The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  But one interesting discovery made by David Wood – and accepted by Lincoln – is that the geometry of the Rennes-le-Chateau area is, incredibly, measured in English miles, not in kilometres. Lincoln argues effectively that the kilometre (which is supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator) is a slipshod and meaningless measurement, and that the world would be better off to return to miles.

  Equally controversial are the speculations contained in a book called The Tomb of God (1996) by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, whose geometrical constructions leave them to locate the tomb of Jesus at the foot of a mountain near Rennes-le-Chateau, and who are convinced that Saunière was murdered. But a BBC television programme about the book seemed to demonstrate that the BBC’s attitude to Rennes-le-Chateau had changed since Lincoln’s three programmes, and that they had become hard line skeptics.

  What was certainly most absurd was the programme’s attempt to demonstrate that the Priory of Sion story, and the whole Rennes-le-Château affair, was a hoax that has now been exploded. For even if it could be demonstrated that Pierre Plantard, who claims to be a Merovingian descendant of Dagobert, was an imposter, the mystery of Saunière and his fortune would remain as baffling as ever.

  Then where did that wealth come from? The answer is almost certainly: not from any hidden treasure but from the Priory of Sion – that is, from modern descendants of the Merovingians, particularly the house of Hapsburg in Austria. Andrews and Schellenberger (whose book is excellently researched, even if its conclusions seem dubious) produce evidence that Henri Boudet, the priest of nearby Rennes-les-Bains, was Saunière’s paymaster, and that he passed on sums like three and a half million gold francs to Saunière’s housekeeper Marie Denardaud, and seven and a half million to Bishop Bellard, who appointed Saunière to Rennes-le-Château. It seems clear that there were many other people in the secret.

  As to Pierre Plantard, who seems to have given Lincoln the basic information that enabled him to solve the mystery of the parchments, the case against him has been laid out by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in a book called The Templar Revelation. Plantard came to prominence in occupied Paris in 1942 as the Grand Master of a quasi-Masonic order called The Order of Alpha-Galates, which was “markedly uncritical” of the Nazis. In fact, the Nazis seemed to approve of it. But then, they would; part of Himmler’s job was to establish that the Germans had a noble origin in the remote days of the Norse sagas, and to create a modern mystical order with its roots in the Aryan past. Pierre Plantard, whom Picknett and Prince describe as “a one-time draftsman for a stove-fitting firm, who allegedly had difficulty paying the rent from time to time”, then changed his name to Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair and later played an important part in bringing about the return to power of General de Gaulle in 1958. From 1956, the Priory of Sion had been depositing “enigmatic documents” in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The implication was that these documents had been concocted as part of the “hoax”. In fact, Lincoln’s books The Holy Place and Key to the Sacred Pattern make it clear that there is no reason whatever for believing that the Priory of Sion is some kind of hoax or that Pierre Plantard is not exactly what he says he is.

  On the other hand, it is necessary to admit that the BBC may have been justified in its negative attitude towards The Tomb of God by Andrews and Schellenberger. As already noted, their theory suggests that Jesus is buried at the foot of a mountain near Rennes-le-Chateau. They find all kinds of geometrical figures in Saunière’s parchments, then use these as a map to locate the “tomb of God”. They add the word “sum” (am) to “et in Arcadia ego”. to make an anagram that reads “I touch the tomb of God, Jesus” They suggest that the “blue apples” referred to in Saunière’s parchment are grapes, and that they symbolize the body of Jesus. The puzzling phrase “horse of God” they seem to think refers to a railway engine, and an important part in their argument is played by a railway line that was built in the 1870s. Finally they suggest that Saunière and his two fellow priests were murdered, for reasons they fail to make clear.

  Another theory cited by Picknett and Prince holds that the tomb of Jesus is situated under the public toilet in Rennes-le-Chateau.

