Of its dimensions and manifold restorations, the ordinary guide-books say enough, and make a repetition unnecessary. The round church with its interesting arcade of grotesque, sculptured heads, and its rare proportions; the choir, "springing," as Hawthorne says, "as it were, in a harmonious and accordant fountain out of the clustered pillars that support its pinioned arches," are both a delight to every lover of the beautiful.
Hardly more than a century after the Norman conquest we find the Knights Templars on this spot. The year after their removal here from Holborn in 1185, they built their Temple church, the finest of the four round churches that still remain in England. The choir, which is one of the most beautiful specimens of pure early English, was finished in 1240.
In early times, the discipline of the knights was most severe. The Master himself scourged disobedient brethren within its walls, and on Fridays there were frequent public whippings within the church. In a narrow, penitential cell to be seen in the church walls, only four and a half feet long and two and a half wide, a disobedient brother is said to have been starved to death.
The interesting recumbent figures clad in mail, upon the Temple floor, are not, as is popularly supposed, Knights Templars, but Associates of the Temple, who were only partly admitted to its great privileges.
Shortly after the downfall of the Templars, the property passed into the hands of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, whose priory, as we remember, was burned by the wrathful men of Kent in Wat Tyler's rebellion. The knights leased it to the law students who belonged to the "King's Court." Therefore, when the rebels reached London, they poured down on the haunts of the Temple lawyers, carried off the books, deeds, and rolls of remembrance, and, in vengeance on the Knights Hospitallers, burned them in Fleet Street. So determined were these men, goaded by years of tyranny, to put an end to all the laws that had oppressed them.
In later years, we find that the Temple church in the time of Henry VIII., and later still, of Milton and Ben Jonson, was used in term time for the students as a place for rendezvous. Discussions on legal questions sometimes waxed boisterous, and, as a contemporary said, as "noisy as St. Paul's."