24/08/2026
About the Author and His Vision
I am Filip De Schepper: a researcher of the medieval Templars, a Wing Chun Kung Fu master with more than thirty years of experience, a psychiatric nurse working with children and young people, and the founder of several interconnected heritage, educational, and research initiatives.
My work begins with one simple conviction: history is not merely something preserved in archives, books, and museums. It also lives in the questions we ask today, in the values we pass on, in the skills we practise, and in the communities we build around the past.
My professional life brings together fields that may initially seem very different: mental-health nursing, youth guidance, martial arts, historical research, heritage education, archery, landscape history, and public engagement. In practice, however, these fields share a common foundation. Each requires attention, patience, clear boundaries, trust, disciplined practice, respect for vulnerability, and a belief in people’s capacity to grow.
As a psychiatric nurse working with children and young people, I have learned that development does not take place through words alone. Young people need stable adults, safe structures, predictable boundaries, meaningful responsibilities, and opportunities to experience competence, belonging, and progress. They need to be seen, listened to, and treated with dignity.
Research in child and adolescent mental-health care consistently underlines the importance of the therapeutic relationship. Young people benefit from relationships with professionals who are trustworthy, consistent, non-judgemental, emotionally available, and clear about boundaries. A sense of safety, choice, autonomy, and genuine respect can help create the conditions in which children and adolescents are more able to participate, reflect, learn, and grow.
This professional experience shapes the way I work with young people in every Art of the Templar™ activity. The heritage, martial arts, and archery programmes are not clinical treatment or psychotherapy. They do not replace professional mental-health care, individual therapy, medical care, or specialist support when these are needed. They are educational and community-based activities, designed to offer a safe and structured environment in which young people can practise skills, build confidence, learn responsibility, and experience constructive belonging.
Within that framework, the programmes can offer important developmental and therapeutic advantages. Structured physical activity, guided reflection, skill-building, historical storytelling, group cooperation, and predictable rules can help young people develop focus, patience, emotional self-regulation, self-confidence, social connection, and a sense of agency. Early support for emotional wellbeing, resilience, and socio-emotional learning is particularly important during adolescence, a formative period marked by significant physical, emotional, and social development.
My interest in the Templars has never been limited to familiar images of crusaders, mystery, and legend. I am especially interested in the historical reality behind such images: the people, institutions, properties, routes, charters, landscapes, and networks that made the medieval Order of the Temple a real part of European history.
This kind of research demands patience, close reading, source criticism, and respect for uncertainty. Not every appealing hypothesis is a proven fact. Not every place name, seal, family connection, or local tradition automatically constitutes evidence of Templar activity. For that reason, I seek to read sources carefully, compare different textual witnesses, distinguish evidence from interpretation, and place every document within its historical, institutional, and geographical context.
At the same time, I believe that scholarly work does not have to create distance. On the contrary: sound research can become a gateway to wonder, personal development, public education, and shared heritage. Through Art of the Templar™ and Templar Care and Combat BV, I seek to build bridges between history, the body, landscape, care, education, discipline, and community.
My work is an invitation to take the past seriously without freezing it in time. It is also an invitation to reconsider the chivalric values often associated with the Templars—honour, discipline, courage, service, loyalty, respect, and self-control—and to pass them on in an inclusive, peaceful, responsible, and contemporary form.
Care, Safety, and Youth Development
My work with young people is guided by a care-based approach. This means that safety is more than the absence of physical risk. Safety also includes emotional security, respectful communication, predictable rules, attention to individual needs, appropriate boundaries, and a culture in which asking for help is accepted.
Children and young people develop best when they can experience both support and challenge. They need opportunities to try, fail, practise, improve, and succeed. They also need adults who remain calm, consistent, and respectful when things become difficult.
Within Art of the Templar™, this approach is translated into practical principles:
• Clear rules and routines create predictability and reduce uncertainty.
• Safe physical training encourages body awareness, coordination, discipline, and confidence.
• Group activities support cooperation, mutual respect, and a sense of belonging.
• Individual responsibilities give participants a meaningful role within the group.
• Reflection moments help young people connect action, emotion, and personal values.
