THE TEMPLARS. 255 ried out a financial expedient of the same kind as his dealings with the Templars, by arresting all the Jews of the kingdom simultane- ously, stripping them of their property, and banishing them under pain of death. A memorandum of questions for consideration, still preserved in the Tresor des Chartres, shows that he expected to benefit in the same way from the confiscation of the Templar possessions, while, as we shall see, he overlooked the fact that these, as ecclesiastical property, were subject to the imprescriptible rights of the Church.* The stories about Squin de Florian, a renegade Templar, and Noffo Dei, a wicked Florentine, both condemned to death and con- cocting the accusations to save themselves, are probably but the conception of an imaginative chronicler, handed down from one annalist to another, f Such special interposition was wholly un- necessary. The foolish secrecy in which the Templars enveloped their proceedings was a natural stimulus of popular curiosity and suspicion. Alone among religious Orders, the ceremonies of recep- tion were conducted in the strictest privacy ; chapters were held at daybreak with doors closely guarded, and no participant was allowed to speak of what was done, even to a fellow-Templar not concerned in the chapter, under the heaviest penalty known — that of expulsion. That this should lead to gossip and stories of rites too repulsive and hideous to bear the light was inevitable. It was the one damaging fact against them, and when Humbert Blanc, Preceptor of Auvergne, was asked on his trial why such secrecy was observed if they had nothing to conceal, he could only an- swer " through folly." Thus it was common report that the neo- phyte was subjected to the humiliation of kissing the posteriors of his preceptor — a report which the Hospitallers took special pleasure in circulating. That unnatural lusts should be attributed to the Order is easily understood, for it was a prevalent vice of the Middle Ages, and one to which monastic communities were espe-
- Guill. Nangiac. Contin. ann. 1306. — Vaissette, IV. 135.— Raynouard, p. 24.
t Villani, Cron. vin. 92. — Amalr. Augerii Vit. Clera. V. (Muratori S. R. I. III. II. 443-44).— S. Antonini Hist. (D'Argentre I. i. 281).— Trithem. Chron. Hirsaug. ann. 1307.— Raynald. ann. 1307, No. 12. The best-informed contemporaries, Bernard Gui, the Continuation of Nangis, Jean de S. Victor, the Grandes Chro- niques, say nothing about this story.
