History of Freemasonry

If the reader has bestowed any attention on the preceding part of this work, he will have been enabled to discover that what I have designated as “ Prehistoric Masonry “ is nothing more than a collection of legends and traditions derived from various sources and, apparently, invented at different periods during the Middle Ages, when the Fraternity of Freemasons was a thoroughly Operative association, composed of architects and builders, with a few unprofessional men of rank and wealth, who had been accepted by the Craft as patrons or honorary members.

It is, however, only in compliance with the usage of historians that I have consented to adopt the use of this term “prehistoric” in reference to the present subject, and not because I have considered it to be an absolutely correct one when applied to the history of Freemasonry.

Anthropologists have divided the chronological series of events in every nation or race into two distinct periods-the prehistoric and the historic. The former includes the time when the inhabitants of a country were in a condition of utter barbarism, from which they gradually raised themselves to a higher state of civilization.

Of the fact even of the existence of such a primitive people we have no evidence, except certain myths and legends, in which they appear to have embodied their ideas of religious belief, and, at a somewhat later period in their progress toward civilization, some fragmentary records, to be found principally in the hieroglyphic monuments of ancient Egypt and in the cuneiform inscriptions of old Assyria.

But when a nation or race began, by the natural process of advancement, to emerge from this lower sphere of intellectual debasement to a higher one, its first labor was to preserve the evidences of its existence and the memorial of its transactions in written records.

All before this era of emergence from oral traditions to records has been called by anthropologists the “ prehistoric period “-all after the historic.

Now it is very evident that no such division can, in strictness, be applied to the history of Freemasonry. Viewed as an association of builders, when there ceases to be a record of the association, it must be supposed that it did not exist. There are no legends or traditions whose existence can be traced to a period anterior to that which contains historic records of the society.

These legends and traditions, all of which have been given in the first part of this work, were not, like the primeval myths of the prehistoric nations, the outgrowth of an uneducated religious sentiment wholly unconnected with and independent of any record of real events which occurred, or were occurring, at the same time.

On the contrary, they sprang up in the Middle Ages, at the very time when Freemasonry was making its indelible record in the history of Europe. They were fabricated by Freemasons who had long before been recognized in history as an association of some importance. They were not the spontaneous growth of some primitive body of builders, known to us only by these legends which had been orally transmitted from the earliest prehistoric times. They were the inventions of a later period, most of the facts which they detailed being borrowed from historical records, principally from the Bible or from ecclesiastical historians, and they were indebted for their fabrication partly to a desire to magnify the antiquity of the Institution and partly to the influence of that legendary spirit which prevailed in the Middle Ages, and which we find still more extensively developed in the legends of the Saints which have been accepted by the Roman Catholic Church.

These Masonic legends differ also in another respect from the prehistoric myths of antiquity.

As soon as a nation began to make its history, its myths were relegated to their proper place in the region of rnythology and the history continued to be written without any admixture with them. They were considered as things of the past. They had their inevitable influence upon the religion of the people, but they were not intruded into its political history.

But from the very time of the fabrication of the Masonic legends and traditions, they were accepted as a part of the annals of the association and were incorporated into it as a portion of its true history. As such they have been maintained almost to the present day. In this way we have two histories of Freemasonry which have always been presenting themselves to our consideration with the assumption of an equal claim to our credence.

We have in the first place, the authentic history, gathered from the records of all the building guilds and confraternities from the time of Numa, and which, assuming various forms at different periods, finally has culminated in the Speculative Freemasonry of the present day.

And then we have a mass of legends and traditions fabricated in the Middle Ages, and some others of a later day. These have been obtruded into the authentic history, have grown up alongside of it, and have presented and sought to preserve a different and, of course, an apocryphal form of history.

Looking at the time and manner of the fabrication of these legends and the persistent way in which for some centuries they have traveled down the stream of pari passu with the authentic history, it would perhaps have been better to designate them as “ extra-historic,” rather than “prehistoric” something not before history, but something outside of history.

Yet, as they have been made to assume the appearance of prehistoric legends, and have claimed, however incorrectly, to be traditions of the origin and progress of the Institution at a time when there were no written records of its existence, I have felt myself excusable, and perhaps even justifiable, in tolerating temporarily this mistaken view, under the protest of this explanation, and of

adopting the usage of historians in their treatment of the histories of nations.

As a matter, therefore, of convenience I have used the term “ prehistoric,” although I am well convinced that there is no such thing as a “prehistoric Freemasonry.”

There is, unquestionably, a prehistoric architecture. The art of building, so as to secure shelter from the inclemencies of the seasons and protection from the incursions of wild beasts, was practiced at a period long antecedent to the existence of any written records of the existence of the arts. The Troglodytes must have made alterations for their greater comfort, convenience, and security in the rude caves which they made their homes, and the lake-dwellers of prehistoric Helvetia exhibited, as we may judge from their remains, considerable skill and ingenuity in the construction of their lacustrine houses.

But architecture, when it is not united with and practiced by an organized craft, guild, or fraternity, is not Freemasonry.

Therefore prehistoric architecture and prehistoric Freemasonry are two entirely different things. Of the former we have monumental records ; of the latter we have no evidence, and the term is used only as a facon deparler, as a matter of convenience, and as a concession to common usage in the treatment of historical subjects.

There is one very marked difference in character between the prehistoric myths of antiquity and the legends of Freemasonry, which, for the reason just assigned, I have placed in the supposititious prehistoric period of that institution.

The myths of the earliest peoples found their origin and groundwork in an enforced observance of the contending powers of nature. The nomadic races, wandering over the wide plains and lofty mountains of the East, were necessarily struck by the alternate changes of darkness and light, of night and day. They saw and they feared the dark sky with its diadems of glittering stars and its murky clouds; these they beheld dispersed by the rosy dawn, before which stars and clouds and darkness fled as the wild game flees before the hunter. Then they beheld the glorious sun, ushered in by the dawn, traverse the sky, at length to be destroyed in the far West by the recuperated forces of night, which again reigned supreme over the earth, until it was anew dispersed by the ever-renewing dawn.

This perpetually recurring elemental strife gave rise to the formation of myths, which formulated fables of the wars of these opposing forces of nature, just as, later, men in the historic period described the battles of contending armies.

These simple myths (1) were undoubtedly the first acts of the human mind. As time passed onward and the intellect became more cultivated, the myths were developed into a definite form of religious faith, The forces of nature were impersonated as actual, living dieties.

The primitive Aryans, out of the fire which descended from the clouds in the forked lightning, and the fire which they brought by friction out of the wood, both of which they deemed to be identical, made their god Agni.

At a later period their Greek descendants symbolized the all. healing and purifying sun, whose rays disperse the morbific influences of malaria, as Herakles destroying the hydra of the Lernaean marshes, or as the light-diffusing Phoebos Apollo, who pictured the solar rays by his flowing locks of golden hair and his quiver filled with arrows.

Thus it was that the simple nature-myths of the primeval nations, Aryan and Semitic, were in the progress of time resolved into a system of complicated mythology that became the popular religion of the ancient nations.

But this mythology was perfectly separated from political and national history. The prehistoric mythology of Greece and Rome was always distinct from Grecian and Roman authentic history.

Though in the earliest period when history began to emerge from tradition there was, undoubtedly, some confused admixture of the two, yet, as each nation began to keep its records, the two streams were made to flow in different channels, and the mythical and the historical elements were not permitted to intermingle. The priests preserved the fromer in their temple services, and the poets only referred to them in their epics and in their odes ; the philosophus and the historians confined their instructions to the latter.

But it has not been so with the legends, which may be called the myths, of Freemasonry. Springing into existence not at any early, prehistoric period, but receiving their form at the very time when Masonry was already an historical institution, these traditions have travelled down contemporaneously with its authentic narratives, not in two independent and separated streams, but in one commingled current.

At the period when the speculative element of Masonry withdrew itself from the alliance which it had always maintained, the traditions contained in the Legend of the Craft, which constitute the great body of Masonic myths, were incorporated into and made an inseparable part of the true history. Nothing was rejected; everything was accepted as authentic; and indeed other legends borrowed from or suggested by Rabbinical and Talmudic reveries were added.

Hence has arisen that inextricable and deplorable confusion of tradition and history, of false and true, of apocryphal and authentic, that we find in all the so-called histories of Freemasonry which were written in the 18^th century. Nor did this false method of writing cease with the expiration of that period.

It was continued into the 19^th century, and its influence is still felt, not only in the opinions entertained by the masses of the Fraternity, but in the statements made in annual addresses before lodges, by men not always unlearned or unscholarly, but who do not hesitate to advance traditions and legends as a substitute for the true history of the Order.

Of this mode of writing Masonic history, let us take at random a single passage from one of the works of the most eminent of the writers of this school.

“The Druidical Memoranda,” says Dr. Oliver, “were made in the Greek character, for the Druids had been taught Masonry by Pythagoras himself, who had communicated its area a to them, under the name he had assigned to it in his own country. This distinguished appellation (Mesouraneo), in the subsequent declension and oblivion of the science, during the dark ages of barbarity and superstition, might be corrupted into MASONRY, as its remains, being merely operative, were confined to a few hands, and these artificers and working Masons.”

Here are no; less than five positive assertions, of which but one rests on the slightest claim of authority, while the whole of them are absolutely unhistorical.

1.The statement that the Druids used the Greek character in

(1) “Antiquities of Freemasonry,” Period I., ch. i., p. 17 their secret writing is made on the authority of a casual remark of Caesar but later authorities, much better than Caesar, on the subject of Druidism have shown that the character used by them was the old Irish Oghum alphabet.

2. The assertion that the Druids practiced or were acquainted with Masonry is altogether untenable. It is known that the dogmas and practices of their religion were antagonistic to those of Masonry 3. The statement that they were taught Masonry by Pythagoras is met by the simple fact that philosopher never visited Britain. 4.All that is said about the Greek word Mesoureneo, as the term under which Masonry was known to Pythagoras and communicated by him to the Druids, is a mere fable. It had its origin in a whimsical etymology first proposed by Hutchinson, and which has never been accepted by competent philologists.

5. The implied doctrine contained in the close of the paragraph, that the first form of Masonry was Speculative, and that the Operative branch was merely what remained after the declension and decay of the science, to be practiced by working Masons, is in direct violation of all historic truth, which makes the Speculative element an after-thought and a development out of the Operative. When history is thus caricatured, what chance is there that the unlearned shall find the truth; and what labor must be imposed on the learned in striving to extract the pure gold of facts from the worthless ore of tradition in which it has been imbedded ?

The mode of writing Masonic history which was adopted in the 18^th century, and which, with some honorable exceptions, has been pursued almost to the present day, was one which was by no means calculated to elicit truth or to satisfy the inquiring mind.

A groundwork for the history of Freemasonry was found in the Legend of the Craft. All the statements in that old document were accepted as authentic narratives of events that had actually occurred. Hence the origin of the institution was placed at a period anterior to the flood. All the patriarches were declared to have been Masons; Noah and his sons were said to have been the means of transmitting its tenets from the antediluvians to the post-diluvians. Its progress was traced from Noah to Moses, who was said to have practiced its mystic rites in the wilderness. From Moses it was made to pass over to Solomon, who, in some incomprehensible way, was supposed to have organized, as its first Grand Master, an association which, however, according to the preceding history, appears to have been in existence thousands of years before. From the King of Israel it was made to pass over from Palestine to Europe, and is landed with little respect, or at least with no accounting for the lapse of time, in the kingdom of France, and in the time of Charles Martel. From him it crosses the Channel, and is reorganized in England in the reign of King Athelstan and by his brother Edwin.