• Historical stories offer a symbolic language through which courage, loyalty, responsibility, and ethical choices can be discussed.
• Positive recognition focuses not only on technical achievement, but also on perseverance, kindness, responsibility, and contribution to the group.
The purpose is not to impose a rigid ideal of behaviour. It is to help young people discover that discipline can be supportive rather than punitive, that strength can be calm rather than aggressive, and that courage can include kindness, honesty, asking for help, and protecting others.
Therapeutic Advantages of the Programme
The youth activities offered through Art of the Templar™ are educational and developmental in nature. They are not presented as psychiatric therapy. Nevertheless, their structure can offer meaningful benefits that complement a young person’s wider support network.
Structure and Predictability
Clear routines, safety rules, commands, transitions, and shared responsibilities can provide a stable framework. For young people who feel overwhelmed by uncertainty, structure can create calmness and a clearer sense of what is expected.
Emotional Regulation and Self-Control
Martial practice, breathing, posture, concentration exercises, and archery can encourage participants to pause before acting, regulate attention, and become more aware of physical and emotional signals. The aim is not suppression of emotion, but learning how to respond with greater awareness and control.
Confidence Through Gradual Mastery
Skills are taught step by step. A young person does not need to be strong, fast, or naturally talented in order to make progress. Repetition, patience, and effort make improvement visible. This can support confidence and a more realistic experience of personal competence.
Belonging and Social Connection
The group is designed as a community of learning rather than a competitive hierarchy. Participants can encourage one another, take on responsibilities, share skills, and grow together. A constructive group environment can help reduce isolation and strengthen social confidence.
Agency and Responsibility
Young people are not merely told what to do. They are invited to take responsibility for equipment, group rules, learning tasks, safety, historical projects, and support for one another. This helps them experience that their choices and actions matter.
Positive Role Models
Young people benefit from adults who provide a stable, respectful, and consistent presence. In a youth setting, authority should not mean domination. It should mean clarity, fairness, calmness, accountability, and care.
Meaning and Identity
Historical heritage can provide young people with a meaningful framework for reflection. The past is not used to impose an identity upon them, but to offer stories, symbols, questions, and examples through which they can explore their own values. The aim is not to create “modern Templars,” but thoughtful young people who can ask: What does courage mean today? How do I use strength responsibly? How can I serve others? What does honour look like in everyday life?
Chivalry as a Practical Ethic
For me, chivalry is neither costume nor nostalgia. It is a practical ethic: protecting someone rather than humiliating them; taking responsibility rather than looking away; developing discipline rather than seeking power; and using knowledge, skill, and strength in the service of others.
This is why the values within the youth programme are always translated into concrete behaviour:
• Respect: listening, recognising boundaries, and caring for equipment, nature, animals, and other people.
• Discipline: practising, keeping agreements, persevering, and working attentively.
• Self-control: never using strength, skill, or authority to frighten, dominate, or humiliate others.
• Courage: acknowledging mistakes, asking for help, speaking honestly, and beginning again when something is difficult.
• Service: helping others, taking responsibility, and making the group stronger.
• Brotherhood and sisterhood: cooperating without exclusion, supporting one another, and sharing knowledge.
• Honesty: acting truthfully in performance, speech, the use of equipment, and personal responsibility.
• Care: recognising when another person needs support, encouragement, protection, or respectful space.
Art of the Templar™
Art of the Templar™ is the heritage, educational, and research identity through which this vision takes practical shape. It is the framework under which historical research, public history, youth education, martial practice, archery, heritage routes, publications, lectures, and cultural activities come together.
The identity rests on three connected pillars:
• Heritage: the critical study, documentation, preservation, and accessible presentation of the medieval past.
• Archery: the safe, responsible, and educational transmission of a historical skill and of the traditions connected with it.
• Chivalry: character formation, service, discipline, respect, responsibility, and ethical conduct in everyday life.
Art of the Templar™ is not an attempt to restore a medieval order literally, nor to reproduce a historical world as though it could be transferred unchanged into the present. It is a modern heritage practice: a way of connecting historical questions, primary sources, skills, and values with people today.
