describe this as the arrival of camp followers and reserves whom the English mistook for a new army.
Baigent and Leigh propose that this was a charge of Templar cavalry, kept in reserve and committed at the decisive moment.
There is no contemporary source for this. No chronicle mentions Templars at the battle. The claim appears in Masonic tradition centuries later, and the authors treat the tradition as memory rather than as invention.
The plausibility argument, that an unexplained turning point demands an explanation, assumes the standard explanation is inadequate, which it is not. Panic at the appearance of what looks like reinforcements is well documented in medieval battle.
Bannockburn is the place to see the method clearly. A gap in the record is identified. A hypothesis is proposed that would fill it. The hypothesis is then used in later chapters as though it had been established, so that by the time the book reaches Rosslyn, the Templars at Bannockburn are a premise rather than a proposal. Nothing dishonest has occurred at any single step, and the cumulative effect is a conclusion resting on air.
Rosslyn Chapel
The physical evidence, and the part of the book that has had the most visible consequence.
The chapel was built by William Sinclair from 1446 and is densely carved with imagery that has attracted interpretation for centuries: the Apprentice Pillar, green men, plant forms, and figures the authors read as Templar and Masonic.
The Sinclair family's later role in Scottish Freemasonry is documented. Their connection to the Templars is asserted.
The carvings are real and unusual. Whether they encode anything is the question, and the answer depends on the interpretive framework brought to them. Symbols that look Masonic to a reader primed for Masonry look like standard late-medieval church decoration to an architectural historian.
The book made Rosslyn a destination, and The Da Vinci Code later multiplied the effect. Visitor numbers rose from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, which is the most measurable thing the thesis has produced.
Where Freemasonry Actually Came From
The documented account, which the book partly follows and partly obscures.
Medieval stonemasons had lodges: working organisations on building sites with their own rules, admission procedures and traditions. Scottish lodges kept written records from the late sixteenth century.
Around 1600, under the influence of William Schaw, master of works to James VI, Scottish lodges were reorganised with statutes, and began admitting men who were not working masons. These non-operative members grew in number through the seventeenth century.
By the early eighteenth century the lodges had become largely gentlemen's societies with a ritual inheritance from the craft. The Grand Lodge of England was founded in 1717, and speculative Freemasonry as an institution dates from there.
The ritual content, with its Solomon's Temple symbolism and its legend of Hiram, appears in the eighteenth century and has no documented earlier source.
What Stevenson Established
The scholarly work the book leans on, and it deserves separating from the book.
David Stevenson, a historian at the University of St Andrews, published The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century in 1988, the year before this book, followed by a study of the early lodge records.
His argument, from documents, was that Freemasonry as an institution originated in Scotland around 1600 rather than in England in 1717, and that the Schaw statutes and the admission of non-operatives were the decisive developments.
This was a real finding and it has been broadly accepted. It moved the origin of the craft back a century and across a border.
Baigent and Leigh cite Stevenson and then extend him. Stevenson found Scotland in 1600; they propose Templars in 1307. The three-hundred-year gap between the documented origin and the proposed one is where the book lives, and Stevenson himself did not endorse the extension.
Where the Templar Degrees Came From
The source the book leans on most for corroboration, and the one that most needs its date checked.
Freemasonry has higher degrees beyond the basic three, and several of them are Templar in name and imagery: the Knight Templar degree of the York Rite, the Knight Kadosh of the Scottish Rite, and others with a chivalric and crusading character.
Baigent and Leigh treat these as preserved memory, the surviving trace of a real inheritance that the craft degrees had lost.
The documented history runs the other way. The Templar degrees appear in the middle of the eighteenth century, in France and Germany, in a period when Masonry was expanding rapidly and lodges competed to offer the most impressive lineage.
The key figure is Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Scottish Jacobite exile in Paris, whose oration of 1737 claimed that Freemasonry descended from crusading knights. Ramsay's speech is the first appearance of the chivalric origin story, and it was rhetoric rather than research: an attempt to give the craft a noble pedigree acceptable to French aristocrats.
Within decades the claim had been embodied in ritual. The Strict Observance in Germany built an entire system on Templar succession, complete with a fabricated line of Grand Masters, and it collapsed when its own leadership admitted at a convention in 1782 that the lineage could not be verified.
So the Masonic Templar tradition is not evidence for a medieval transmission. It is evidence that eighteenth-century Masons wanted one, and manufactured it, and the book cites the manufacture as though it were the memory.
The American Chapters
The final section, which shifts the subject and improves the evidence.
The authors trace Masonic membership among the figures of the American Revolution and the early republic: Washington, Franklin, and a substantial proportion of the officers and delegates.
The membership is documented. Freemasonry was widespread among the colonial elite, lodges provided a network across colonies, and Masonic ideals of fraternity and reason are recognisable in the founding documents.
Where the book overreaches is in treating the presence of Masons as a Masonic conspiracy, and in reading the Templar inheritance through into the republic. The first is a category error, since membership of a common society does not make its members' actions the society's plan. The second depends on the earlier chapters having established what they did not.
Read as an account of Masonry's role in eighteenth-century American networks, the section is reasonable. Read as the culmination of a Templar transmission, it inherits every weakness upstream.
How the Argument Is Built
Worth setting out as a general pattern, since it recurs across the whole genre.
A documented gap is found: missing ships, an unexplained charge, an unusual carving. A hypothesis is offered that would fill it. Alternatives are mentioned briefly and set aside. The hypothesis is adopted for the next stage.
Corroboration is sought in later tradition. Masonic ritual from the eighteenth century, family legends, nineteenth-century antiquarian speculation. These are treated as preserved memory rather than as retrospective construction.