Such is the history of Freemasonry that for a century and a half has claimed and received almost universal belief from the Craft. And yet, perhaps there never was a history of any kind that could present so few claims to belief.

It is fragmentary in its details. Centuries are passed over with no connecting link. From Abraham, who, it is said, “ had learned well the science and the art (that is, Geometry and Operative Masonry), to Moses, who is called the Grand Master of the Jewish Masons, a period of more than four centuries passes with the most inefficient and unsatisfactory account, if it can be called an account at all, of how this science and art were transmitted from the one to the other. From Moses to Solomon there occurs a vast chasm of fifteen centuries, with scarcely an attempt to fill it up with a con. secutive series of intervening events. And so the fragmentary history goes on in intermittent leaps from Solomon to Zerubbabel, from Zerubbabel to Augustus, from Augustus to Charles Martel, and finally from him to Athelstan.

It is contradictory in its statements. Claiming for the Institution a purely Hebrew character, it intermixes with strange inconsistency the labors and the patronage of Jewish patriarches and Pagan monarches, and finds as much of true Masonry in the works of the idolatrous Nebuchadnezzar as in those of King Solomon.

But perhaps the most important fault of these 18^th century historians of Freemasonry is the entire absence of all citation of authority for the records which they have made. They assume a statement to suit their theory, but give no evidence or support from contemporary profane or sacred writers that it is a genuine fact and not a bare assumption. The scholar who is seeking in his historical studies for truth and truth only, finds himself thus involved in a labyrinth of doubts, from which all the canons of criticism fail, how. ever skillfully applied, to extricate him. He knows not when the writer is acting on the results of his own or some Predecessor’s invention, or when he is reciting events that have really occurred.

We are not to attribute to those writers who have thus made a romance instead of a history any willful intention to falsify the facts of history. At first led astray by a misinterpretation of the Legend of the Craft, they had on this misinterpretation framed a theory of the antiquity of Freemasonry in a wrong direction, and then, as has occurred thousands of times before, they proceeded to fit the facts to the theory, and not, as they should have done, the theory to the facts. The doctrines of the new school of anthropology, which does’ not admit that the origin of the whole human family is to be found solely in the Semitic race, were, in their day, unknown. If Freemasonry was older than the era of the revival and the establishment. of the Grand Lodge of England, its antiquity was to be sought only in the line of the Jewish patriarches. Thus it became venerable, not only by its age but by its religious character. To this line they wished, therefore, to confine the direction of its rise and progress, and they thought that they could find the proofs of this line of progress in their own interpretation of the Legend of the Craft, and the application to it of certain passages of Holy Writ. They succeeded in this, at least to their own satisfaction, because “ the wish was father to the thought.”

But as they recognized the symbolic character of Freemasonry, and as they found some of the most important and expressive of these symbols prevailing in the Pagan associations of antiquity, they thought it necessary to account for this contemporary prevalence of the same ideas in two entirely different systems of religion in such a way as not to impair the validity of the claim of Masonry to a purely Semitic origin.

This they did by supposing, that while the Divine truths inculcated by Speculative Masonry were preserved in their purity by those of the descendants of Noah who had retained the instructions which they had received from their great ancestor, there was at some era, generally placed at the time of the attempted building of the Tower of Babel, a secession of a large number of the human race from the purer stock.

These seceders rapidly lost sight of the Divine truths which they had received at one time, and fell into the most grievous religious errors. Thus they corrupted the purity of the worship and the orthodoxy of the faith, the principles of which had been originally communicated to them.

In this way there sprung up two streams of Masonry, distinguished by Dr. Oliver as the “ Pure “ and the “ Spurious.” The former was practiced by the descendants of Noah in the Jewish line, the latter by his descendants in the Pagan line.

It is thus that these theorists account for the presence of a Masonic element, though a perverted one, in the mysteries of the ancient Pagan nations.

There was afterward a union of these two lines, the Pure and the Spurious, at the building of the Temple of Jerusalem, when King Solomon involved the assistance and the cooperation of the heathen and idolatrous workmen of the King of Tyre.

The Spurious Freemasonry did not, however, cease to exist in consequence of this union at the Temple of the Jewish and Tyrian Freemasons. It lasted, indeed, for many centuries subsequent to this period. But the Jewish and Tyrian cooperation had effected a mutual infusion of their respective doctrines and ceremonies, which eventually terminated in the abolition of the two distinctive systems and the establishment of a new one, which was the immediate forerunner of the present Institution.

This delightful romance, in which the imagination has been permitted to run riot, in which assumptions are boldly advanced for facts, and in which statements are made which there is no attempt to corroborate by reference to authority, has for years been accepted by thousands upon thousands of the Fraternity, and is still accepted by the masses as a veritable history of the rise and progress of Freemasonry.

In my younger days, when my researches were directed rather to the deign and to the symbolism of the Order than to its history, which I was willing to take from older and more experienced heads, I had been attracted by the beauty and ingenuity of this romantic tale, and gave, without hesitation, my adhesion to it.

But when my studies took an historical direction, and I began to apply the canons of criticism to what I was reading on this subject, I soon found and recognized that the landscape which I had viewed with so much pleasure was, after all, only a wonderful mirage.

I have, therefore, been compelled to abandon this theory and to seek for one more plausible and more consistent with the facts of history. I have come to this conclusion, I admit, with great reluctance, because I was unwilling to throw aside the picture which I had so long admired and which was the work of masters whose labors I respected and whose memory I venerated. But I am forced to say, with Aristotle, that though Plato and Socrates be my friends, yet truth is a greater friend and one that I must value above them both.

When we look at the course pursued by these Masonic historians of the early part of the 18^th century, it is lamentable to think how many glorious opportunities of preserving facts in the history of the Institution have been lost by the mistaken direction of their views. We have in the History of St. Mary’s Lodge, by Bro. J. Murray Lyon, a fair sample of what might have been done by Dr. Anderson, if he had pursued a similar plan in the composition of the two editions of the Constitutions compiled by him.

In 1723 he must have had access to many documents of great importance bearing on the history of Masonry in the latter part of the 17^th and in the beginning of the 18^th century. There were undoubtedly minutes of lodges which were accessible to him, but the lodges are now extinct and the records perhaps forever lost. In these he would have found authentic evidence of the manners and customs, the organization and the regulations, of the Operative Masons, and could have accurately defined the line through which Operative Masonry passed in its transmission and transmutation to a purely Speculative system.

But on these subjects he has maintained unbroken silence. In the first edition he has not said a single word of the actual condition of Freemasonry at the time of his writing. But he has wasted pages in an inaccurate and unauthentic history of the rise and progress of architecture, which had been already written by far better authority, because a professional architect with equal ability can write history of his own science more skillfully than can a doctor of divinity.

Even of the four lodges which in 1717 organized the Grand Lodge of England, a few lines comprise the brief account that he gives. He tells us their names and the locality in which they held their meetings, and no more. And yet these lodges must have had their history, there must have been a minute-book of some kind, however brief and imperfect might have been the records. And these minute-books, only three or four, must have been in existence before Anderson began the compilation of his book, and from his position in the Order must have been accessible to him. And yet he has treated these invaluable records-invaluable to the future Masonic historian and which should have been invaluable to him with a silence bordering almost on contempt.

Comparing this treatment of the early English records with the manner in which Lyon has treated those of Scotland, we can not too much deplore this neglect of the real duties of a historian. The result of this difference of treatment of the same subject by two different historians has been that while we are made by Lyon familiar with the true history of the Scottish Lodges in the 17^th century with their regulations, their usages, their modes of reception, and almost everything that appertains to their internal organization we are, so far as we can gather anything from Anderson, absolutely as ignorant of all that relates to the English Lodges of the same period as if no such bodies had ever existed.

Such neglect of opportunities never to be recalled, such obdurate silence on topics of the deepest interest, and such waste of time and talent in the compilation of a jejune history of architecture instead of an authentic narrative of the Masonic history which was passing before his eyes, or with which he must have been familiar from existing documents, and from oral communication with many of the actors in that history, is to be not only deeply regretted, but to be contemplated almost as a crime.

Anderson’s compilation has been that which gave form and feature to all subsequent histories of Freemasonry until a recent period. Smith, Calcott, Preston, and Oliver have followed in his footsteps, only pouring, as it were, from one vial into another, so that all the treatment of early Freemasonry anterior to the year 1717, as treated by English and French writers, has been almost wholly without the nessecary element of authenticity. These historians have dealt in hypotheses, suggestions, assumptions, and romantic legends, so as to lead the scholar who studies their pages in search of historical light into an inextricable web of doubt and confusion.

The Germans have done better, and bringing the Teutonic instinct of laborious research to the investigation of Masonic history, they have made many approximations to the discovery of truth. And later English Masons forming a school of iconoclasts, have begun, by the rejection of anachronisms and improbabilities, to give to that history a shape that will stand the crucial test of critical examination.

It must be evident to the reader, from what has been said, that the history of Freemasonry, upon which this book is about to enter, will be treated in a method that seeks to approach that accuracy with which authentic history should always be written. From the causes already assigned, there must often be an embarrassment in finding proper evidence to authenticate the material offered to the inspection of the reader. But in no case will assumption be presented in the place of facts. When the supposed occurrence of events can not be proved by contemporaneous authority, such events will not be recorded as historical. It may be conjectured that such events may have occurred, and such a conjecture is entirely legitimate, but its value will be determined by its plausibility. It will be a matter of logical inference, and not of historical statement. Thus one of the great errors of Anderson will be avoided, who continually presents his conjectures as facts, without discrimination, and thus leaves his reader in doubt as to when he is writing history and when indulging in romance or in assumptions.

Pursuing this method, I am compelled to reject the universally received hypothesis that Freemasonry received its organization at the Temple of Solomon.

I reject it because there is no historical evidence of the fact. The only authorities on this subject are the books of Kings and Chronicles. That of Josephus need not be referred to, because it is simply a compilation of Jewish history made up out of the Scriptural account.

Now, the account of the events that occurred at the building of the Temple is very briefly related in those books, and it gives us no authority for saying that there was any organization of the builders, at that edifice, at all like the one described in our Masonic histories.

Similar objections may be urged against all other propositions or theories which seek to connect the rise of the Masonic Institution from bodies which were not architectural in their character.

I fall back, therefore, upon that theory which since the time of the Abbe Grandidier has been gradually gaining strength, and which connects the Speculative Masonry of our own times with the Operative Masonry of the Middle Ages.

Never abandoning, for a moment, the predominant idea that Freemasonry, in whatever aspect it may be viewed, whether as Operative or Speculative, whether as ancient or modern, has always been connected in some way with the art of building and with a guild organization, I shall proceed to trace its early history not in religious communities or in social fraternities, but solely in the associations which have been organized for the pursuit and practice of architecture.