  Henry Lincoln’s most powerful argument concerns the actual measurements of the earth. He mentions a remarkable book called Historical Metrology (1953) by a master engineer named A.E. Berriman, an incredibly erudite volume covering ancient Egypt, Babylon, Sumer, China, India, Persia and many other cultures, which begins with the question: “Was the earth measured in remote antiquity”?, and sets out to demonstrate that indeed it was. It argues that ancient weights and measures were derived from measuring the earth – which, of course, means that ancient people had already measured the earth.

  The book must have struck Berriman’s contemporaries as hopelessly eccentric. He says that one measure was a fraction of the earth’s circumference, that a measure of land area (the acre) was based on a decimal fraction of the square of the earth’s radius, and that certain weights were based on the density of water and of gold. It sounds almost as if Berriman is positing the existence of some ancient civilization which vanished without a trace, except for these ancient measures.

  In the last analysis, one of the most interesting things Lincoln has done, with his thirty-year investigation of Rennes-le-Chateau, is to demonstrate the existence of some ancient science of earth measurement. Since medieval times, this science seems to have been in the custody of the Church, and we must naturally suspect the involvement of the Templars. But Lincoln is inclined to believe that it may be far older even than that – dating back to the age of the megaliths.

  Berriman seems to be making the same point in Historical Metrology. His argument, as noted above, is that prehistoric measurement was geodetic in origin – that is, was derived from the size of the earth.

  One of his most powerful arguments occurs at the beginning of his first chapter.

  He points out that although the Greeks did not know the size of the earth, the earth’s polar circumference happens to be precisely 216,000 Greek stade, or stadia. The Greek stade is 600 Greek feet, and the Greek foot is .15 longer than the British foot.

  If we want to find out how many Greek stade there are to one degree of the earth’s circumference, we divide 216,000 by the 360 degrees in a circle. And the answer, significantly turns out to be 600 – the same as the number of feet in the stade.

  If we then divide by 60 – to get the number of stade in one minute of the circumference – we get 10 stade.

  And if we go further, and divide again by 60, to find the number of Greek feet in one second of the earth’s circumference, we see that it is precisely 100.

  This simply cannot be chance. Distances do not normally work out in neat round figures. It is obvious (a) that the Greeks took their stade from someone else, and (b) that someone else knew the exact size of the earth.

  Berriman is full of these puzzling facts – for example, that the area of the great bath of Mohenjo Daro, in the Indus Valley, is a hundred square yards.

  As to this “English connection”, Lincoln has an amusing but fascinating speculation. Early in his investigation into Rennes-le-Chateau, he went to the Bibliotheque Nationale with Gerard de Sede, and de Sede suggested he should request a book called Le Vraie Langue Celtique (The True Celtic Tongue) by the Abbe Henri Boudet, who was, as we have noted, priest of nearby Rennes-les-Bains, and a close friend of Saunière.

  Lincoln was able to obtain Boudet’s book, and found it baffling as well as funny. Boudet seemed to think that the original language of mankind before the Tower of Babel was English, or rather Celtic. This part of the book Lincoln describes as “linguistic tomfoolery”. And since Boudet was known to be an intelligent man, Lincoln suspects he had his tongue in his cheek. But the volume then turns into something far more interesting. Boudet goes on to discuss the complex megalithic structures of the area. The subtitle of the book is “The Cromlech of Rennes-les-Bains” – a cromlech
is a megalith made up of large flat stones resting on two upright stones, rather like a huge dining table.

  It looks as if Boudet’s job was simply to hint at the mystery of the whole area, and imply that it dates back to megalithic times. But Lincoln is also inclined to suspect that his intention is to tell his reader that one major key to the secret of the area lies in English – perhaps in English measures, such as the English mile. And is Boudet also hinting that the original measures of mankind are English – such as the mile?

  Let me try to summarize the conclusions of this postscript.

  The Rennes-le-Chateau area appears to be an enormous sacred site centred on a natural pentacle. Lincoln believes it has been sacred for at least a thousand years, for the “temple” – consisting of churches, castles and villages – must have been designed at least a thousand years ago.

