Temple Church

You're standing outside a Crusader church. Not a memorial to the Crusades. An actual church built by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century, consecrated in eleven eighty-five by the Patriarch of Jerusalem himself, in the presence of King Henry the Second. It was modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem — the round nave was a deliberate echo of the holiest site in Christendom.

Inside, lying on the floor of the Round Church, are nine stone effigies of medieval knights. One of them is William Marshal, First Earl of Pembroke. If you've never heard of him, you should have. Marshal served five English kings — Henry the Second, Richard the Lionheart, John, Henry the Third, and the Young King Henry. He won tournaments, fought in wars, and at the age of seventy — seventy — he commanded the English army at the Battle of Lincoln in twelve seventeen, personally fighting in the melee and saving England from a French invasion during a civil war. He's been called the greatest knight who ever lived. He's been lying here since twelve nineteen.

The round nave contains the earliest known surviving free-standing Purbeck marble columns in England. Run your hand along one if you get the chance. That stone is eight hundred years old.

In thirteen oh-seven, the Templars were arrested across Europe, accused of heresy, and destroyed. Their London church was seized by the Crown and eventually given to lawyers. The Inner Temple and Middle Temple — two of London's four Inns of Court — still share this church today. So the space built by warrior monks to pray before riding to Jerusalem is now used by barristers. Lawyers have been squatting in a Crusader church for over seven hundred years.