On great ceremonial occasions the Provincial Prior of Lancashire does not process alone. He is escorted by his Bodyguard, a body of knights who attend him in regalia, lend dignity to the proceedings, and embody in their bearing the loyalty and discipline for which the Order has always stood. It is one of the most visible honours a knight can be asked to undertake. It also invites a natural question: what was the equivalent in the original Order of the Temple, eight centuries ago?

The answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no, and it tells us a good deal about how the modern Order both echoes and gently reinvents its medieval forebear.

The Bodyguard today

The modern Bodyguard is a ceremonial escort. Its purpose is one of honour rather than defence: to attend the Prior on formal occasions, to bring solemnity and good order to a procession, and to represent the Province with the dignity its office deserves. The knights who serve in it are chosen for their commitment, and they carry out their duty with the precision and decorum that mark a well-ordered ceremony. In an age when no one expects a sword to be drawn in anger, the Bodyguard keeps alive the outward forms of an older world, and the inner virtues those forms were always meant to express.

A note on the title "Prior"

Here the comparison takes its first surprising turn. The medieval Knights Templar had no Prior at all. The Order was led, worldwide, by its Grand Master, and in each country by a Master or Preceptor; the head of the Order here was styled the Master of the Temple in England. The title "Prior" belonged to the wider monastic world and, among the military orders, to the Knights of St John, whose head in England was the Grand Prior. It reached our Order much later, through the union of the Temple and St John traditions that the modern body still proclaims in its full name. So when we look for a medieval "Prior's bodyguard", we are really asking how the Templars guarded and attended their Master, and how they protected the thing that mattered most to them in the field.

The Master and his household

A senior Templar never travelled alone. The Rule of the Order set out, in careful detail, the household each great officer was entitled to keep. The Marshal, who commanded in war, rode with squires, a sergeant and mounted attendants. The commanders of the eastern lands kept squires, foot soldiers, a sergeant, a clerk in deacon's orders, and even a scribe who could read and write Arabic. The Grand Master's establishment was larger still, taking in a chaplain, clerks, sergeants, squires, and brother knights who rode at his side as companions.

This was partly practical. A leader who carried the Order's authority through a dangerous and unsettled world needed men about him for protection, for counsel and for the running of his affairs. But it was also a matter of dignity. The size and order of a Master's household announced the importance of his office, much as a ceremonial escort does today. In those mounted companions, riding close beside their Master, we find the nearest medieval cousin of the modern Bodyguard.

The guard around the banner

Yet the true heart of the Templar idea of guarding lay not around a man but around a flag. The Order's war banner, the black and white Beauseant, was the rallying point of every Templar in the field, and the Rule surrounded it with some of its strictest discipline. When the Marshal raised the banner to charge, he was to detail a body of knight brothers, five or six and up to ten, to ride close about him and the banner and on no account to leave it. A further brother carried a second banner furled around his lance and kept at the Marshal's side, ready to raise it if the first should fall, so that the brethren would never be left without a standard to rally to.

The banner was never to be lowered in order to charge, and those charged with its keeping were forbidden to abandon it. So long as the Beauseant flew, the knights were bound to fight on; and so long as the knights fought, the banner had to fly above them. To guard it was the supreme test of a Templar's loyalty and discipline, and to fail in that duty was among the gravest faults a brother could commit.

The same faith, a different field

Set side by side, the two duties could hardly look more different. The medieval guard was a matter of life and death, exercised on campaign and in the press of battle, its discipline written in hard rules and harder penalties. The modern Bodyguard performs in the calm of a ceremony, its swords ornamental and its danger nil. One protected a Master and a banner in a hostile world; the other honours a Prior and a Province in a peaceful one.

And yet the thread that runs between them is unbroken. Both express the same handful of virtues: loyalty to the office above the man, discipline freely chosen, and the quiet pride of standing beside one's leader and one's banner when called upon to do so. The knight who escorts the Provincial Prior today keeps faith, in his own way, with the brother who once rode at the Beauseant and would not leave it.

There is even a thread of heraldry to bind the two together. The Master of the Temple in England sealed his charters with the Agnus Dei, the Holy Lamb bearing the Order's banner, and that same lamb sits at the heart of the crest of the Priory of Lancashire to this day. The banner the brethren were sworn to guard, and the Province whose Prior our Bodyguard escorts, are in the end one tradition, eight centuries apart.