Templar Tithes and Justice at Oosterhout, the Netherlands

Oosterhout, north of Breda, the Netherlands, is hardly known as a Templar place, yet the Knights Templar held a quarter of its lordship, most of its tithes and the right to present its parish priest. An inquest of 1312 and an inventory of 1313 describe these rights in detail. What did Templar lordship in a Brabant village look like?

Origins
The rights of the order in Oosterhout go back to the lords of Breda, who founded the commandery of Ter Brake at nearby Alphen, by tradition around 1144, and shared lordship with the Templars in both villages [1][2]. The seventeenth century compiler Christophe Butkens reports that Beatrix, lady of Strijen, gave the Oosterhout tithes to the Templars in 1199; another account gives 1190. The deed is considered false, although its content agrees with later sources [1][3]. Later accounts of Templar houses in the town, such as the small castles of Borstellé and Brakestein, cite no medieval document [4].

The inquest of 1312
In 1312, dated 1311 in older literature, Philip of Liedekerke had the rights of the order recorded at Ter Brake. He was the younger brother of the lord of Breda and held Oosterhout as a lordship of his own after 1306 [5]. The master and his brethren were absent; fifteen sworn tenants of the Templars from Oosterhout testified [1][5]. The order held a quarter of the rights to the waste land and a quarter of the fines up to 100 solidi (shillings), against three quarters for the lord [1][5], all such fines on its own allodial land, the tithes and the right to present the priest, and the right to keep a bull and a billy goat. The lord might build no mill, church or castle in the parish [1][5]. At the end Philip's men objected that the Templars sheltered more people than he did, and the men of the Templars answered that the lords of the Temple were misericordiores et magis pacifici (more merciful and more peaceable) than Philip [5].

Income in 1313
When the Hospitallers took over, their inventory of May 1313 showed how much Oosterhout mattered. Its tithes yielded 174 pounds, by far the largest item of Ter Brake, besides rents, woods, waste land and a mill [1]. By 1373, with an income of 484 florins, Ter Brake ranked among the richest Hospitaller commanderies of Brabant [1].

The church today
The parish whose priest the Templars presented first appears in two acts of 1277 [3]. The Hospitallers kept the tithes and the patronage until the early seventeenth century [3]. In 1473 they ceded their lordship and jurisdiction to the lord of Breda for an annual rent [5]; in 1616 the tithes passed to Prince Philip William of Orange [3][4]. The present Sint Jansbasiliek on the Markt stands where excavations in 1970, 1975 and 1976 found an earlier church [3]. It is a Gothic cruciform church of the second half of the fifteenth century, with a tower begun in 1519 and left unfinished, enlarged in 1880 to 1882 [3][6]. No Templar fabric survives, but the function continues: a parish church once served under the patronage of the Temple.

Oosterhout was never a Templar house. Yet the quarrel of 1312 shows the order as a lord whose tenants claimed it was more merciful than Philip of Liedekerke [5]. Few places in the Netherlands preserve so detailed a picture of Templar lordship. The history of Ter Brake itself is told in our post on Alphen [7].

This blog is original work by TemplarsNow^TM based on an AI-assisted quick scan on the topic. References and further reading, Open Access if available, all links verified November 4, 2026 and all sources checked but not all studied in detail: [1] Streefland, A.A. (1980) Tempeliers in Brabant. De commanderij Ter Brake bij Alphen, Jaarboek De Oranjeboom 33, pp. 147-148, 153-161; [2] TemplarsNow (2026) The Lords of Breda - Founders of the Only Dutch Templar Commandery; [3] Broeders, J.M.H. (1978) Uit de geschiedenis van de Sint Jansbasiliek te Oosterhout, Jaarboek De Oranjeboom 31, pp. 21-22, 33-36; [4] Van Lawick, H.Ch.G. (1949) Enige verzamelde gegevens omtrent de commanderij Ter Braeke van de Orde der Ridders van Sint Jan in Noord-Brabant, Jaarboek De Oranjeboom 2, pp. 5, 12; [5] Bijsterveld, A.J. (1991) Alphen, van Echternachs domein tot Bredase heerlijkheid, 1175-1312 (II), Jaarboek De Oranjeboom 44, pp. 119-121, 124-125; [6] Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (n.d.) Rijksmonument 31673, Markt 28, Oosterhout (Sint Jan), Rijksmonumentenregister; [7] TemplarsNow (2024) The Templar Commandery at Alphen, the Netherlands.

The illustration shows the tower of the Sint Jansbasiliek at Oosterhout, which stands on the site of the parish church whose priest the Templars presented. Photo G. Lanting (2010), CC BY-SA 3.0, source Wikimedia Commons.

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