Church of St. Mary’s

Founded c. 1170 by the Knights Templar who established a preceptory at Temple Guiting. The order was suppressed in 1312; their estates passed to the Knights Hospitaller.

In the middle of the 12th century, Gilbert de Lacy gave land at Guiting to the Knights Templar. The order, founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land, had grown into one of medieval Europe's most powerful institutions: bankers, landowners, warriors, and monks. They established a preceptory at Guiting to manage their Cotswold estates, enriched by the wool trade that made this region prosperous. Around 1170, they founded St Mary's Church. For the next 140 years, Templar brothers administered their holdings from here, connected to a network that stretched from the Cotswolds to Jerusalem. The end came suddenly. In 1307, Philip IV of France, deeply indebted to the Templars, ordered mass arrests and accused the order of heresy. Pope Clement V, under Philip's pressure, dissolved the order in 1312. At Temple Guiting, the preceptor John de Coningston was arrested in 1309 and sent to the Tower of London. His fate after imprisonment is unrecorded. The estates passed to the Knights Hospitaller at Quenington. But the church the Templars built remained, continuing to serve the village through the Reformation, the Civil War, the industrial revolution, two world wars. The village name preserved what the suppression tried to erase: Temple Guiting, where the Templars once were.