Finding; such associations among the ancient Romans I shall endeavor to pursue the course of these associations, from their birth in the imperial city and in the time and under the fostering care of Numa, to their dissemination with the Roman legions into the conquered provinces of Gaul, Germany, and Britain; their subsequent establishment in these countries of confraternities which they called Colleges of Workmen (Collegia Fabrorum), out of which, after the decay of the Empire and the extinction of the armies, was developed in the gradual course of civilization the societies of Traveling Freemasons, who sprang from the school of Como in Lombardy.

Thence, by slow but certain steps, we shall advance to the time of the Operative or Stonemasons of Germany, France, and Britain, who were a development and result of the Comacine Fraternity.

And lastly this will bring us to the era when the Operative system was wholly abandoned as a practice, and when the society was delivered up to the pursuit of a Speculative Philosophy, still, however, retaining the evidence within itself of its architectural parentage, by the selection of its symbols and its peculiar language as well as by many features of its internal organization.

The connection, according to this theory, of Freemasonry with the art of building, a connection that has never, even in its Speculative form, been wholly severed, will necessarily lead to digressions in the course of this history upon the subjects of Roman, Byzantine, and Gothic architecture.

These subjects will have to be discussed, not as architectural studies, but solely in their close relationship to Freemasonry, and in respect to the reciprocal influences that were exerted upon Freemasonry and its followers by the varying systems of architecture and that produced on them by the skill and intelligence of the Freemasons.

There will be no attempt to write a history of Architecture and to call it, as Dr. Anderson has unfortunately done, a history of Freemasonry, but the effort will be made to write a history of Freemasonry in its connection with, and its reference to, Architecture.

“Every Freemasons” said the Chevalier Ramsay, in his visionary hypothesis, “is a Templar.” The truer doctrine is that in the olden time every Freemason was an architect, using this word in its purest and primitive meaning, to signify a builder.

Mr. Hallam says, in his History of the Middle Ages, that “the curious subject of Freemasonry has unfortunately been treated of only by panegyrists or calumniators, both equally mendacious.” And he thinks that it would be interesting to know more of the history of the Craft during a period in which they were literally architects.

The desire here expressed, is the object and the design of this work to gratify. Whether the object has been successfully achieved can be determined only when the work is finished.

Let me say, in concluding this preliminary essay-and I say it lest there should be any misconception of my views-that the theory which I shall seek to establish is not that the Freemasons of the present

day are in direct and uninterrupted descent from the Roman Colleges of Artificers, but that these latter associations brought, by the Roman legions from the civilization of the Empire, into the

comparatively unenlightened provinces of Gaul, Germany, and Britain, those sentiments of architectural beauty as well as those principles of architectural skill, which gave rise to the establishment of associations of builders, who in time constituted themselves into the form of guilds.

These guilds, or fraternities, at a very early period assumed an important place in the history and practice of the building art, and associated themselves together for the purpose of disseminating the principles and practice of building over certain parts of Europe.

Thence arose the association known as “ Travelling Freemasons,” who, starting from their school in Lombardy, perambulated the continent and erected many important edifices, mostly of a religious character, such as monasteries and cathedrals.

From these the Stonemasons of Germany, of France, and of England borrowed the system of guild-formation, that is to say, the usages and regulations of a guild in the practice of their profession.

These Operative Masons at various times admitted into the membership and privileges of their guild many persons of rank, influence, and learning, who were not professionally connected with the building art. These honorary admissions accomplished two objects: they were received as gratifying compliments by the non-professional members, and at the same time secured their good wishes and protection for the guild.

But eventually a schism took place between the Operative Masons and the honorary members. The former adhered to the Operative Craft, but the latter, eliminating altogether the Operative element, formed a new guild or fraternity of Speculative Masons whose only connection with architecture or building was that they preserved much of its technical language and implements, but consecrated them to symbolical purposes.

Having thus abandoned the professional practice of the craft of building, and assumed a merely ethical character, they became the Freemasons or the Speculative Masons of the present day.

Such is a brief outline of the plan which will be pursued in the future prosecution of this history of the rise and progress of the Order of Freemasonry.

CHAPTER II

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THE ROMAN COLLEGES OF ARTIFICERS

It will be evident, from what has been said in the preceding chapter, that the plan upon which it is intended to write the history of Freemasonry in the present work will utterly preclude any search for the origin of the Institution among the purely religious associations of antiquity, whether they be of Jewish or of Gentile character.

Hence I reject as untenable either of the hypotheses which traces

the rise of the Order to the Patriarchal religion, the ancient Mysteries, the workmen at the Temple of Solomon, the Druids, the Essenes, or the Pythagoreans.

If we contemplate the Speculative Freemasonry of the present day as the outgrowth of the Operative system which prevailed in the Middle Ages, we must look for the remote origin of the former in the same place in which we shall find that of the latter.

Now, the mediaeval Operative Masons, known as the Steinmetzen of Germany, the Tailleurs de pierre of France, and the Freemasons of England, were congregated and worked together under the form and regulations of a Guild. But as all institutions in their gradual growth and development are apt to preserve some of the most important features of their original construction, notwithstanding all the changes and influences of surrounding circumstances to which they are subject in the course of time, we may very legitimately come to the conclusion that whatever was the original body or prototype from which the Masonry of the Middle Ages derived its existence, or of which it was a continuation, that prototype must have had some of the forms of a guild.

It is true that when the operative Masons organized themselves into an association, at some period between the 10^th and the 17^th centuries, which period is not at this time and in this place to be accurately determined, they may as an original body have assumed a form, independent of all previous influences. But we know that such is not the fact, and the Masons of that period were the successors of other bodies that had preceded them, and that they only developed and improved the principles of art that had already been long in existence.

Then the body of men-the association, the sodality-of which they were the outgrowth must have some features in its form and character that were imitated by the body of Masons who succeeded them, who pursued the same objects, and only developed and improved the same principles.

Now, what were the features that must distinguish and identify the original, the exemplar, of which the more modern Freemasonry was an outgrowth ?

I answer to this question that those features, to which we must look for an identification of the original body, are at least two in number :

First, the original body must have had the form and character of a sodality, a confraternity, or what in more modern times would be called a Guild.

And secondly, that this sodality, confraternity, or guild must have consisted of members who were engaged in the practice of the art of building.

The absence of either of these two features will make a fatal break in the process of identification, by which alone we are enabled to trace a connection between the original and the copy.

We can easily find in the records of ancient history numerous instances of sodalities or confraternities, but as they had no reference to the art of building, it is clear that not one of them could have been the exemplar or source of mediaeval Masonry.

The members of those religious associations of antiquity, which were called the “ Mysteries,” and to which Speculative Masonry is thought, not altogether incorrectly, to bear a great similitude, were undoubtedly united in a sodality or confraternity-They had admitted into their association none but those who had been duly chosen, and reserved to themselves the power of rejecting those whom they did not deem worthy of a participation in their rites ; they had ceremonies of initiation ; they adopted secret methods of recognition; and in many other ways secured the isolation of an exclusive society. They were in every respect a confraternity, and their organization bore a very striking resemblance to that of the modern Freemasons. And hence it is that some writers have professed to find in these religious Mysteries of the ancient pagans an origin to which they might trace the Masonic Institution. But the hypothesis is untenable, because these religious associations had no connection with architecture or the art of building. Freemasonry, which always has been either an operative art or been closely connected with it, could not, by any possible contingency, have derived its origin from what was a wholly religious association.

The Society of Dionyiac Artificers, who flourished in Asia Minor, did indeed unite with the observance of the Mysteries of Dionysus the practice of architecture. Hence the compiler of Lawrie’s History of Masonry has pretended to trace the origin of our modern system to the connection of the Pagan Dionysiacs with the Jewish builders at the construction of King Solomon’s Temple. There would be a great deal of plausibility in this theory, if it could be proved that the Dionysiacs as architects were contemporaneous with Hiram of Tyre and Solomon of Israel. But unfortunately the authentic annals of chronology prove that they were only known as builders of temples, palaces, and theaters about seven hundred years after the era of the building of the Temple at Jerusalem.

So, too, of the Essenes, we may say that the doctrine can not be sustained which attributes to them the continuation and preservation of the Masonry of the Temple builders, and which assigns to them the origin of the modern Speculative system. Leaving out of the question the fact that it is impossible to account for the lapse of time which occurred between the construction of the Temple and the first appearance of the Essenes, about the era of the Maccabees, we meet with the insurmountable objection that the Essenian sect was wholly unconnected with architecture.

So, too, of all the other schemes of tracing Masonry to the Druids, the Pythagoreans, or the Rosicrucians, we always have the invincible obstacle in our way, that all of these were associations not devoted to, nor pursuing the art of building. It is impossible to trace the origin of a fraternity of working Masons, all of whose ideas, principles, pursuits, usages, and customs prominently and exclusively connected them with the cultivation of architecture and the art of building, not theoretically but practically to any other and older sodality which knew nothing of architecture and whose members never were engaged in the construction of edifices.

But if we should discover in long-past time a sodality, whose members were builders and who were congregated together for the purpose of pursuing their professional labors, in a society which partook of the main features of a modern guild, we should be encouraged to make the inquiry whether such a sodality may not have given birth, and suggested form, to the mediaeval associations of Operative Masons, from whom afterward sprang, in direct succession, the Speculative Masons of the 18^th century.

Now just such a sodality will be found in the Roman Colleges of Artificers -the Collegia Fabrorum-which are said to have been instituted by Numa, the successor of Romulus, and, therefore, the second king of Rome.

That the establishment of these colleges of workmen of various crafts was one of the numerous reforms instituted by Numa, among his subjects, is a fact that has not been denied by historians. The evidence of the existence of these colleges in the later days of the empire and of their dispersion into various provinces, is attested by numerous inscriptions in votive tablets and other monuments that remain to the present day.

The important relation which it is supposed that the Roman colleges bore to mediaeval stonemasonry, makes it proper that something more than a mere glance should be given at the history of their origin and progress as well as at their character and deign.

Of Numa himself, a few words may be said. He was undoubtedly one of those great reformers who, like Confucius, Moses, Buddha, and Zoroaster, have sprung up at different periods in the world’s history and have changed the character and the religion of the people among whom they lived and placed them on the first steps of the march of civilization. That such was the career of Numa, is testified by the fact that he so transformed the military disorder of the heterogeneous multitude that had been left by Romulus, into the orderly arrangements of a well-regulated municipality, that, as Livy says, that which the neighboring nations had hitherto called a camp, they now began to designate as a city.

Numa, who was a native of Cures, a considerable city of the Sabines, was, on account of his nationality, selected, through the influence of the Sabine population of Rome, to succeed Romulus, and was called to the throne, according to the generally received chronology, 686 years before the Christian era.

Having borne in his private life the character of a wise and just man, with no distinction as a warrior, he cultivated, when he assumed the reins of government, all the virtues of peace. He found the Romans a gross and almost barbarous people. He refined their manners, purified their religion, built temples, instituted festivals, and established a regular order of priesthood.

As Plutarch says, the most admirable of all his institutions was his distribution of the citizens according to their various arts and trades. Before his accession to the throne, the different craftsmen had beer, confusedly mixed up with the heterogeneous Roman and Sabine population and had no laws or regulations to maintain their rights or to secure their skill from the rivalry of inexperienced charlatans.

