Knights of St John - St Mary-in-the-Elms - Woodhouse, Leicestershire
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SMacB
N 52° 43.880 W 001° 12.230
30U E 621282 N 5843896
Stained glass window containing the arms of The Knights of St John, also known as the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem Order of Saint John, Order of Hospitallers, Knights Hospitaller, Knights Hospitalier or Hospitallers.
Waymark Code: WMXVDT
Location: East Midlands, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 03/02/2018
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Stained glass window ascribed as containing the arms of The Knights of St John, also known as the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem Order of Saint John, Order of Hospitallers, Knights Hospitaller, Knights Hospitalier or Hospitallers.
"a medieval Catholic military order that became the modern Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which remains a sovereign subject of international law, as well as the Protestant members of the Alliance of the Orders of Saint John of Jerusalem. It was headquartered variously in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, on the island of Rhodes, and in Malta, and it is now headquartered in Rome.
The Hospitallers arose in the early 11th century, at the time of the great monastic reformation, as a group of individuals associated with an Amalfitan hospital in the Muristan district of Jerusalem, dedicated to John the Baptist and founded around 1023 by Gerard Thom to provide care for sick, poor or injured pilgrims coming to the Holy Land. Some scholars, however, consider that the Amalfitan order and hospital were different from Gerard Thom's order and its hospital. After the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 during the First Crusade, the organisation became a religious and military order under its own Papal charter, charged with the care and defence of the Holy Land. Following the conquest of the Holy Land by Islamic forces, the knights operated from Rhodes, over which they were sovereign, and later from Malta, where they administered a vassal state under the Spanish viceroy of Sicily. The Hospitallers were the smallest group to colonise parts of the Americas; at one point in the mid-17th century, they acquired four Caribbean islands, which they turned over to the French in the 1660s.
The knights were weakened in the Protestant Reformation, when rich commanderies of the order in northern Germany and the Netherlands became Protestant and largely separated from the Roman Catholic main stem, remaining separate to this day, although ecumenical relations between the descendant chivalric orders are amicable. The order was disestablished in England, Denmark, Sweden and elsewhere in northern Europe, and it was further damaged by Napoleon's capture of Malta in 1798, following which it became dispersed throughout Europe and Russia. It regained strength during the early 19th century as it redirected itself toward religious and humanitarian causes. In 1834, the order, by this time known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, acquired new headquarters in Rome, where it has since been based.
Five contemporary, state-recognised chivalric orders which claim modern inheritance of the Hospitaller tradition all assert that "The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is the original order", and that four non-Roman Catholic orders stem from the same root: Protestant orders exist in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, and a non-denominational British revival has its headquarters in the United Kingdom with branches throughout the Commonwealth."
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It is uncertain what the link with the Knights of St John and this church. In the rather wordily titled book of 1860 '
Armorial Windows Erected, in the Reign of Henry VI. by John Viscount Beaumont and Katharine Duchess of Norfolk in Woodhouse Chapel, by the Park of Beaumanor, in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire. Including an Investigation of the Differences of the Coat of Neville'. by John Gough Nichols, F.S.A., it has this to say about the window:
'Gules, a cross argent. The appearance of this coat is beyond our expectation, as it is not among those which were described by Burton : but it is apparently of coaeval antiquity with the other shields. It is not known as the bearing of any English family after the time of Thomas de Cobliam, who lived in the reign of Edward III. but it is the ancient coat of the sovereign house of Savoy. I cannot find, however, any reason for giving it that meaning in the present case ; but am rather disposed to regard it as belonging to some ecclesiastical person or community. It may possibly be the personal coat of the Abbot of Leicester, at the time the glass was made, he being, as already mentioned, the patron of the parish church of Barrow.'