Military Orders first became central to European life in the 1130s and, despite the suppression of the Templars in 1312, remained so until Napoleon seized Malta from the Hospitallers in 1798. Even then, the spirit had not died, for hospitaller organisations based upon the original foundations were revived in the nineteenth century and many continue to perform important social functions today. The attraction of this subject was reflected in the conference on military orders held at St John's, Clerkenwell, in September 1992, which drew scholars from twenty countries; a large selection of their papers is published here. Themes as diverse as the administration of the Hospitaller estates in Essex; the Templar castles on the pilgrimage route to the Jordan; the treatment of prisoners of war by the Teutonic Order; and the perception of the military orders in Victorian England, are among the wide variety of studies contained in the forty-one papers in this volume. Yet, at the same time, the subject has an underlying unity, making it a field for fruitful co-operation between historians, archaeologists and art historians, the full potential of which is just beginning to be explored.