St John's Commandery, Swingfield, Kent
This building was built in the 13th-century. It was a chapel and hall of a 'Commandery' of Knights Hospitallers. The Knights Hospitaller were a military and religious order founded in the 12th century with the purpose of caring for and protecting pilgrims to the Holy Land. Their main unit of local administration was the commandery, where knights and sergeants lived together under the rule of a commander, who administered the estates with which the order had been endowed. Revenues from commanderies funded hospitals for sick pilgrims. It is built on the site of an earlier nunnery of the Sisters of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. The Hospitallers founded a religious community here in 1180, but this chaple from the 1200s is the only building that remains. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, in 1540 the chapel was converted into a farmhouse, and since then has undergone successive phases of alteration. This site is now in the care of English Heritage (2011). Read more.