Absence of evidence is explained by secrecy. Fugitives hide, initiates keep oaths, records were destroyed. The explanation covers every gap and is immune to disconfirmation.
And the qualifications accumulate at the front and evaporate toward the back. A chapter opening with might and could ends with did.
The Objections
Four, in descending order of force.
No contemporary evidence. For Templars at Bannockburn, for a fugitive fleet reaching Scotland, or for Templar survival into the fifteenth century, there is nothing from the period.
The later sources are late. Masonic Templar degrees appear in the eighteenth century, invented by men who were themselves seeking an ancient pedigree, and cannot corroborate events four centuries before.
The three-hundred-year gap. Between 1307 and the documented Scottish lodges of 1600 nothing connects them except the argument's need for a connection.
The authors' record. Their previous major work rested on a demonstrated forgery, and the same evidential habits are visible here.
What It Did to the Culture
The influence is out of proportion to the evidence and worth naming.
The Templar-Masonic connection is now common knowledge in the sense that most people who have heard of either assume it. It runs through The Da Vinci Code, through a great deal of documentary television, and through the general esoteric picture of a hidden tradition running from Jerusalem to the present.
Rosslyn's visitor figures, the market for Templar tourism in Scotland, and the presence of the story in popular writing on Masonry all descend substantially from this book.
The historical Templars, an order of medieval monks with a banking function, and the historical stonemasons, craftsmen with an admission ritual, have both been largely displaced by the composite this book assembled from them.
What Survives
Three things, honestly stated.
The Scottish origin of Freemasonry is real, and readers who took it from here took something true, even if the credit belongs to Stevenson.
The account of the suppression is accurate and well told, and a reader who knew nothing about the Templars would come away with the outline right.
The method, as a specimen. Anyone who wants to understand how speculative history is constructed, and why it persuades, will find this an unusually clear example.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want to know where the Templar-Masonic story came from, since this is where it was assembled in its modern form.
Read it alongside Stevenson, so that you can see exactly where the documented account ends and the extension begins.
Read it if the construction of historical myth interests you, because it is a textbook case and a readable one.
Do not read it as history, and do not cite Bannockburn.
The habit this book teaches by negative example is worth having. When a story is assembled from possibilities, watch what happens to the qualifiers. A chapter that opens by saying something might have occurred should close the same way. When it closes by saying it did, something was added between the two ends, and the something is usually the reader's own wish for the story to be true. That wish is not a fault. It is the raw material this genre works with, and knowing that it is being worked is most of the defence.
The book that built the Templar-Masonic story, and a clear specimen of how such stories are built.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the missing evidence and of the authors' record is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Temple and the Lodge about?
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh's 1989 argument that Knights Templar escaping suppression in 1307 reached Scotland, fought for Robert the Bruce, and became the hidden source of Freemasonry.
Who were Baigent and Leigh?
Two of the three authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the 1982 bestseller proposing a bloodline of Jesus. They wrote several further books together on Templar and esoteric history.
Did Templars fight at Bannockburn?
There is no contemporary evidence for it. The claim rests on later Masonic tradition and on the argument that an unexplained late charge at the battle must have been Templar cavalry.
Did Templars flee to Scotland?
Some Templar presence in Scotland is documented before 1307. Evidence for a mass arrival of fugitives afterward is thin, and the excommunication of Bruce that supposedly made Scotland a refuge cuts both ways.
What is the Rosslyn connection?
The chapel built by the Sinclair family in the fifteenth century is presented as carrying Templar and proto-Masonic symbolism. Its carvings are real; the interpretation attached to them is the disputed part.
Where did Freemasonry actually come from?
The documented line runs from Scottish stonemasons' lodges in the late sixteenth century, through the admission of non-masons, to the founding of the Grand Lodge in London in 1717.
How do the authors handle evidence?
By accumulation of possibility. A chain of plausible steps is built and the conclusion is treated as established, with the qualifications made along the way dropped by the end.
Is any of it accepted by historians?
The Scottish origin of Freemasonry is accepted and was established by David Stevenson's independent scholarship. The Templar link is not, and no academic historian of the order endorses it.
Is it well written?
Yes. It is clear, well paced and enjoyable, which is part of why the thesis has spread further than its evidence warrants.
How does it relate to Holy Blood, Holy Grail?
Same authors, same method, narrower scope. The earlier book's central document turned out to be a modern forgery, and readers should carry that knowledge into this one.
What is the American section about?
The later chapters argue that Masonic networks shaped the American Revolution and the early republic, which is better supported for Masonry's presence than for any Templar inheritance behind it.
Who should read it?
Readers who want to know where the Templar-Masonic story comes from and how it is constructed, provided they read it as a case study in speculative history rather than as history.
Watch the qualifiers disappear
Take any chapter of this book and mark every might, could, possibly and perhaps in the first half. Then mark every statement in the second half that treats the same claim as settled. The gap between the two counts is the argument. This is not a trick particular to these authors; it is how most persuasive speculation works, and it works because a reader who has followed a chain of maybes for twenty pages is tired of maybes and ready to be told. Knowing that about yourself is worth more than knowing anything about the Templars.
Sources & References
- Baigent, Michael and Leigh, Richard (1989). The Temple and the Lodge.
- Stevenson, David (1988). The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590 to 1710.
- Barber, Malcolm. The Trial of the Templars, the standard account of the suppression.
- Contemporary chronicle accounts of Bannockburn.
- Records of the Schaw statutes and early Scottish lodge minutes.
- Court records of Plantard's 1993 testimony on the Priory of Sion documents.