The central question is therefore not: “How can we become medieval people?” The central question is: “What can we learn today, through knowledge of the past and respect for its historical context, about responsibility, community, practice, self-mastery, and service?”
That question runs through all our activities: reading charters, studying landscapes, visiting historical sites, creating heritage routes, guiding young people, practising martial arts, telling historical stories, conducting archival research, and teaching archery safely and responsibly.
Templar Care and Combat BV
The legal and organisational foundation of this work is Templar Care and Combat BV, based in Deinze, Belgium. The company brings together two fields that may seem different at first sight, yet are closely connected in my vision: care and education on the one hand; heritage, martial arts, research, and public learning on the other.
The name expresses this dual mission:
• Care stands for care, safety, responsibility, attention to wellbeing, and service to others.
• Combat refers not only to physical resilience or martial arts, but also to practice, discipline, self-knowledge, courage, and the ethical use of strength.
The company provides a stable framework for historical, cultural, and philosophical research into the Templars and related medieval chivalric traditions. It also supports educational, scholarly, and cultural activities, including publications, lectures, courses, workshops, heritage projects, public-history initiatives, and the dissemination of teaching materials and research reports.
Heritage work is therefore not an incidental side project. It is a structural and long-term part of the organisation’s mission.
My professional experience as a psychiatric nurse working with children and young people plays an important role in this vision. Working with people requires more than technical expertise. It requires calmness, attention, trust, clear boundaries, responsibility, and sensitivity to vulnerability. I bring that attitude into the guidance of young people, the design of safe activities, the organisation of camps and workshops, and my broader understanding of chivalry.
Heritage as a Living Practice
My heritage work always begins with a double movement. On the one hand, there is historical reconstruction: the search for what the available sources genuinely allow us to say. On the other hand, there is public interpretation: how can that knowledge be made understandable, discussable, and meaningful for contemporary audiences?
With the Templars, this double movement is especially important. The Order of the Temple has a powerful cultural legacy, but it also has a long history of romanticisation, speculation, conspiracy theories, and modern appropriation. I do not want to begin with myths that need to be confirmed. I want to begin with questions that can be investigated.
Which Templars held which properties? How did commanderies function? What relationships existed between religious institutions, comital authority, local lords, urban economies, and transport networks? What roles were played by waterways, roads, toll points, rents, charters, seals, and fiscal administration? Where does the evidence end, so that a hypothesis must honestly remain a hypothesis?
This approach is visible in my historical and prosopographical research. One example is my first scholarly working paper on Magister Christianus, the Templars, and the Chapter of Thérouanne between 1214 and 1235. Instead of beginning with a desired identification, the study carefully distinguishes between possible chains of individuals, institutional relationships, documentary links, and evidential limits. Its aim is not to force an attractive narrative, but to construct a transparent and verifiable argument.
Another example is my study From Peat Moor to Market: Rights, Waterways, and the Lost Peat Geography of Lepe and Assenede, c. 1160–1313. This research examines how peat extraction, waterways, property rights, tolls, rents, transport, and landscape were connected in the Four Ambachten and the northern Meetjesland.
The study demonstrates that the sources document a polycentric system of peat-moor exploitation, water management, boundary definition, legal access by land and water, fiscal administration, and shared infrastructure. At the same time, the sources do not automatically prove one fully continuous peat route from Lepe to Ghent. The willingness to say both “this is what we know” and “this is what we do not yet know” lies at the heart of responsible heritage research.
My Mentor: Helena B. Scott
A defining influence on my historical work has been my mentor, Helena B. Scott. I am deeply grateful to her for teaching me to look beyond later retellings, confident interpretations, and attractive narratives—and to return, whenever possible, to the primary sources themselves.
She taught me that serious historical research begins with close attention: to the wording of a charter, the status of a manuscript or copy, the use of a seal, the chronology of a witness, the geography of a place name, and the institutional purpose behind a document. A source must not be made to say more than it can support. At the same time, careful reading can reveal far more than first appears on the surface.
