Sworn in Secret: Freemasonry and the Knights Templar

This is an extremely complete book going way back in history. It starts off talking about masonry, early masons and George Washington. It says there's not much known about the earliest days of masonry.

Then the book gets into the history part, starting off with the Phoenicians, who were tolerant of other religions. It talks about what they did, how they built things and their travels. Then there's the Minonian civilization and what happened to, moves on to Constantine the Great, the Crusades and Hugh de Payne and nine knights that became he first Knights Templar.

It talks about the Templars and Solomon's Temple, the levels of men in the Templars (knights, serving brothers and clerics), how Richard the Lionhearted was tied in to the Templars and how the Templars became a far-ranging group, defending Christian pilgrims and even running a financial system.

Here's where things go bad for them. They had money; apparently quite a bit of it (mostly from lands and gifts they were given.) The Church and the King of France wanted that money. They were willing to kill for it and that's just what they did. The attacked the Templars and took what they could from the ruins. Their goal was probably genocide but somehow the majority of the Templars had escaped their net.

The ones that were caught were tortured and burned alive at the stake.

Then the book talks about a trip to North America and has a lot on Roslyn Chapel. The Peasant's Revolt of 1381 is discussed and eventually this is tied in to the rise of Freemasonry. The Freemasons set up seven things to work on: grammar; rhetoric; dialectic (tell truth from falsehood); geometry; music and astronomy.

This is a straight fact book and is very, very brief about things like the Holy Grail and the 'royal bloodline.'

It's a very scholarly work that is very well done.