But Numa divided the several trades into distinct and independent companies, which were designated as Collegia or colleges. Plutarch names but eight of these colleges, namely: musicians, goldsmiths, masons, dyers, shoemakers, tanners, braziers, and potters, but he adds that the c4her ar6mcen were also divided into companies, so that the exact number of colleges that were instituted by Numa cannot be learned from the authority of Plutarch. If we suppose that the other artificers alluded to by him comprehended all the remaining crafts, which were united in another college, which was afterward developed into new societies, the whole number which, according to Plutarch, were originally instituted by Numa would amount to nine.

But as, besides the Collegia, such as those of the augurs and priests which were specially established by legal authority, there were many others formed by the voluntary association of individuals, the number of the colleges of handicraftsmen became in the later days of the republic, and especially of the Empire, greatly increased.

There were, among the Greek sodalities or fraternities which they called etaireiai. They were established by Solon, and Gaius thinks that the Roman colleges borrowed some of their regulations from them. But this could not have been the case in reference to any regulations established by Numa, since Solon lived about a century after him. The Greek etaireiai were, however, not confined to craftsmen but, according to the law of Solon, cited by Gaius, (1) they comprehended brethren assembled for sacrifices, or sailors, or people who lived together and used the same sepulcher for burial, or who were companions of the same society, or who, inhabiting the same place, were united in the pursuit of any business, which last division might be supposed to refer to workmen of the same craft. All of these were permitted to make regulations for their own government, provided they were not forbidden by the laws of the state.

Among the Romans a college generally signified any association which, being permitted by the state and recognized as an independent association, devoted itself to some determined object.

Its recognition by the state gave to the college the character of a legal personage, such as is now called a corporation.

If we examine the laws which were made for the establishment and the government of the colleges, we shall be impressed with their similarity to those which have always existed among the Masonic Lodges, both Operative and Speculative. The identity of regulations are amply sufficient to warrant us in believing that the regulations of the one were derived from, or at least had been suggested by, the other.

The laws and usages by which the workmen at the Temple of King Solomon were distributed into classes and regulated, which have been given by Masonic historians, and by none more extensively than by Dr. Oliver, are all supposititious and apocryphal; but those that describe the government of the Roman colleges or guilds of craftsmen have been recorded by various historians, and especially

in the different codes of the Roman law and have, therefore, all the character and value of authenticity. Whatever conclusions we may think proper to deduce in connecting these colleges with the modern Masonic guilds, must of course be judged according to their logical weight, but the facts on which these conclusions are based are patent and have an authentic record.

It was required by the Roman law that a college should not consist of less than three members. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that a Lodge can not be composed of less than three Masons. As in Freemasonry there are “ regular Lodges “ which have been established by competent authority, and “ clandestine Lodges “ which have been organized without such authority, and whose members are subject to the severest Masonic penalties, so there were legal colleges -Collegia licita -which were formed by authority of the government and illegal colleges Collegia illicita - which assembled under no color of law and which were strictly prohibited.

Illicit colleges, says Ulpian (1) are forbidden, under the same penalties as are adjudged to men violating public places or temples; and Marcian says that they must be disso;ved by virtue of the decrees of the Senate, but their members when they separate are permitted to divide the common property.

According to the Justinian code, no college of any kind was permitted to assemble unless by an act of the Senate, or a decree of the emperor.

Each college was permitted to make its own internal regulations, provided that they were not in contravention of the laws of the state. The regulations were proposed by the officers, and after due deliberation adopted or rejected by a vote of the members, in which a majority ruled.

The members of a college (sodales), says Gaius, were permitted to make their own regulations if they did not contravene the public law; and he shows that the same privilege was granted by Solon to the Greek eltaireiai or fraternities.

The colleges had also the right of electing their officers, and of receiving members by a vote of the body on their application. The applicants for admission were required to be freemen ; but the Justinian code permitted slaves to be received into a college if it was done with the consent of the Domini or Masters; but not otherwise, under a penalty of one hundred pieces of gold to be inflicted on the Curatores or Wardens.

As in the mediaeval Lodges of Freemasons we find that distinguished persons not belonging to the Craft were sometimes admitted, so a similar usage prevailed in the Roman colleges. To them the law had granted the privilege of selecting from the most honorable of the Roman families, persons who were not connected with the Craft, as patrons and honorary members.

That they exercised this privilege is evident from inscriptions and some remaining lists of members.

We have also the authority on this point of Pliny, who in his correspondence when he mas governor of Bithynia with the Emperor Trajan, shows by implication that it was the usage of the colleges of builders to admit non-professional persons into their guild. A conflagration having destroyed a great part of the city of Nicomedia, Pliny applied to the Emperor for permission to establish a College of Workmen-COLLEGIUM FABRORUM, to consist of one hundred and fifty men ; and knowing that it was the custom in these colleges to admit persons who were not of the Craft, he adds: “ I will take care that no one not a workman shall be received among them, and that they shag not abuse the privileges conceded to them by their establishment.”’

Each college had also its arca, or common chest, in which the funds of the guild were kept. These funds were collected from the monthly contributions of the members, and were, of course, devoted to defraying the expenses of the college. At a later period when these societies, or sodalities had become objects of suspicion to the government, in consequence of their sometimes engaging in political intrigues, they were forbidden to assemble. But there is a decree of the Emperor Severus, cited by Marcianus, which, while it forbids the governors of provinces to permit COLLEGIA SODALITIA or confraternities, even of soldiers, in the camps, yet allows the poorer soldiers to make a monthly contribution in a common chest, provided they did not meet more than once a month, lest under this pretext they should form an illicit college. The permission thus given to make monthly contributions (what in modern Freemasonry we should call “monthly dues”) was most probably derived from the custom long before practiced by the Colleges of Workmen.

The members of the colleges were exempt by Constantine from the performance of public duties; but this exemption appears to have applied to all craftsmen as well as to those who were united in corporations. And the reason assigned was that they might have better opportunities of acquiring skill in their professions or trades and of imparting it to their children. And therefore this immunity from public employments was confined in the colleges to those members who were really craftsmen, and in the code of Theodosius (1) it was expressly declared that this immunity should not be granted promiscuously to all who had been received in the colleges, but only to the craftsmen. Patrons and honorary members were not to be included in the exemption.

The meetings of a college were held in a secluded hall called a Curia, which was the name originally given to the Senate-house, but afterward came to signify any building in which societies met for the transaction of business or for the performance of religious rites. Each of these corporations, says Smith, had its common hall, called Curia, in which the citizens met for religious and other purposes. In the old inscriptions we frequently meet with this word in connection with a college, as the Curia Saliorum, or the Hall of the College of the Priests of Mars, and Curia, Dendrophororum, or the Hall of the College of Woodcutters. Krause says that they sometimes met in private houses he does not give his authority for this statement, but it was probably in cases where the college was too poor to afford the expense of owning or hiring a common hall or Curia.

Officers were elected by the members to preside or to perform other duties in the college. There seems to have been some variety at different periods and under different circumstances in the titles of these officers.

The officer who presided was called the Magister, or Master. It would seem that in some of the legionary colleges he was called the Prefectus or Prefect. In the Justinian code he is styled the Curator.

Corresponding in some sense to our Masonic Wardens were the Decuriones, whose number was not however confined to two. In a list of the officers and members of a college, which has been preserved and which is given by Muratori, there are seven Decuriones.

A Decurio denoted, as the word imports among the Romans, one who commanded or ruled over ten men. Hence Dr. Krause supposes that the members of a college were divided into sections of about ten, over each of which a Decurio presided. It will be remembered that Sir Christopher Wren states in the Parentalia talia, while describing the regulations that prevailed among the Traveling Freemasons of the Middle Ages that “ the members lived in a camp of huts reared beside the building on which they were employed that a surveyor or Master presided over and directed the whole and that every tenth man was called a Warden and overlooked those who were under his charge.” This is at least a coincidence, and it may give some color to the hypothesis of Krause, that the Decuriones of the Roman colleges presided over sections of ten men.

Reference has been made to a list of the officers of a college, which has been preserved by the celebrated Italian antiquary, Muratori, in his work on inscriptions. Similar lists are to be found in the works of Gruter, who has made the best collection of ancient inscriptions.

These lists, like those published at this day by the Masonic Lodges, were intended to preserve the names of the officers and members for the information of the government.

In the list published by Muratori we find the following names and titles of officers, which will give us a very good idea of the manner in which the internal government of a Roman College of Artificers was regulated.

In this list first appears the names of fifteen Patrons, who, as has already been said, were not craftsmen. The last of these is called the Bisellarius of the college.

There is some difficulty in coming to an exact understanding of the meaning of this word. A bisellium was a double seat-a seat capable of holding two-as Hesychius calls it, “ a distinguished and splendid seat,” remarkable for its size and grandeur. It might be compared to the “Oriental chair” appropriated to the use of the Worshipful Master in our modern Lodges. It was, in short, a chair of state, capable of holding, two persons; though it is evidenced from several specimens which were found at Pompeii and which were accompanied by a single footstool, that it was occupied only by one. These chairs were used in the theaters and other public places at Rome and in the provinces as seats of honor. The privilege of occupying a bisellium was granted as an honor by a decree of the Senate or an edict of the emperor, and the person to whom the privilege was granted was called a Bisellarius.

Its form was like that of a modern ottoman, but larger and higher, and there was also a stool or suppedaneum, on which the feet rested.

Krause says that some of the colleges had several Bisellarii among their members, and he thinks the word is equivalent to honorary member But as the Patrons were generally persons of wealth and distinction, selected by the college to defend and promote its interests, it is not likely that of the fifteen named in Muratori’s list only one should have been elected an honorary member. But as the privilege of a Bisellarims was a dignity conferred as an honor on certain persons, it is more probable that of the fifteen the last one only had arrived at this honor, and that the record of it was made in the list, just as in the present day titles are appended to the names of persons in catalogues.

The next officers mentioned in this list are seven Decuriones. Then follow the names of the following officers: An Haruspex, a Soothsayer and Diviner, who may be considered as equivalent to our modern chaplain, and whose duty it was to attend to the sacrifices and conduct the religious services of the college; a Medicus, or Physician ; a Scriba Perpetuus, or Permanent Secretary, and a Scriba, or Secretary. Against the names of two of the members is written the word immunes, or exempt, to show that for some reason, not explained, these members were relieved from the payment of the monthly contribution.

In this list no title of Magister or Master appears. The same occurs in an inscription on a marble plinth, which has been preserved by Gruter. It is dedicated on the front side by the College of Carpenters (Collegium Fabrorum Tignariorum) to the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus. On the other side are forty names, many of which have the title affixed of Honoratus, or Honorary. The last six names have the title of Scriba, or Secretary, attached to each ; hence Krause thinks it probable that each Decuria, or section of ten men, had its Master, who was a Decurio, its Secretary and its Patron, and, besides, its own property, obtained from bequests or donations.

If this be true, a college would not appear to have been a single lodge, but rather an aggregation of lodges. The mediaeval division, described by Wren, where in a building the workmen were divided into tens, each having its own warden, would precisely meet this ancient condition of the Decuriae.

