Templar provincial chapters in medieval times

Every year the Templars of each Western province met in chapter, le chapitre provincial, to pay their dues, report on their houses and judge faults. Alan Forey has reconstructed how these assemblies worked around 1300. Where did they meet, who came, and what did they decide?

Every year
By the later thirteenth century provincial chapters were normally held annually, usually in spring or early summer [1]. A Templar questioned in Florence in 1311 said that omni anno congregabantur capitula per provincias [every year chapters were assembled by provinces], and King Henry III of England gave ten deer every year for the order’s provincial chapter [1]. Claims for corrodies and pensions during the trial in England mention chapters in fifteen of the seventeen years between 1291 and 1307 [1].

Where they met
In the province of France the chapter was always held in Paris [1]. From 1291 the English chapter always met at Dinsley in Hertfordshire, after meetings at Bisham in Berkshire in the later 1270s and 1280s and earlier in London [1]. In Provence most chapters met at Montpellier [1].

Who came and what they did
Some forty to fifty brothers usually attended, mostly heads of convents, and in many provinces the majority were sergeants [1]. The provincial master normally presided, occasionally the grand master or the visitor [1]. Heads of houses paid their responsions and reported on their convents, recruits were received, and the chapter also acted as a chapter of faults [1]. Below it, every preceptory held its own weekly chapter for the business of the house and minor faults [2]. Meetings lasted only a few days; between chapters the provincial master consulted smaller groups of commanders [1].

Did they make law?
The only evidence for legislative power is a set of decrees issued at a chapter at Mausonium in Italy in the third quarter of the twelfth century [1]. Decrees of the general chapters have not survived at all, because the central archives of the Temple were lost [3]. Templar government rested on the master and convent in the East, with the provincial chapter as the yearly link between them and the commanderies [1, 3].

Provincial chapters were the working parliament of the Temple in the West: a yearly meeting of commanders, mostly sergeants, who paid their dues, received recruits and corrected faults. They show an order that was still well organised at the time of its fall.

This blog is original work by TemplarsNow^TM based on an AI-assisted quick scan on the topic, inspired by the paper of Forey (2018), reference [1]. References and further reading, Open Access if available, all links verified October 18, 2026 and all sources checked but not all studied in detail: [1] Forey, A.J. (2018) Templar provincial chapters in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Ordines Militares 23, pp. 275-299, here pp. 275-281, 290, doi:10.12775/OM.2018.010; [2] Barber, M. (2006) The Trial of the Templars, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 12-13; [3] Forey, A. (2009) Notes on Templar personnel and government at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Journal of Medieval History 35 (2), pp. 150-170, here p. 151.

Illustration: François Marius Granet, Le Chapitre de l’Ordre du Temple (1147), Musée national du château de Versailles, inv. 376; study drawing in the Louvre (INV 26787). Public domain.

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