  But the pentacular structure of the mountains of the area can only be seen from the air or from a good map. And we know that there were no good maps a thousand years ago, except portolans, the maps sailors used to navigate from port to port. And we will see in the section on the “Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings” that Professor Charles Hapgood believed that some of the portolans may date back to the age when there was no ice covering Antarctica – at least 5.000 BC, and perhaps earlier.

  A.E. Berriman’s conclusions about the Greek stade point in the same direction. If the ancient Greeks – before Eratosthenes, about 200 BC – did not know the size of the earth, then how is it possible that the Greek stade should be a very precise measure of the earth’s polar circumference? Someone knew the size of the earth. That “someone” may have been the ancient Egyptians, or perhaps even the Sumerians, whose civilization dates from around 4,000 BC. But then, neither the Egyptians nor the Sumerians had any means of measuring the size of the earth so precisely. Was the earth, in fact, measured by some much earlier civilization, dating back long before the Egyptians or the Sumerians? In our book The Atlantis Blueprint, Rand Flem-Ath and I have argued that Antartica was Atlantis and that a great civilization existed in Atlantis – as Plato suggests – as long ago as 10,500 BC.

  But even if a “worldwide maritime civilization” existed at that time, as Hapgood suggests, it would still have been virtually impossible to measure the earth’s polar circumference except by the rather inaccurate geometrical means used by Eratosthenes. (See Chapter on the Ancient Sea Kings.)

  Erik van Daniken would undoubtedly argue that the earth was measured from spacecraft in ancient times. Rand Flem-Ath and I (CW) are both inclined to suspect that the real answer lies in the notion that civilization may be tens of thousands of years older than anyone suspects.

  If that is so, then the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau may stretch back much further than the Templars or the Merovingians and have its origin in some remote period of prehistory.

  45

  Did Robin Hood Really Exist?

  Next to King Arthur, Robin Hood is the most famous of British heroes, and he shares with King Arthur the indignity of having his existence doubted by modern scholarship. The folklorist Lord Raglan concluded that he was really a Celtic god, while in The God of the Witches Margaret Murray argues that his name means Robin of the Hood, and that he was probably the devil (or horned god) in ancient witchcraft festivals. Yet there is also convincing evidence that Robin was a real person, and that – as the ballads declare – he plundered the king’s deer in Sherwood Forest and had a long-standing feud with the Sheriff of Nottingham.

  The first literary reference to Robin Hood occurs in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, dating from around 1377. Langland makes a priest remark that he could not say his paternoster without making mistakes, but “I know rhymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf Earl of Chester”. So there were already ballads of Robin Hood by that date. In 1510 Wynkyn de Worde, one of the earliest printers, brought out A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hood, which did for Robin Hood what Malory had done for King Arthur in the middle of the previous century. And by the time he appears in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1847) Robin had become the boon-companion and ally of Richard the Lion Heart, the heroic outlaw of the woods. All that was needed then was for some folklorist to notice how often Robin Hood’s name is associated with folk festivals, like the Hobby Horse ceremony which takes place on May Day in Padstow, Cornwall,22 to suggest that Robin Hood was really Robin Wood, and that his name is derived from the Norse god Woden . . . In fact he appears as Robin Wood in T.H.White’s Sword in the Stone, in which he becomes a contemporary of King Arthur, who (if he ever existed) was said to have died about AD 540.

  Those who assume there is no smoke without fire are inclined to believe that Robin Hood was a real outlaw who at some time lived in Sherwood Forest, and who became so popular during his own lifetime that, like Billy the Kid, he soon became the subject of tales and ballads. Yet it seems unlikely that he was around as early as Richard the Lion Heart (1157–99), or he would surely have been mentioned in manuscripts before Piers Plowman two centuries later. In his Chronicle of Scotland, written about 1420, Andrew Wyntoun refers to Robin Hood and Little John for the year 1283, which sounds altogether more likely – about a century before Piers Plowman.

