The Shroud and the Grail - Noel Currer-Briggs

 I have been fascinated by the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau since Henry Lincoln began his Chronicle series in 1972.   I even read the book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, when it came out in 1982.   I managed to steer well clear of the Dan Brown phenomenon, fortunately, and was able to remain interested if not committed.   Twenty years later, I was reading a fantasy story about magic when I stumbled over a reference to the book by Noel Currer-Briggs.   Was it real, I wondered.   If so, was it available?  Yes to both.

Noel Currer-Briggs (1919-2004) was Yorkshire-born (can't be helped), a scholar, a cryptographer at Bletchley Park during World War II, and a genealogist.   He came to the subject of the grail through Ian Wilson's books on the Turin Shroud, which I have also read.   Currer-Briggs theorised that the grail was the vessel in which the cloths that shrouded Jesus's body were kept after his resurrection.  Specifically these are the Shroud itself, now in Turin, and the face cloth which was destroyed during the French Revolution but has been recorded in countless artworks as the generally accepted face of Christ.

Currer-Briggs' aim in this book was to work out where the Shroud had been since first being seen by western eyes in Constantinople during the First Crusade, and ending up in the possession of the dethroned king of Italy, who gave it to Turin cathedral for safekeeping.   Genealogy is his tool.   He argues that the Templars spirited it away from Constantinople when the city was looted during the Third Crusade, took it to Germany, then on to France where the Templars had their western HQ.   When the Templars were suppressed in 1307 it then passed into the keeping of one particular family with extensive Templar links drawn ever tighter as their descendants married into other Templar families.   Ultimately it passed to the House of Savoy, which became the royal house of Italy.

It's all intriguing and adds to the fascination.   What I don't entirely get is how one school of thought is that the Grail was a chalice, another a bowl, when (according to Currer-Briggs) it was in fact a flat wooden box.   On the plus side, despite living in East Midlands, I had never heard of the Nottinghamshire alabaster carvings that profess to be of John the Baptist's severed head but which make much more sense as references to Christ's Resurrection. 

Essential reading, then, for those like me who are fascinated by the arcane.