Unlike most of its five million members, including many world leaders, who believe that the Freemasons, the world’s largest fraternal organization, evolved from the guilds of medieval stonemasons, historian Robinson persuasively links Freemasonry’s origins and goals to the once powerful and wealthy Knights Templar order. Banned and persecuted by a 14th-century papal bull, he claims, the Knights were forced to form an underground society. The author combines scholarly research and entertaining storytelling in tracing Freemasonry as a worldwide political, religious, economic and social body dedicated to self-improvement and charity while governed by secret rituals and symbols (explained here in detail).

Historians are always wary of newcomers who try to reinterpret old events in a new way. Here, Robinson (not a professional historian) takes a fresh look at the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 in England and emerges with something really new. It had been thought that this revolt against feudal landlords and royalty was a spontaneous one led by ad hoc people. Robinson shows, in what seems to be a convincing way, that far from being spontaneous, the revolt was a well-planned and highly organized attempt on the part of remnants of the Knights Templar (disbanded by the Pope 65 years earlier) to get retribution against the Knights Hospitaller. Robinson’s hypothesis explains many previously unanswerable facts; for those interested in medieval British history and Freemasonry.

Here, Robinson, a gentleman farmer and medievalist, makes an occasionally lively, often illuminating case for the medieval Knights Templars as the originators of the secretive worldwide society of Freemasons. What sort of people could make use of a secret underground network of sworn allies in 14th-century England?

What sort of members would have been capable of organizing such national uprisings as the supposedly spontaneous Peasants’ Rebellion of 1382 at a time when clandestine communication and travel between cities was next to impossible? Certainly not a collection of ill-educated construction workers, states Robinson in this indictment of the standard claim that modern-day Freemasonry originated with a society of stonemasons’ guilds.

On the other hand, the Knights Templars, a well-armed and secretive religious order that provided banking services for Europe’s nobility, had ample reason to go underground when Pope Clement V abruptly excommunicated them at the behest of France’s King Philip, who had the knights arrested and tortured to avoid repaying the money he owed them.

The English Templars received enough advance warning to disappear, Robinson argues, founding a Brotherhood that continued to protect “heretics” (including the scientists of the Enlightenment) through the ensuing centuries, until Roman Catholicism’s political power weakened and the Freemasons, who came to include several US presidents, became the establishment. The author’s enthusiam for his subject proves contagious as he traces Freemasonry’s arcane terms to appropriate counterparts in Norman French, the language spoken by the Templars, and links secret Masonic symbols to those likely to have been used by the ousted Knights.

He ends by suggesting that a suitable use of the power of five million modern Freemasons, considering their religious tolerance and their new knowledge of the Templars’ Crusader origins, might be to act as peacemakers among contending religious forces in Jerusalem, where the order of the Templars began. A refreshing example of scholarly detective work, limited only by its specialized subject