In the time of the Empire, when the government began to be suspicious of the revolutionary tendencies of the craftsmen, care was taken to place officers over the colleges who might have a control of their arts. These officers differed at different times and in different places. Sometimes he was called a Precurator, or Superintendent; sometimes a Prapositus, or Overseer, and sometimes a Prefectus, or Prefect. In fact, the legionary colleges, which accompanied the legions and which were principally concerned in the fabrication of weapons, as armorers and smiths, had an officer over them who was called the Prefectus Fabrum, or Prefect of the Workmen.

But originally the title of Magister, or Master, was applied to him who wasover the Decuriones, and who controlled all the acts, the labors, and the hours of rest of the members of the college, as well as their sacrifices and other religious ceremonies. There is abundant evidence of this in the inscriptions, and from them also we learn that the Master was chosen annually, and afterward with all the other officers quinquennially. But sometimes he was elected for life, a custom that was observed at a long subsequent period by the French Lodges, whose Venerables were chosen ad vitam.

Thus we meet with such inscriptions as Magister quinquennatis Collegium Fabrorum Tignariorum and Magister quinquennatis Collegium Aurificum, that is, Quinquennial Master of the College of Carpenters and Quinquennial Master of the College of Goldsmiths. Sertorius also refers to certain peculiar powers of the Magister Collegium, or Master of the College. There can be no doubt that this was a well-recognized title of the presiding, officer of those sodalities.

But the Patrons, who were selected from the most wealthy and influential families of Rome, and who were not craftsmen, seemed to have exercised very important powers. Chosen that they might protect the interests of the society, no regulation was enacted, no contracts were made, and no work undertaken without their sanction. The kings, prelates, and nobles so often recorded as Grand Masters by Dr. Anderson in his history of early English Masonry, may very well be supposed to correspond in position and duties to these Patrons of the Roman Colleges.

Dr. Krause thus describes the internal organization of these colleges:

“It was only the Masters who could undertake any work. The members of the Decuria, (or sections) who corresponded to the Fellow Crafts of the present day, worked under them; and under these and under the Master, were the Alumni or Apprentices, who were still being instructed in the schools (attached to the college) and whose names, as they were not yet members of the college, are not mentioned in any of the Inscriptions.”’

That there was a distinction of ranks among the members of a college is very evident from several of the inscriptions, and from passages in the code. It, besides, in the nature of things that in every trade or craft there should be some well skilled and experienced in the Mystery, who will take the highest place; others with less knowledge who must be subordinate to these; and finally scholars or apprentices who are only beginning to learn the principles of their art. As in the Lodges of Operative Masons, in the Middle Ages, there were Masters, journeymen, and Apprentices, so must there have been in the colleges of Rome, a similar division of ranks.

The passage in the Justinian code, already referred to, provides that slaves could be received in the colleges only with the consent of their masters; if received without this consent the Curator or Master of the College was liable to a penalty of one hundred pieces of gold. This would indicate that in the Roman colleges, the distinction of bond and free so much insisted on in the modern Masonic system, was not recognized among the craftsmen of Rome. But it must be remembered that among the Romans, a condition of servitude did not always imply the debasement of ignorance. Slaves were sometimes instructed in literature and the liberal arts, and many of them were employed in trade and in various handicrafts. It was these last who were to be conditionally admitted into the Colleges of Artificers.

It is evident that with the prosecution of their craft, the members of the colleges connected the observance of certain religious rites. In the list from Muratori, heretofore cited, it is seen that among the officers designated was a Haruspex or Sacrificer.

This semi-religious character, first introduced in their establishment by the pious Numa, continued to prevail to the latest days of the Empire. It was in the spirit of paganism, which connected the transaction of all private as well as public business with sacrificial rites.

Hence every college had its patron deity, which was called its Genius, under whose divine protection it was placed. The Curia, or hall of the college, was often built in the near vicinity of the temple of this god, and meetings of the guild were sometimes held in the body of the temple. Sacrifices were offered to him ; festival days were kept in his honor, and were often celebrated by public processions. Among the paintings discovered at Pompeii is one that represents a procession of the College of Carpenters.

Krause gives ample proof that the Colleges of Artificers made use of symbols derived from the implements and the usages of their craft. We need not be surprised at this, for the symbolic idea

was, as we know, largely cultivated by the ancients. Their mythology, which was their religion was made up out of ii great system of symbols. Sabaism, their first worship, was altogether symbolic, and out of their primitive adoration of the simple forces of nature, by degrees and with the advancement of civilization was developed a multiplicity of deities, every one of which could be traced for his origin to the impersonation of a symbol. It would, indeed, be strange if, with such an education, the various craftsmen had failed to have imbued their trades with that same symbolic spirit which was infused into all their religious rites and their public and private acts.

But it is interesting to trace, as I think we may, the architectural symbolism of the mediaeval builders to influences which were exerted upon them by the old builders of Rome, and which they in turn communicated to their successors, the Speculative Masons of the 18^th, and perhaps the 17^th century.

This is, I think, one of the most important links in the chain that connects the Roman colleges with modern Freemasonry. Nothing of the kind can be adduced by those who would trace the latter institution to a Jewish or Patriarchal source. The Jews were not an aesthetic people. They rejected as vainly superstitious the use of painting and sculpture in their worship.

Though we find among them a few symbols of the simplest kind, symbolism was not cultivated by them as an intellectual science. Christian iconography, which succeeded the Jewish and the Pagan, has been more indebted for its eminently symbolic character to the latter than to the former influences.

It is the same with the symbolism that has always been cultivated in Masonry, both in its Operative and in its Speculative form. It has been indebted for its warmth and beauty rather to the Roman colleges than to the Jewish Temple.

The most important of these colleges in the present inquiry were the Collegian Fabrorum, which has generally been translated the Colleges of Artificers.

The word Faber, in the Latin language, means generally one who works in any material, but the signification is limited by some adjoining word. Thus faber tignarius meant a carpenter, faber ferrarius a blacksmith, faber aurarius a goldsmith, and so on. But it was very generally used to designate one who was employed in building-a stone-cutter or mason.

We meet in Gruter, and elsewhere, with many inscriptions in which the word can only bear this meaning. In the passage above cited from Pliny, we see that when he asks the imperial consent to establish a society of artisans to reconstruct the burned edifices of Nicomedia, for which purpose builders only could be of use, he calls the desired society a Collegium Fabrorum, which may be fairly interpreted a College or Guild of Masons.

There were, of course, colleges of other trades, such as the Collegium Pistorum, or College of Bakers, the Collegium Sutorum or College of Shoemakers, of whom a votive tablet was found at Osma in Castile, and many others. But, as Dalloway says, the Fabri were “workmen who were employed in any kind of construction and were subject to the laws of Numa Pompilius.”

It is to these Collegia Fabrorum, or Roman guilds of Masons or Builders, that Dr. Krause, whose opinion on this subject I adopt with some modifications, has sought to trace the origin of the Mediaeval corporations of stonemasons and the more recent Lodges of Freemasons.

In concluding this survey of the character and internal organization of these Roman colleges, the prototypes of the modern Masonic guilds, it will not be inappropriate to cite the language on this subject of the latest and most classical writers on the antiquities of Greece and Rome. The following brief description is taken from Guhl and Komer’s able work on The Life of the Greeks and .Romans.’

Mechanics guilds (Collegia 0pipium) existed at an early period, their origin being traced back to King Numa. They were nine in number, viz., pipers, carpenters, goldsmiths, dyers, leather-workers, tanners, smiths, and potters, and another guild combining, at first, all the remaining handicrafts, which afterward developed into new, separate societies. Amongst these later guilds, frequently mentioned in inscriptions, we name the goldsmiths, bakers, purple-dyers, pig dealers sailors, ferry men, physicians etc. They had their separate inns (curia, schola), their statutes and rules of reception and expulsion of members, their collective and individual privileges, their laws of mutual protection and their widows’ fund, not unlike the mediaeval guilds. There was, however, no compulsion to join a guild. In consequence, there was much competition from freedmen-foreign, particularly Greek, workmen who settled in Rome, as also from the domestic slaves who supplied the wants of the large families-reasons enough to prevent the trades from acquiring much importance.

“They had, however, their time-honored customs, consisting of sacrifices and festive gatherings at their inns, on which occasions their banners (vexilla) and emblems were carried about the streets in procession. A wall-painting at Pompeii is most likely intended as an illustration of a carpenters’ procession. A large wooden tray (ferculum) surmounted by a decorated baldachin is being carried on the shoulders of young workmen. On the tray stands a carpenters bench in miniature, with two men at their work, the figure of Daedalus being seen in the foreground.”

In reading this brief description, the principal details of which have already been given in our preceding pages, the reader can hardly fail to be struck with the far closer resemblance the usages of Freemasonry bear to those Roman colleges or guilds, than they do those of the Jewish workmen at the Temple, as we learn them from the very imperfect and unsatisfactory allusions contained in the Bible or in the Antiquities of Josephus. One can barely fail to see that the derivation of Masonry from the former is a far more reasonable hypothesis than a derivation from the latter.

Though but indirectly and remotely connected with this subject, one fact may be mentioned that shows how much the spirit of the guild organization, itself the spirit of Freemasonry, had imbued the common life of the Romans.

The benefit societies of the present day, which are said to be and most probably are but coarse imitations of the Masonic Lodges, were not unknown to the ancient Romans. They had their burial clubs, called Collegia Tenuirom, the literal meaning of which is Guilds of the Poor. They were, as their name imports, societies formed by the poorer classes, from whose funds, derived from annual contributions, the expenses of the burial of a member were defrayed and a certain sum was paid to the surviving family. (1)

Having shown that there existed among the Romans guild-like associations of craftsmen, presenting a very close resemblance in their usages and purposes to the guilds or corporations of Stonemasons of the Middle Ages, who are admitted to have been the predecessors of the Speculative Freemasons of the 18^th century and of the present day, the further connection of these two institutions can be identified only by tracing the progress of the Roman colleges from their rise in the reign of Numa, to their dissolution at the time of the decline and fall of the Empire, and their absorption into the architectural associations which sprang up in those parts of Europe which had once been Roman provinces.

The inquiry into this difficult but interesting topic must be the appropriate subject of the following chapter.

CHAPTER III

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GROWTH OF THE ROMAN COLLEGES

It has been shown in the preceding chapter that Numa, in his sagacious efforts to improve the civilization of the early Romans, and to reconcile the heterogeneous elements of which the population was composed had instituted colleges or guilds of mechanics.

I do not intend to complicate this question by any reference to the theory of Niebuhr and his disciples who have ignored the existence of any true history at that period, but who deem every theory connected with regal Rome as merely mythical and traditionary. I content myself with the fact that when Roman history began to present itself under the authentic form of records, the preexistence of these guilds was fully recognized. It is sufficient for the present purpose to accept the generally received opinion, and while it is not denied that in primitive Rome such guild formations prevailed, we may safely attribute their origin to some early reformer, who may be represented by the name of Numa as well as by any other.

In treating the subject of the rise and progress of these colleges or guilds, I shall pursue the course of Roman history as it has been generally received by scholars. As we advance to later times we shall find ourselves amply fortified by the contemporaneous authority of classical writers, and by numerous monuments and inscriptions. Except the mere question whether they were first established by Numa or by somebody else, in what Niebuhr would call prehistoric Rome-a question of but little or no importance in reference to their connection with the mediaeval guilds-there is no statement concerning them that is not a part of authentic history.

