This is one of my favorite reviews of Born in Blood. Mainly because the reviewer saw it for what it was, a lot of speculation and very little provable evidence. personally I preferred A Pilgrim’s Path much more.
From: http://www.phoenixmasonry.org/masonicmuseum/Born_in_Blood_Book_Review.htm
The author purports to prove that Freemasonry is directly descended from the medieval monastic Knights Templar, and in the process to solve a number of minor mysteries concerning Masonic ritual, including the meanings and origins of words like cowan, cabletow and tyler, which occur in Masonic ritual and nowhere else in the English language. His best evidence centers on the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381.
In 14th Century England life sucked for all but a very few people. You worked hard and were paid little if you were freeborn and nothing if you weren’t. You had no rights at all. Anything you grew or built or invented belonged either to the king or the pope. Malnutrition was a way of life, and if you were caught hunting on land that belonged to an aristocrat you could be beaten or executed. The penalty for criticizing the church was that your lower lip would be cut off. And if you did it again, you had another lip, didn’t you?
Into the mix add frequent crop failures from 1315 to 1318 and then a big famine in 1340 then follow that up with three plagues and a simultaneous war with Scotland and by 1350 the population of England had gone from 4M to 2.5M. Life’s a bitch!
For a moment there seemed to be a silver lining to the cloud. The labor shortage caused by all your friends and family dropping dead meant that for the first time ever, a commoner could get some meaningful cash for his labor. The authorities didn’t like the idea of working people having economic clout, so they passed the Statute of Labourers which, among other things, fixed wages at preplague levels. Also at about that time the Hundred Years War had begun, so that meant increased taxes. Landowners who wanted to reduce the cost of their human resources could hire a lawyer to comb genealogies to discover freemen who had descended from serfs, thus forcing them into unpaid servitude.
- WAT TYLER’S REVOLT
There’s only so much a people can take, and in 1381 a peasants’ rebellion occurred, organized by reform-minded parish priests in contact with a shadowy, secretive “Great Society” and led by a guy called Walter the Tyler. Now it may be that tyler is an obsolete spelling of the occupation roof tiler, but Robinson contends that tyler in this case is sergeant at arms of a Masonic lodge, a natural choice to lead a violent mob. During this insurrection, there was a great deal of lopping off of heads of aristocrats and upper church officials, lawyers and authority in general; but the mob seems to have been deliberately guided toward the destruction of property, particularly property belonging to the Knights Hospitaller and the Church. One piece of Hospitaller property was spared, that temple which had been the principal temple of the Knights Templar prior to the suppression of the order in 1307.
When the king’s party finally went out to meet with the leaders of the rebellion, two men conspicuously not in the party were the Archbishop of Canturbury and the prior of the Knights Hospitaller. Tyler and a few men found them anyway in the Tower of London and beheaded them. The young king agreed to parley with Tyler, but Tyler was stabbed by members of the king’s excourt as he spoke. As Tyler lay wounded, the king rode to the rebels and announced to them that he would personally see to their concerns. The now leaderless rebellion petered out in London and carried on for a couple more days in outlying towns.
So that’s the closest Robinson came to a historical smoking gun. The shadowy Great Society of the Peasant’s Revolt has one foot in the Masons, based on the name Walter the Tyler, and one foot in the Templars, based on the fact that the mob singled out Hospitaller leadership and property, the Hospitallers being the rival monastic order which had most directly participated in and profited from the Pope’s supression of the Templars.
It’s not perfect evidence, but it’s pretty good. The troublesome part is the possibility that tyler might be an alternate spelling of tiler. Robinson tries to add weight to his argument mainly in that it just makes so much sense that a man who occupied the position of sergeant at arms of a secret society would be a natural choice to lead a violent rebellion and that a roof tiler would be a less likely leader. Also, from the moment he appeared on the scene he was universally recognized as the leader of the rebellion, even though rioting had been taking place under other leaders for a couple of days before he arrived. Robinson doubts that could have happened so easily if Wat had been a “tiler” and not a “tyler.”
Tyler issued the command that men within 36 miles of the coast should stay put, lest the French take advantage of the upheaval in order to stage an invasion. Tyler was a man used to giving commands and apparently accustomed to having those commands carried out, which in this case they were. Further, these commands covered ranges miles from London and coordinated concurrent rebellions as far north as Scotland. Robinson takes this coordination and discipline as evidence that a command structure was in place and ready to go when the rebellion erupted. That’s a lot to expect of a roof tiler, but all in a day’s work for a sergeant at arms of a secret society.
