Series 4 > Knights of St John of Jerusalem in Scotland

INTRODUCTION
XXV11
Templars, they do not appear as witnesses to surviving royal acts
before 1160.1
Soon after the mid twelfth century they can be seen accumulating
other minor holdings. Malcolm iv granted them one toft in all his
burghs,2 and this may have been the foundation of the network of
small tofts and tenements which they held all over Scotland in the
late Middle Ages. By the end of the twelfth century there seems to
have been a special category of exemptions from secular service
enjoyed by the military orders in their burghal properties.3 By the
early thirteenth century other possessions can be traced, including
saltworks at Callander,4 and lands in Lanark,5 Newton Mearns,6
and Kinnear (? Fife).7
The Hospitallers held churches, too, though here again their
acquisitions were more modest than the Templars’. By 1173 x 1178
they had presentation to the ‘chapel of Torphichen’ which seems
to have been moving towards parochial status, with rights of
cemetery and teinds of the men of Torphichen;8 later, 1210 x 1226,
the Hospitallers also secured rights of teinds in Ogilface, three and
a half miles west of Bathgate.9 The curiously long and narrow
shape of Torphichen parish was a result of this westward expansion
of the Hospitallers’ rights. By 1180 x 1189 they had presentation to
the parish church of Glenmuick in Mar,10 though three centuries
later the Bethlehemites of St Germains (East Lothian) claimed that
this parish had belonged to them since ‘ time beyond the memory
of man’.11 For a brief period in the thirteenth century the Hospital¬
lers held the patronage of Ochiltree, but were obliged to renounce
this (in return for ^14 sterling per annum) as the result of a compli¬
cated legal wrangle before 1296.12 Most of their acquisitions of
appropriated parish churches date from after 1312.
Like the Templars, their principal raison d’etre in Scotland seems
to have been recruitment; but the lack of any evidence equivalent
to the records of the trial of the Templars makes it impossible to
1 RRS, i, 218-19
3 St Andrews Liber, 139; cf. ibid., 264
6 Dryburgh Liber, 156-7
7 Balmerino Liber, 15-16
* Ibid., 320; HolyroodLiber, 36-37
2 RRS, i, 230
4 Newbattle Registrum, 131-2
6 Paisley Registrum, 379-80
8 St Andrews Liber, 319
10 Aberdeen Registrum, ii, 315-16
1 Vatican Archives, Registrum Supplicationum (Reg. Supp.j, 651, f. 93V
■2 Melrose Liber, i, 288-91