It has therefore been proved that these colleges were guild-like in their organization; that they had all the legal rights of a corporation ; that they elected their own members; that they were governed by certain officers chosen by the votes of the society; that they were supported by monthly contributions; that they had a guild-chest or common fund, which was the property of the corporation; that they had a tutelary deity, in honor of whom they performed religious rites; that they had honorary members not belonging to the Craft, who, as patrons of the colleges, and being selected from the wealthiest and most influential families of the Republic or the Empire, protected their interests ; and finally, that they had, like our modern corporations, laws, regulations, usages, and a jurisdiction which were all sanctioned by the authority of the state.

In tracing the progress of the Colleges of Artificers, through the reigns of the seven kings the long period of the Republic and the rise and fall of the Empire, we need not dwell upon the age of Romulus. Though the narrative of his reign was accepted as authentic by Dionysius and Plutarch, by Livy and Cicero, the incredulity of modern scholars, stimulated by their researches, has led to the very general opinion that the first of the Roman kings was a mythical personage, and that his history was founded, as Niebuhr says, on a heroic lay. Yet even he admits that portions of the nar- rative are to be accepted as matters of fact. Made up as it has been of traditions, which were believed from the earliest periods, the reign and the character of Romulus may be considered as an expoltation of that of the time in which he is supposed to have lived.

From these traditions we learn that he was, as the founder of an empire might well be supposed to be, a warlike king, who was engaged in constant contests with the inhabitants of neighboring and rival cities. Though claimed to have been a legislator of the highest order, who exercised his skill in the organization of a new state, the necessity of defending his territory from aggression and of increasing its limits, gave him but little opportunity or inclination to cultivate the arts of peace.

He is said to have created those religious institutions of the Romans, which were afterward developed into greater maturity by Numa and some of his successors. But he discouraged the cultivation of the arts, and interdicted the citizens from the practice of all mechanical and sedentary trades, which were left to foreigners and slaves, while the free Romans were confined to agricultural labors and warlike pursuits.

His successor, Numa, was, on the contrary, distinguished for his pacific character. During his long reign of forty-three years, the state over which he ruled enjoyed an uninterrupted flow of peace. There were no domestic dissensions and no foreign wars.

He was not only a king but a philosopher, and by an anachronism which Niebuhr attempts, but vainly, to explain, he was considered as a disciple of the sage Pythagoras. He established the religious institutes; and pontifical regulations, whose cruder form had been attributed to Romulus; he built several temples, especially that of Janus; he reformed the calendar; instituted public markets and festivals; encouraged the pursuit of agriculture and the mechanic arts; and created the brotherhoods or corporations of the trades and handicrafts- men, which continued to exist through the whole history of the Roman state under the name which he had originally given them of Colleges of Artificers.

Tullus Hostilius was the successor and the contrast of Numa. He was a warlike monarch, and his reign was marked by a series of military successes. He was not Eke his predecessor, of a religious turn of mind, and it was only in moments of trepidation, says Livy, that he made vows to build temples or had recourse to expiatory sacrificial rites. Heineccius (2) thinks it probable that he abolished the craft associations which had been instituted by Numa, because they were calculated to divert the citizens from military pursuits and to deprive him of the services of active soldiers. Ancus Martius, the fourth king, was the grandson of Numa. He revived the institutions of his grandfather and brought the Romans back from the warlike habits of the previous reign to a cultivation of the arts of peace. With this view he caused the sacred institutes of Numa to be written out by the Pontifex Maximus upon tablets and to be exhibited to the inspection of the public. Under his reign, the colleges must have revived from the oppression they had experienced under his predecessor.

The history of the next king, Tarquinius Priscus, if we are to judge from the legends upon which it is founded, afford no reason for believing that his reign was unfavorable to the craft associations. He is said to have been a patron of architecture and of a constructive character. He is said to have adorned the Forum, to have formed the Circus Maximus, to have constructed the Cloaca, or sewers, to have laid the foundations of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and to have built a stone wall around the city. All these labors would have required the aid of architects and builders, and we suppose that the corporations or colleges of these craftsmen were encouraged by a monarch so well disposed to the cultivation of the arts of construction.

Servius Tullius, the sixth king, has had the reputation of a reformer. He was the first to make a census of the people, and to distribute them into classes.

Florus says that he made the division in curia and colleges and that things were so ordered that all distinctions of property, station, age, occupation, and office must have been well marked. In this reign the colleges and craftsmen took a recognized position among the classes of the community.

Tarquinius Superbus, the last of the race of Roman kings, whose name has been stained by the record of his tyranny, was the enemy of the people. His life was that of a despot. He surrounded

himself with a body-guard to protect his person ; he prohibited all assemblies of the peace e4her in the country or in the city, so that no opportunity might be afforded them of consulting on the affairs of the state ; he occupied them in forced labors for the construction of the sewers and the completion of the Circus; he repealed all the popular laws of his predecessor ; abolished the equitable distribution into classes which had been made by the census; and suppressed the colleges and craft sodalic, As the natural and expected result of this oppressive course, the people rose to the assertion of their liberties. Tarquin and his family were perpetually banished, the monarchy ceased to exist, and the republic rose on its ruins.

For a time after the expulsion of the King the Patricians ruled over the Plebeians with a hand not always light. Dissensions sprang up between the oppressors and the oppressed, and the Colleges of Artificers became a subject of suspicion and dislike to the former class, because as these associations were wholly made up out of the latter, they were supposed to be the fomenters of discontent and bodies in which seditious factions would be nourished.

Nevertheless, one of the first acts of the Consular government was to re-establish the mild and beneficent laws of Servius Tullius, and to permit the assemblage of the people, whence resulted the restoration of the colleges.

The severity of a famine which occurred in the Year of the City 276, is attributed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus to the fact that the number of women, children, slaves, and handicraftsmen who were unproductive classes, was three times greater than that of the citizens who were engaged in agricultural pursuits.

Though history, such as it was at that time, is silent on the subject, yet it must be evident that the continual discords for many of the early years of the Republic, between the Patricians and the Plebeians, must have seriously affected the interests of the Colleges of Artificers and secured to them only intermittent periods of spasmodic activity.

But when the people had extorted from the Senate the Tribuneship by which they became a part of the governing power, and the right of holding offices of honor and of entering the priesthood, the colleges of handicraftsmen appear to have been more firmly established. The laws of the Twelve Tables, which were adopted in the Year of the City 302, confirmed their privileges, a decree which Gaius in his Commentary on these laws thinks was suggested by and copied from the decree of Solon in reference to similar associations among the Greeks.

In the Year of the City 687, the Senate had suppressed the colleges, but eight years afterward they were restored by the Tribune Publius Clodius.

From that time the Roman citizens began to pay much attention to the arts and to mechanics. But though the craftsmen were united in the Tribes and had the right of voting, they were not highly respected and were not permitted to serve in the army except on extraordinary occasions, such as domestic seditions. (1)

Yet a great many new colleges were created, some by legal enactment and some by voluntary association. Such, for example, were the colleges of Ship Carpenters, of Smiths, and especially the Collegia Sirucloram, or Colleges of Builders, who were the same as the Fabrii Cementarii, or as it must be literally translated, the Stonemasons.

But these guilds or Colleges of Artificers were not confined to the city of Rome. They spread into the provinces and the municipal cities, or those which had been invested with the right of Roman citizenship.

For a long time these corporations of workmen pursued a quiet and exemplary course, engaged in the lawful pursuit of the various trades and handicrafts.

But the number in time greatly increased; Clodius, the Tribune, in abrogating the decree of the Senate which had suppressed them, unfortunately had extended the privilege to slaves and foreigners of creating new colleges or of uniting with the old ones. Hence many of these sodalities gradually degenerated into factions and political clubs, and thus became dangerous to the state.

In addition to this fault, the classical writers speak in terms of denunciation of the sumptuous feasts in which many of the colleges indulged. They carried this species of dissipation to such an extent, that Varro complains that the extravagant banquets of the colleges had greatly enhanced the price of food at Rome.

These follies were of gradual growth. The colleges continued to exercise their functions during the existence of the Republic, and were found in a flourishing condition at the advent of the Empire.

It is not to be supposed that in a change of government from the simplicity of a democracy to the corruptions of a monarchy, based on a revolution, the faults of political intrigue and extravagant conduct would not increase rather than abate.

Hence we find the emperors generally opposed to the increase of these sodalities, and there are frequent decrees suspending or suppressing them. But it must be remarked that this opposition appears to have been directed rather against the creation of new corporations than to the suppression of the old ones.

To properly appreciate the true condition of the Roman Colleges of Workmen, we must advert to the fact that while there were a certain number of them which had existed from the earliest period, being the continuation of the primitive system which had been established by Numa, and which had, except at intermittent periods of suspicion been tolerated and even patronized by the government, there were many others which had sprung up in later times, and which were formed by the voluntary association of individuals.

These bodies were for the most part the creation of political factions, whose revolutionary designs were sought to be concealed in the exclusiveness of secret consultations, or sometimes of less worthy craftsmen who, not having been admitted into the fellowship of the old college, were willing to set up a rivalry in business.

Hence had arisen a distinction well recognized in the decrees of the Senate, or of the emperors, and constantly referred to in the various codes of Roman law.

This distinction was into lawful and unlawful colleges, or, to use the legal terms, into Collegia licita and Collegian illicita. The voluntary associations, to which allusion has just been made, were of the latter class. They were illicit or illegal colleges, and held a somewhat similar position to the old and lawful colleges that, in modern times, an unincorporated society does in its privileges and franchises to a corporation. The analogy goes so far at least as this, that the illicit colleges, like the unincorporated societies of the present day, had no recognition in law-in other words, possessed no rights which the law recognized. But, in another respect, the analogy fails. The illicita colleges were not only not recognized, but were actually discountenanced by the state, an interference to which our unincorporated associations are not subjected. If the law does not protect them, it does not persecute them. They are allowed, if guilty of no violation of the laws, to continue without let or hindrance.

But this was not the happy lot of the illegal colleges. They were repeatedly denounced and suppressed by the state, which looked upon them always as associations of a dangerous character.

It has been supposed that it was the policy of the Empire to destroy the corporations of craftsmen which had been originally instituted by Numa, and decrees and laws have been quoted to prove the statement. If such had been the case, we should meet with an insurmountable difficulty in tracing back the corporations of builders of the Middle Ages, to the Roman colleges. The total and permanent suppression at any time of these, would naturally destroy the links of that chain of continuity which is absolutely necessary to identify the one with the other in the progress of history.

But we can not find any evidence that the primitive colleges, and especially those of the builders, ever were suppressed. The decrees of the Senate and of the emperors were directed against the new, and not against the old, associations of craftsmen.

Thus Suetonius tells us that Julius Caesar abolished “ all colleges except those which had been anciently constituted; “ the same author informs us that Augustus “ dissolved all colleges except the old and legitimate.”

The same reservation is made in all references through the Digest of Justinian, to any decrees or enactments which affected these corporations. It is only Collegia illicita against which the penalties of law are to be enforced. “ It is permitted to assemble for religious purposes,” says the Digest, “ provided that by this the decree of the senate prohibiting illicit colleges is not contravened.” Ulpian says that “ illicit colleges are forbidden under the same penalties as are adjudged to armed men who take possession of temples or public places.”

