Legends

Bad joke on QI on the BBC the other day. The old joke about three CIA agents being recruited as killers, sent into rooms to shoot their wives, the first two can't do it, the third goes in, shoots all the bullets then comes out and says "you could've told me it was loaded with blanks, I had to beat her to death with the chair". The third one, and only the third one, was changed to a woman.

1, 2, 3, from the Ingoldsby Legends. Excellent.

I saw a book, "The Groundwater Diaries", read a little bit of it. Mentioned suspicions about a Masonic conspiracy about Arsenal football club. I've said elsewhere that this is true, but he didn't seem to know about the evidence, Norris and so forth.

On. What were the Templars hiding?

Temple Bruer, as I've mentioned, is an important site. It, and nearby Aslackby, were two of only eight Templar round churches in England. According to "21st Century Grail", a questing book, a templar confessed back then that Brueria, as he called it, held one of only four templar idols, Baphomets perhaps, in England.

The place is covered in Dagaz and Triquetra.

And double M's, of course.

It's connected by "trackway" to Byard's Leap.

I've elsewhere mentioned the Templar connection to my town, and various nearby places such as Eagle. The book "Search for the Templars" (or some similar title) has a chapter just for Lincolnshire, the only country other than Yorkshire (the country's largest county) so recognised.

The site of the Templar hospital in the town was later the site of the Governor's house during the civil war, in which he had a prophetic, thrice dreaming a cannon ball hit his house and burned it down, which duly happened after the third dream. He's wisely moved house after the third occurence.

I think it would be best to dispel the myths of Templar survival in Portugal, Scotland and the Americas. The Templars actually survived their persecution, with the help of Bishop Dalderby of Lincoln, in the Bishop's castle at Newark-on -Trent, Nottinghamshire, England, where they kept the Holy Grail, or some similarly valuable object until it was stolen from its hiding place by a member of the Royal family in 1906.

I have personally seen the hole in which they hid their relic in the dungeons of Newark Castle, I have seen a nearby building with "Imperial Hall" written on it with the "A"s written in Masonic, square and compass, style. I have seen scaffolding on the same street arranged overnight into a six foot inverted pentagram.

Newark Castle would have been a very conventient place to hide the idol of Temple Bruer, Brueria, when the Templars were dissolved. I have a family conncetion myself to Brueria. There was a Templar hospital in the town, near the castle. There were reportedly (according to Rosemary Robb in a local history book) tunnels found leading from the castle which were filled in. Leading to the Church of St Mary Magdalene. I myself attended St Mary Magdalene C of E school, which has now shut down.

Are we meanto believe that it's a coincidence that Newark was, barring Oxford, THE Royalist stronghold during the civil war?

The book "Twenty-first Century Grail", which I don't recommend, mentions and idol of the Templars at Brueria (Temple Bruer, doesn't appear on all Road Atlases). The Templars being suppressed in England were taken for trial to York, London and Lincoln, putting the Bishop of Lincoln, Dalderby in a good position to rescue his friends.

From one of my files.

I should say a bit more about the dungeon whatever it was was hidden in. It's a bottle dungeon, brick lined from the eighteenth century when it was used for the storage of ice. There's a hole in the bricks, allegedly smashed in the 1906 Royal visit to retrieve whatever. The other bottle dungeon also has alcoves, five around the western half of the wall. All the alcoves are similar, a soft yellow stone with a hollow several inches square a equally deep. The rest of the castle is blue limestone. Coincidentally the dungeons are yeards from where bad King John was poisoned, but that was many year before the Templars supposedly took up residence. Supposedly the five represented five Templar installations in the area and that dungeon was for worship, the other being for the stashing of whatever was stashed. They were both used until the Civil War, after which the castle was partly demolished and partly blown up by Parliamentary forces, having three times resisted siege and being a few miles from the site of the King's surrender.

An interesting fact: the Grand Master of the English Templars was both initiated and arrested at Bruer.