234 THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS. JAMBS DB Templars had died during their imprisonment in the Tower. A.D?"L310 The twenty-sixth prisoner examined was the Master of the Temple, Brother William de la More, who gives an account of the number of persons he had admitted into the order during the period of his mastership, specifying their names. It is stated that many of the parishioners of the parish adjoining the îiew Temple had been present at the interment of the brethren of the fraternity, and that the burials were not conducted in a clandestine manner. In Ireland, in the mean time, similar proceedings against the order had been carried on. Between the 11th of February and the 23rd of May, thirty Templars were examined in Saint Patrick's Church, Dublin, by Master John de Mareshall, the pope's commissary, but no evidence of their guilt was obtained. Forty-one witnesses were then heard, nearly all of whom were monks. They spoke merely from hearsay and suspicion, and the gravest charges brought by them against the fraternity appear to be, that the Templars had been observed to be inattentive to the reading of the holy Gospels at church, and to have cast their eyes on the grouud at the period of the elevation of the host* On the 30th of March the papal inquisitors opened their commission at Lincoln, and between that day and the 10th of April twenty Templars were examined in the ehapter-Lruse of the cathedral, amongst whom were some of the veteran warriors of Palestine, men who had moistened with their blood the distant plains of the far East in defence of that faith which they were now so infamously accused of having repudiated. Brother William de Winchester, a member of twenty-six years' standing, had been received into the order at the castle de la Roca Guitte in the province of Armenia, bordering on Palestine, by the valiant • Aita liymtri, tom. iii. p. 179, 180. Coirci;. Mag. Brit., tom. ii. p. 373 to 380.