There was a very wholesome dread, both in the times of the republic and under the emperors, of those illegal associations, voluntarily assembled, too often for the promotion of factions or the encouragement of political opinions which were dangerous to the state.

When the greater part of the city of Nicomedia had been destroyed by fire, Pliny, who was then the governor of Bithynia, applied to Trajan for permission to organize for the purpose of rebuilding a College of Masons (Collegium.Fabrorum), which should not consist of more than one hundred and fifty artisans, and in which he would take care, by the exclusion of every person who was not a Mason, that the purposes of the new college should not be diverted into an improper direction.

There is a good deal of suggestive history in this passage of Pliny’s letter to the Emperor.

It indicates, in the first place, that it was not unusual to create new Colleges of Masons for special purpose, which purposes being accomplished, the colleges were dissolved. Pliny would hardly have asked permission to perform an act of such importance, if it had not been sanctioned by previous custom.

But this brings us very near to the similar custom of the Stonemasons in the Middle Ages, who, we know, were accustomed to create their temporary or especial Lodges of workmen, when any building was to be undertaken. We see in this, if not a proof of the direct continuation of the mediaeval Masons from the Roman colleges (which Mr. Findel is unwilling to admit), at least a very exact imitation in an interesting point, by the former of the customs of the latter.

And in the next place, we learn from this epistle of Pliny that it was not unusual to admit into these colleges of workmen members who were not of the Craft, and that this was often done for an evil purpose

On this fact, indeed, was based the objection of the state to illicit colleges. Voluntary associations were often formed which, assuming the name and pretending to practice the professions of the regular colleges, consisted really, in great part, of non-operatives who met together in secret to concoct political and insurrectionary schemes.

If the illicit colleges had confined themselves to a rivalry in work with the regular bodies, it is not likely that the state would have meddled with the contests between regular and irregular workmen, or, as in after times they were called, Freemasons and Cowans. Government does not at this day, in any country, interfere between constitutional and clandestine Lodges of Masons. It leaves, as it is probable that it would have done in Rome, the settlement of the controversy to the Masonic law.

But it was the admission of these non-operative members into the illicit colleges, who converted them from bodies of honest work. men into political clubs, that made all the evil and awoke the suspicions and the interference of the state.

Trajan consequently declines to permit the creation of a new and temporary college at Nicomedia, and he assigns the reason for his refusal in these words.

He says, in reply to Pliny: “You have suggested the establishment of a College of Masons (Collegia Fabrorum) at Nicomedia, after the example of many other cities. But we should not forget that this province, and especially its cities, have been greatly troubled by this kind of factions. Whatever name we may, give to them for ,any cause, bodies of men, however small in number, who are drawn together by the same design, will become political clubs.”

The last two words are in the original hetaria,. This from the Greek, among which people hetaria, or helairiai were associations originally instituted for convivial purposes or for mutual relief, like our benefit societies. They became, in later times, very common in the Greek cities of the Roman Empire, but, as Mr. Kennedy says, “ were looked on with suspicion by the emperors as leading to political combinations.”’

I think, therefore, that we may safely arrive at the conclusion that the primitive colleges of artisans, who derived their origin from the time of Numa, and to which we may trace the idea of the mediaeval guilds of Masons, were generally undisturbed by the government, whether regal, republican, or imperial, and continued their existence and their activity to a very late period in the history of the empire. The persecutions, suppressions, and dissolutions of colleges of which we read, refer only to those illegal and irregular ones, which, not confining their operations within the legitimate limits of their craft, were voluntary associations made up, for the most part, of non-operative members, who were engaged in factious schemes against the powers of the state.

This point being settled, we may next direct our attention to the condition of these colleges, and especially the Colleges of Masons, or Collegia Fabrorum (for with them only are we concerned), in the empire and in the provinces until the final overthrow of the Roman power

The Romans in the earlier portion of their history, were without any taste or refinement. The people were entirely military in their character, and they cultivated the rude arts of war rather than the polished ones of peace. Architecture, therefore, was in a debased condition. The principles of building extended only to the construction of a shelter from the weather, Their houses were of the rudest form, and, as their name imported, were merely coverings from the sun and rain. “ These sheds of theirs,” says Spence, “ were more like the caves of wild beasts than the habitations of men ; and rather flung together, as chance led them, than formed into regular streets and openings. Their walls were half mud; and their roofs pieces of boards stuck together.”

The builders of the college established by Numa could at that time have been occupied only in the most inglorious part of their profession. They were engaged in works of utility and absolute necessity, and could have had no knowledge of or inclination for ornament. The most bungling carpenter or bricklayer of the present time must have greatly surpassed them in skill.

During that period the colleges furnished no architects to the army. The only workmen that we find there were the smiths and the carpenters; they were soldiers who exercised with but little need of skill the mysteries of these trades, being employed in the renovation of weapons and in needful repairs about the camp. It was not until centuries afterward that workmen were supplied by the colleges and authorized by the state to accompany the legions in their campaigns and in their occupation of conquered provinces. (1)

It was not until about the era of Augustus-that monarch who boasted that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble-that the Romans began to exhibit a fondness for the fine arts, and especially for architecture. Marcellus, the conqueror of Syracuse, had, two centuries before, implanted the seeds of a refined taste in his countrymen, and invited the invectives of the ascetic Cato, by the works of Grecian art which he brought to Rome from the spoliation of the city which he had conquered. To him, therefore, has been attributed the introduction of the arts into Rome.

But it is to Augustus that architecture was indebted for the high position as an art that it assumed among the Romans, and from the period of his reign must we date the rise of the Colleges of Builders, as associations of architects, whose cultivated and encouraged genius produced its influence upon the conquered provinces into which they migrated with the Roman legions.

Pittacus says, in his Lexicon of Roman Antquities, (2) that those workmen who at first confined their labors to the city of Rome, afterward spread over the whole of Italy and then into the various provinces of the empire, furnishing everything that was needed by the army.

The government seems to have taken especial care of these colleges, for besides the officers elected by the members themselves, the state placed over them other officers, whose duty it was to give them a general superintendence.

In the provinces this duty was entrusted to the proconsul or government. Thus we have seen that Pliny, as governor of the province of Bithynia, proposed to create a College of Builders,

over which he was to exercise a control such as would regulate it in the admission of its members. In the municipal cities this officer was called sometimes a Procurator, and sometimes a Praepositus. In every legion the artisans were under the government of a Prefect, who was styled the Prefectus Fabrum, or Prefect of the Artisans. I am not willing to confound this officer with the Prefect of the Camp, who was, like our modern quartermaster, of a purely military character. There is an inscription copied by Reinesius, in which occur the words Faber et Praef. Fabr. Leg., XX., i.e., Artificer and Prefect of the Artificers. This would seem to imply that the Prefect himself was sometimes, if not always, an artificer and one of the Craft.”

Under the officer appointed by the state, as the general superintendent of the artificers of the college, was a subordinate one, appointed also by the state or perhaps by himself, whose duty it was to inspect and to direct the labors of the workmen, and to see that everything was done in an artistic and workmanlike manner. He was, in fact, what in later times the Freemasons called the Magister Operis, or Master of the Work.

When, therefore, we meet in Gaul, in Britain, or in any other province which had been penetrated by the legions, with a monument of the labors of these Roman Masons, which some wellpreserved inscription attests to have been the work of a Collegium Fabrorum, or College of Masons, we may suppose that it was accomplished in the following manner.

In the first place the men the materials, the site, the character of the building, and all other matters relating to the general design, were determined by the Proconsul, Procurator, Commander of the Legion, or whomsoever had been appointed by the state or the empoeror as superintendent of the artificers and the colleges.

The workmen being then assembled, commenced their labors by congregating themselves, or being congregated, into a college, if such a college did not already exist, and they were placed under the immediate, control and direction of a subordinate officer, who was an artificer or an architect, and who regulated their labors, made designs or plans, and corrected the errors of the workmen.

In all this we see a great analogy to the method pursued by the operative Stonemasons of the Middle Ages.

First, there was a prelate, nobleman, or man of wealth and dignity, who had formed the design of building a cathedral, an abbey, or a castle. In the old English Constitutions this great personage is always refered to as “ the Lord” and the work or building was called “the Lord’s work.”

Having congregated in huts or temporary dwellings around the site of the edifice they were about to erect, they formed a Lodge, which was under the control of a Master. And then there was the architect or Master of the Works, who was responsible for the faithful performance of the task.

The convenience of military operations, such as the establishment or removal of camps, and the passage of armies from one place to another, required that the legions should carry with them in their marches architects and competent workmen to accomplish these objects. Bergerius, who wrote a treatise “On the Public and Military Roads of the Roman Empire”, (1) estimates, with perhaps

some extravagance, that the number of architects and workmen engaged in the Roman states in the repairs of roads, the construction of bridges and other works of a similar kind, exceeded those employed in the building of the Pyramids of Egypt and the Temple of Solomon.

Of these a great number were distributed among the legions; accompanied them in their marches; remained with them wherever they were stationed ; created their colleges and proceeded to the erection of works, sometimes of a temporary and sometimes of a more permanent character.

Dr. Krause says, citing as his authority the Corpus Juris and the inscriptions, that in every legion there were corporations or colleges of workmen who were employed for building and other purposes needed in military operations.

Hence, in tracing the advance of the Roman legions into different colonies, we are also tracing the advance of the Roman architects and builders who accompanied them. And when the legion stopped in its progress and made any colony its temporary home, they exercised all the influence of a conquering army of civilized soldiers over a country of barbarians. Of all these influences of civilization the one that has been the most patent was that of the architects who substituted for the rude constructions which they found in the countries which had been invaded, the more refined principles of building. The monuments of the edifices erected in Spain, in Gaul, and in Britain have, for the most part, disappeared under the destructive agencies of time; but their memorials remain to us in ruins, in inscriptions, and in the history of the improved condition of architecture, among these barbarous and uncultivated peoples. It was, it is true, developed in subsequent times, and greatly modified by the instructions of Byzantine artists, but the first growth and outspring of the architecture practiced by the mediaeval guilds of Freemasons must be traced to the introduction of the art into the Roman provinces by the Colleges of Builders which accompanied the Roman legions in the stream of conquest which these victorious armies followed.

Having thus presented the details of the history of these Roman Colleges of Builders from their organization by Numa, through the successive eras of regal, of republican, and of imperial Rome; having shown their continued existence and eventually their spread .into the municipal or free cities and into the conquered provinces, impressing everywhere the evidences of an influence on the art of building, it is proper that we should now pause to examine the memorials of their labors in the different provinces and colonies.

It is thus that we shall be enabled to establish the first link in that chain which connects the Freemasonry of the mediaeval and more recent periods of Europe with the building corporations of Rome.

CHAPTER IV

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THE FIRST LINK : SETTLEMENT OF ROMAN COLLEGES OF ARTIFICERS IN THE PROVINCES OF THE EMPIRE

The first link of the chain which connects the Roman Colleges of Artificers with the building corporations of the Middle Ages, is found in the dispersion and settlement of the former in the conquered colonies of Rome.