  And where precisely did he operate? One important clue is that there is a small fishing town called Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire, not far from Whitby, and that up on the nearby moors there are two tumuli (or barrows) called Robin Hood’s Butts. Another is that in medieval England the forest of Barnsdale in Yorkshire joined Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. A sixteenth-century life of Robin Hood among the Sloane Manuscripts says he was born in Locksley, in Yorkshire, about 1160. The Chronicle of Scotland associates Robin with “Barnysale” presumably Barnsdale. So the evidence suggests that he was a Yorkshireman.

  Later legends declare that he was “Sir Robin of Locksley”, or even the Earl of Huntingdon. But it is clear from the earlier ballads that he was a yeoman – a farmer who owns his own land – and that this is partly why he became such a hero: not because he was a nobleman, but because he was a representative of the people. (A small tenant farmer would be only one stage above a landless peasant.)

  One of the most important clues to Robin’s identity emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Historic Documents Commission was cataloguing thousands of documents which represented eight centuries of British history. It was in 1852 that the antiquary Joseph Hunter claimed that he had stumbled upon a man who sounded as if he might be the original Robin Hood. His name in fact was Robert, and he was the son of Adam Hood, a forester in the service of the Earl de Warenne. (Robin was simply a diminutive of Robert – not, in those days, a name in its own right.) He was born about 1280, and on 25 January 1316 Robert Hood and his wife Matilda paid two shillings for permission to take a piece of the earl’s waste ground in “Bickhill” (or Bitch-hill) in Wakefield. It was merely the size of a kitchen garden – thirty feet long by sixteen feet wide. The rent for this was sixpence a year. The Manor Court Roll for 1357 shows a house “formerly the property of Robert Hode” on the site – so by that time Robert Hood was presumably dead.

  Now, 1316 was midway through the reign of Edward the Second, the foppish, homosexual king who was finally murdered – by having a red-hot spit inserted into his entrails – in September 1327. After his coronation (in 1307) he dismissed his father’s ministers and judges and made his lover, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall – to the fury of his barons. It was the most powerful of these, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who forced Edward to accept the rule of twenty-eight barons (called Ordainers), and who finally executed Piers Gaveston in 1312. Edward’s lack of attention to affairs of state allowed the Scots – against whom his father Edward I had fought so successfully – to throw off their English masters. Edward II was defeated at Bannockburn in 1314, two years before Robin Hood hired the piece of waste ground and set up home with his wife Matilda. So it is understandable that when the Earl of Warenne was ordered by the king to raise a troop to fight the Scots Robert Hood failed to oblige, and the reco
rds show that he was accordingly fined. But when a second muster was raised in 1317 Hood’s name was not listed among those fined – which led J.W.Walker, a modern historian, to conclude that this time Robin Hood joined the army. Five years later it was the Earl of Lancaster who raised the army, to fight against the king. Again, Hood’s name is not among those fined, so it again seems that he answered the summons. Lancaster’s army was defeated at Boroughbridge, and Lancaster was captured and beheaded. The quarrel had been about Edward’s new favourites, the Despensers, father and son, whom he had been forced to banish; now he was able to recall them.

  Many of Lancaster’s supporters were declared outlaws, and Walker discovered a document that stated that a “building of five rooms” on Bichhill, Wakefield, was among the property confiscated. Walker believes that this was Robert Hood’s home, and that the outlaw now took refuge in the nearby forest of Barnsdale, where he soon became a highly successful robber.

  Now, it must be understood that if Robert Hood was the legendary Robin, and he took refuge in the forest, living off the deer population, he was risking horrible penalties. When William the Conqueror brought the Normans to England he declared that the forests – which covered a third of the land – were his own property; any peasant who killed deer risked being literally flayed alive. Under William the Saxons suffered as much as countries occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War. Two and a half centuries later the Normans regarded themselves as Englishmen, and the French language had ceased to be used in England, but the laws were still harsh. The “forest laws” had been mitigated, so a man could no longer have his hands or his lips sliced off for poaching a deer; but the penalty was still a heavy fine, a year’s imprisonment, and sureties for his future good behaviour. If he could not find guarantors he had to “abjure the realm” – quit the kingdom for ever.