Her guidance has strengthened my commitment to source criticism, palaeographical precision, and intellectual honesty. It has taught me to distinguish clearly between evidence and interpretation; between what is directly documented, what is plausible, and what remains uncertain; and between a working hypothesis and a conclusion that can be responsibly defended.
This lesson has become central to my research into the medieval Templars. Whether I work with charters, seals, cartularies, regesta, administrative records, account rolls, old editions, or digital databases, I try to allow the sources themselves to determine the limits of what can be claimed.
I therefore wish to thank Helena B. Scott not only for her mentorship, but also for teaching me a method: to look carefully, to question assumptions, to verify before asserting, and to let the documentary record guide the research rather than forcing it into a preconceived story.
That approach continues to shape all my work—from my prosopographical study of Magister Christianus, the Templars, and the Chapter of Thérouanne, to my research on waterways, peat extraction, property rights, and historical landscapes in the Four Ambachten and the northern Meetjesland.
For the Water
One of my ongoing heritage projects is For the Water, developed in the run-up to the bicentenary of the Ghent–Terneuzen Canal in 2027. The project begins from the idea that water is not merely a physical connection between places. It is also a carrier of history, economy, landscape, memory, transport, work, and community.
The canal and its surrounding landscape connect Ghent, the border region, and Terneuzen. Along this axis lie older histories of waterways, creeks, d***s, land reclamation, drainage channels, mills, ports, trade movements, villages, and historical sites.
For the Water seeks to make these layers visible by bringing together research, public history, local collaboration, educational activities, and route development. It is a cross-border heritage project that looks beyond the canal as infrastructure alone. Its focus is on the communities, landscapes, memories, and historical networks shaped by water.
Within that framework, historical questions about medieval institutions, transport, trade, land reclamation, religious houses, water management, and local networks can be explored carefully and critically, without making unsupported claims.
The Zeger Routes
Within For the Water, three Zeger Routes are being developed. These cycling routes connect water, landscape, local history, and documented or carefully contextualised Templar traces.
They invite participants to see the region not merely as a modern border area, but as a historical landscape in which power, religion, trade, agriculture, water management, transport, and mobility have continually influenced one another.
The name refers to historical figures named Zeger in the political and vicomital world of medieval Ghent. These figures appear in a range of documents and networks of authority within medieval Flanders. The routes do not seek to imply that every site along their course was directly associated with the Templars. Their purpose is precisely to teach visitors how historical traces must be read.
The Zeger Routes ask participants to consider:
• Which places are directly documented in primary sources?
• Which connections are plausible, but not yet conclusively proven?
• Which elements belong to local memory, toponymy, oral tradition, or later interpretation?
• Which questions remain open and require further archival work?
• How can landscape, waterways, archaeology, historical maps, and written sources be read together without forcing conclusions?
The Zeger Routes turn the landscape into an open archive. They bring together cycling, observing, learning, reading sources, asking questions, and thinking critically. In this way, they belong to a form of public history in which people are not only consumers of heritage, but also fellow researchers and conversation partners.
Discussions are also being prepared concerning the historical Templar commandery at Zaamslag and possible cooperation with local actors in the Terneuzen region.
Templars on Parchment
The project Templars on Parchment forms the scholarly core of my work. It focuses on medieval charters, seals, regesta, cartularies, administrative records, account rolls, legal documents, and other written sources.
A charter is not a neutral window onto the past. It is a legal act, a text created for a particular purpose, a product of institutional interests, and a document with its own history of transmission.
An original charter, a medieval copy, a cartulary text, a nineteenth-century edition, a digital regest, and an OCR transcription do not all carry the same evidential weight. A source may preserve reliable information while still requiring renewed comparison with an original document or another textual witness.
For that reason, I study not only what a text says, but also:
• Who drafted, sealed, received, witnessed, or confirmed the charter.
• Which goods, rights, people, institutions, and places it mentions.
• Which legal act or conflict the document records.
• How the text has been preserved and transmitted.
• Whether the document survives as an original, copy, abstract, regest, edition, or later transcription.
• Which readings remain palaeographically or textually uncertain.
• Whether a name truly identifies one individual or may refer to several possible people.
• Which geographical reconstructions the document permits and which it does not.
