EARL’S SKULL MISSING

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25289, 15 September 1947, Page 3

EARL’S SKULL MISSING

COFFINS RIFLED IN MIDDLE TEMPLE

[By HARVEY BLANKS.] LONDON, September 3. Just behind the Fleet street office of “The Press” lie the bombed ruins of the ancient Church of the Knights Templar, situated in the warren of narrow lanes, dark passages, and unexpected little garden courts that are collectively known as the Middle Temple. This week Middle Temple lawyers, checking over their beloved church (for they still hope to have it restored when materials become available), were perturbed to find that some of the old coffins in 'he vaults had been rifled. Four coffins had been opened, but only cne relic was missing—the skull of the first Earl of Essex, which has an interesting history. The lawyers gathered up the skeletons, which had been scattered about the stone floor, and restored them to their coffins. When I visited the church a few hours later to have a look at the damage I found a police guard had been mounted, to prevent further depredations. A sergeant showed me where the intruders had got in—through an outside grave with an aperture about 18in wide and 3ft long, with a sliding drop of 9ft into the vaults. The casket which had contained the. remains of the earl was made up ofwtulip wood, but it had been irreparably smashed. Middle Temple lawyers have their own theories concerning the disappearance of the skull. They believe that the desecration was either the work of “some cranky collector of antiquities” or an attempt at common theft by someone who erroneously believed that jewels had been buried with the Knights Templar. The earl whose skull is missing began his career as Geoffrey de Mandeville, and was fatally wounded in the head while marching in rebellion against King Stephen in 1144. He died

excommunicate for his desecration and plunder of church property—so that to some extent the desecration and plunder of his own resting-place seems hke long-delayed poetic justice. . After his death, some Templars earned his body to the Old Temple in Hoibom, where it lay unburied for 20 years. Absolution was granted by the Pope in 1163. after the earl’s son had made restitution, and the remains were buried in the porch of the New Temple. During the present century, the earl’s skull was unearthed and removed to the Middle Temple library, where it remained until it was replaced in the vaults in 1930.