Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 1.djvu/69

Rh commonly worn by the knights of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may have been sometimes mistaken for the religious habit of the Templars.

My enquiries have been likewise directed to monumental effigies of knights of other military religious orders. I have not been able to find, or hear of, any effigy of a Hospitaller; none I believe are known to have existed at Clerkenwell. As far as I can learn there were no monuments of this kind in the church of St. John at Valetta on the dissolution of the order of Malta, though the floor was almost covered with sepulchral stones. Of the order of St. Lazarus and the Teutonic order, I have no information. Stothard, in his well-known Work, (p. 52,) has given two effigies—those of Sir Roger de Bois and his lady—in the mantle of the order of St. Anthony, with the Tau-cross on the shoulder.

Were it not for the solitary instance which I have mentioned from Montfaucon, I should be much disposed to infer from the result of my enquiries, that there was some rule or statute of the order of the Temple, or some tacit understanding among them, forbidding the representation of the knights by monumental effigies; although I can find no such prohibition in the rule of St. Bernard. With the German translation of the Statutes by Münter, (Berlin, 1794,) I am not acquainted farther than from the account given of them in the "Memoires Historiques." They seem to have furnished much of the information contained in an article on the Templars published in the "Library of Entertaining Knowledge." Many of them appear to be of later date than the rule of St. Bernard. They required, for example, that each knight of the order should have a white 'cotte d'armes' ensigned with a red cross before and behind: which cotte d'armes I conceive was the surcoat, and this new regulation was probably made after it had become customary for secular knights to display armorial bearings on their surcoats. Such regulations no doubt were subordinate to the rule of the order, and only enacted from time to time by a general chapter, in the same manner as were the statutes of the knights of Malta.

After all, whether there be or be not effigies of Templars existing, is a fit subject for archæological enquiry. Should there eventually be discovered any effigy referrible to their era, representing a man, whether in armour or not, habited in a mantle with a cross on his breast or shoulder, and with a long