• Where older editions, databases, and archival documents need to be compared again.
This project is intended to result in publications that are both accessible and verifiable: scholarly studies, source collections, digital tools, maps, heritage routes, lectures, educational modules, and eventually books.
The goal is not simply to accumulate specialised knowledge. It is to show how fascinating careful source research can be, and how much of the medieval world can still be recovered when charters, landscapes, names, seals, routes, and institutions are studied patiently together.
Parchment is not silent material. Within every charter are people, interests, conflicts, promises, boundaries, goods, memories, and sometimes entire landscapes.
Youth Work and Heritage Transmission
An especially important part of my work is directed towards children and young people. Heritage preserved only in a book remains fragile. Heritage transmitted through stories, skills, responsibility, practice, and community is given a future.
The youth programme of Art of the Templar™ combines physical practice, storytelling, historical context, cooperation, reflection, safe discovery, and personal growth. Young people are not taught that they are “medieval Templars.” They are taught that history raises questions about how people lived in the past, how values were understood, how communities were organised, and how we can engage critically and responsibly with those questions today.
Summer camps and workshops make these principles tangible. At the summer camp held at the Stenen Molen in Ertvelde, heritage, mill history, physical practice, safe archery training, group formation, reflection, and a shared camp order are brought together.
The mill is not merely a backdrop. It becomes a starting point for thinking about technology, food production, resource management, economy, craft, water, landscape, and everyday life in earlier centuries.
Young people are given roles, responsibilities, and opportunities to work together. They become not only spectators of history, but also co-bearers of a learning environment in which heritage, discipline, safety, and care for one another come together.
Archery for Children
The archery programme is one of the most concrete ways in which this heritage transmission takes shape. Archery is neither a game involving weapons nor a romanticisation of violence. It is a carefully supervised activity in which safety, concentration, respect, self-control, and responsibility are central.
The bow is a historical object with many meanings. In the Low Countries, archers’ guilds were important social and cultural communities for centuries. They had their own rituals, competitions, regulations, symbols, shooting grounds, traditions, and forms of mutual support.
The traditions of the Guilds of Saint George and Saint Sebastian belong to a wider historical landscape in which sport, ceremony, urban culture, religion, craftsmanship, community life, and civic identity came together.
Within Art of the Templar™, archery for children is developed around four interconnected objectives:
• Safe technical instruction with adapted equipment, clear commands, close supervision, and controlled practice situations.
• Historical interpretation: the bow as part of European and Flemish archery culture, rather than as a sensational object.
• Character formation: focus, patience, posture, breathing, discipline, respect for rules, and attention to others.
• Heritage transmission: helping young people experience that skills, stories, rituals, responsibilities, and traditions survive only when people consciously learn and pass them on.
Safety rules are never secondary. An arrow may only be placed on the bow after a clear command. The bow may only be directed towards the target. Dry firing is prohibited. Arrows may only be retrieved on command. When the command “Stop!” is given, everyone stops immediately and lowers their equipment. All materials are checked in advance, and sharp or unapproved weapons are not permitted.
This combination of safety and attention is precisely what makes archery an educational instrument. Children learn that control matters more than strength, that attention matters more than haste, and that genuine skill goes hand in hand with responsibility.
In this way, the bow becomes a bridge between past and future: an exercise in concentration, an introduction to Flemish archery culture, and a means of helping young people grow in respect, discipline, patience, and self-confidence.
A Researcher and a Builder
My work seeks to bring different worlds together: the archive and the landscape, the charter and the cycling route, scholarly research and public history, physical discipline and character formation, care and community service.
I do not want to sell the past as myth. I want to investigate it, make it understandable, and pass it on responsibly. I do not want to teach young people nostalgia. I want to offer them tools to become stronger, more attentive, more critical, and more responsible in the world.
Art of the Templar™ is therefore, above all, an invitation: to learn, to practise, to investigate, to care, to connect, and to carry the cultural heritage of Flanders and Europe rather than merely admire it.
The Templars belong to history. The question of how we live today with honour, discipline, knowledge, care, courage, and service belongs to all of us.