It has been satisfactorily shown that the Masons at Rome were incorporated into colleges, where the principles of their art were diligently studied and taught to younger members who stood for that purpose in the place occupied by the Apprentices in the Stonemasons’ lodges at a long subsequent period. We have seen that an immunity from all public services was granted by the Emperor Constantine to workmen, and among others to architects for the express reason that they might have the opportunity of acquiring a knowledge of their professions and of imparting it to their disciples.

Now, these architects, one of whom was always appointed to a legion with workmen from the colleges under him, carried the skill which they had been enabled to acquire at home, with them into the colonies or provinces which they visited, and there, if they remained long enough, which was usually the case, as the legions were for the most part stationed for long periods, they erected, besides the military defences constructed for the safety of the army, and the roads which they opened for its convenience, more permanent edifices, such as temples. Of this we have abundant evidence in the ruins which still remain of some of these structures, ruins so dilapidated as to supply us with only meagre and yet sufficient evidence of their former existence and even splendor, but more especially in the numerous inscriptions on stone or marble tablets, hundreds of which, in every province, have been collected by Gruter, Muratori, Reinesius and other writers who have devoted themselves to the study of Roman antiquities.

Thus we shall find in Spain, in Gaul, and in Britain abundant evidences, of the kind referred to, of these labors of the Roman architects, while these provinces were under Roman domination. It can not be denied that this must have exercised a certain influence on the original inhabitants and have introduced a more refined taste and a superior skill in the art of building. Nor was the influence thus exerted of an altogether ephemeral nature. When the Roman domination ceased, and the legions were withdrawn to sustain the feeble powers of a decaying empire, threatened by the barbarian hordes of the north with extinction, not all the Romans who had come with the legions, or since their advent immigrated into the country, left with them. A very long series of years had passed, and many of these architects and builders had been naturalized, as it were, and were unwilling to depart from the homes which they had made. They remained, and continued to perpetuate among the people with whom they were domiciliated the skill and the usages which they had originally brought from Rome.

M. Viollet-le-Duc says, in his Dictionary of Architecture, that in the Middle Ages the workmen of the southern cities of Europe preserved the Roman traditions, and that in them the corporations

or colleges did not cease to exist, but that these bodies were not established in the northern cities until the time of the affranchisement of the communes.

Even if this were the fact, it would only be lengthening the chain of connection, for it is fair to suppose that the corporations of the north, at whatever later period they were established, must have adored the system of confraternities from the southern cities where they had long existed as a part of the Roman tradition. So that even in this view the chain is uninterrupted which binds the corporations of builders of the Middle Ages with those of Rome.

But I think that it will hereafter be shown to be historically true that the traditions and the usages of the Roman colleges were well preserved in the early period of English architecture, and that out of these traditions sprang, in part, the regulations of the Saxon guilds. But this is a question for future consideration when we come to the investigation of the post-Roman architecture of Gaul and England.

The evidences of the influence of the Roman colleges on the province of Spain are very abundant, arising from the peculiar relations of that province to the Empire.

Upon the expulsion of the Carthaginians from Spain, which occurred 206 B.C., it was erected into a Roman province, at least so much as had been conquered by the Romans under the Scipios, which did not include more than half of the peninsular. Thenceforward it was governed sometimes by one proctor and sometimes by two, and two legions were always kept stationary in the province.

The influence of this political arrangement was of the most important character. The soldiers intermarried with the native-women, and thus became so estranged from Italy that when the legions were disbanded. Many of them refused to return home, and continued their residence in Spain. (1)

A little more than a century after its conquest, such a system of internal communication had been established by the opening of roads and especially the military one of Pompey over the Pyrences, that the country was laid open to travelers, many of whom settled there. In the time of Strabo, a portion of the province had been so Romanized in manners as to have become almost Roman. The great privilege of citizenship had been granted to many of the inhabitants, and they had even forgotten their native language.

Spain, thus becoming more intimately connected with the Empire than any of the other provinces, furnished, as it is well known, some distinguished names to Latin literature, such as Lucanus, the poet, the older and the younger Seneca, Columelle, Quintilian, and the epigrammatist, Martial.

In the reign of Augustus many considerable colonieswere founded, represented by the modern cities of Zaragossa, Merida, Badajoz, and many others. In these cities the art of building flourished, and they were adorned with some of the finest productions of Roman architecture, of many of which the magnificent ruins still remain, while temples, theaters, baths, circuses, and other public edifices, which had been erected by the Roman masons, have perished through the waste of time and the destructive influences of invasions and intestine wars.

It is well known that while Spain was, from the earliest times, an object of the grasping ambition of foreign peoples, and that it was in turns invaded and conquered by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Goths, and the Arabs, all of whom were attracted by the delights of the climate, the fertility of the soil, and the richness of the mines, the Romans, from the longer duration of their domination and from the more solid character of the edifices which they constructed, have left a greater number of architectural monuments, and these in a greater state of preservation, than the other nations who preceded or followed them. (1)

But the invasion of the Goths, after the departure of the Romans, and the subsequent more permanent occupation of the peninsular by the Saracenic Arabs or Moors, so completely withdrew the architects of Spain from all communication with those of the rest of Europe, and so completely obliterated all effects of the earlier Roman influence, that it is impossible to trace a continued and uninterrupted connection between the Roman Colleges of Masons, who left behind such wonderful evidences of their skill, and the medaevel guilds or corporations of the Middle Ages, who in other countries were their successors.

It is a curious historical fact that while of all the Boman provinces Spain was the one in which the Roman domination was most firmly, established, it was also the one in which, after the decay of the Empire, all the results of that domination were the most thoroughly obliterated.

Spain has, therefore, been alluded to on the present occasion not with any intention of making it a part of that train of succession which, beginning with the colleges of Numa, ended in the mediaeval guilds of Stonemasons, but because it furnishes a very complete instance of how these Roman Colleges of Artificers extended their labors and introduced their art into foreign countries.

In the three other provinces of the western empire, the two Gauls and Britain, the connection of the Roman colleges with the guilds or corporations which subsequently sprang up may be more readily traced. Cisalpine or Citerior Gaul was the name given by the classical writers to that part of Gallia which was south of the alpine mountains, and which constituted what is more familiarly known as northern Italy. Deriving its first settlement, if we may trust to the authority of Livy, which, however, Niebuhr rejects, by an immigration of the Gauls beyond the mountains, in the time of Tarquinius Priscus, these people were for centuries engaged in struggles with the Romans, whose attempts to subdue them were always unsuccessful. When Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, invaded Italy and sought the destruction of Rome and the Roman power, many of them willingly became his allies. But about two hundred years before the Christian era, the two most important tribes, the Insubrians and the Boians, were subdued by the Roman legions under the Consuls C. Cornelius Cethegus and Q. Minucius Rufus, and from that time to the reign of Augustus, Cisalpine Gaul came slowly but surely under the Roman domination. When it was established as a Roman province, it was rapidly filled with a Roman population, and became one of the most valuable of the Roman possessions. Most of the towns received that political status known as the Jus Latii, or the Latinitas, by which they were placed in a middle position between strangers and the Roman citizens, and the pure right of citizenship was bestowed on their magistrates, which was, in the time of Caesar, extended to all the inhabitants, the larger towns being made municipalities.

Fifty years before Christ all Cisalpine Gaul had been invested with the right of citizenship, and consisted of Roman communities organized after the Roman fashion. This would necessarily indicate the introduction among the peace of Roman civilization and refinement. Among the arts that were encouraged, that of architecture was not the least, and we have ample evidence in still remaining monuments and in inscriptions that the Roman architects or members of the colleges were industriously employed in the labors of their Craft.

The proofs of this are to be found in the modern cities of northern Italy, which are the successors of the Cisalpine colonies, and which have preserved in their museums or in private collections the memorials and relics of their ancient prosperity and refinement.

Thus Mutina, now the modern Modena, was one of the most flourishing of the Lombard towns. Ciccro did not hesitate to call it “ the strongest and most splendid colony of the Roman people.” It was so wealthy as to have been able to support for a long time the large army of Brutus. It fell at length into decay, but was never abandoned, and again rose to prosperity in the Middle Ages under the name of Modena by which it is still known. Although the magnificent architectural remains of the ancient city were employed in the construction of the cathedral and other public buildings of the modern one, or were buried under the depositions of alluvial soil, yet the Museum of Modena contains a valuable collection of sarcophagi and of inscriptions which have been excavated at various times and which furnish the evidence of the existence and the labors of the Roman architects and builders under the empire.

There was another town of Cisalpine Gaul, called Aquileia, which was built by the Romans to defend the fertile plains of Italy on the northeast from the incursions of barbarians. Two centuries before Christ it was settled by several thousand colonists from Rome and became a place of great commercial prosperity. In the 5^th century it was plundered and burnt by Attila, King of the Huns ; but though it never again became a place of importance, it was always inhabited, and in the 6^th century was the See of a bishop, and, to borrow the language of Mr. Bunbury, “ It maintained a.sickly existence throughout the Middle Ages.” At the present day it is an obscure village, with only a cathedral. Although it contains no vestiges of Roman edifices, the site, says the same writer, it abounds with remains of antiquity, coins, engraved stones, and other minor objects as well as shads and capitals of columns, fragments of frieze, etc., the splendor and beauty of which sufficiently attest the magnificence of the ancient city.” Among the inscriptions found there arc some which relate to the temple and the worship of Belenus, a local sun-god whom the Romans identified with Apollo. All the works of which we have these memorials must have been effected by the Roman architects, who, with their colleges, were surely among the six or seven thousand who emigrated from Rome and built up the city.

Bononia, or the modern Bologna, was built, it is supposed, by the Tuscans, and was raised to the rank of a Roman colony about two centuries before Christ. It continued to be an important and flourishing city under the empire. Though it suffered decay, it was able, in the 5^th century, to withstand successfully the attacks of Alaric. It never lost the continuity of its existence, but after the fall of the empire regained, in a great measure, its prosperity, and at length assumed, in the Middle Ages, a preeminence among the cities of northern Italy which it still retains. It is not probable that it had soon lost as traditions of those arts which it practiced when a Roman colony, and which are attested by fragments of sculpture and traditions which have been preserved.

The modern city of Ivrea, which is an important place, was the ancient Eporedia, a Roman colony founded about one hundred years before Christ. The strength of its position, as commanding two important passes of the Alps, gave it great military value, and it does not, therefore, appear to have been subjected to any great process of decay. As late as the close of the 4^th century it was a considerable town and occupied, as a military station, by a portion of a legion. The modern city still contains a fine Roman sarcophagus and some other remains of its ancient splendor.

But the most interesting of all the cities of Cisalpine Gaul, in a reference to the connection of the Roman colleges, which labored in them, with the sodalities of the Middle Ages which succeeded them, is Comum, an important city at the foot of the Alps and on the borders of the Lake of Como. The present name of the city is como It is supposed to have been the birthplace of both the elder and the younger Pliny, the latter of whom made it his favorite residence, and established in it a school of learning. It was under the empire a flourishing municipality, and its prosperity was secured by the beauty and convenience of its position at the extremity of the lake, for it became the point of embarkation for travelers who were proceeding to cross the Rhactian Alps. It retained its prosperity to the close of the Roman Empire. In the 4^th century a fleet was stationed there for the protection of the lake. Cassiodorus speaks of it in the 6^th century as one of the military bulwarks of Italy, and extols the richness of the palaces with which the shores of the lake in its vicinity were adorned. It continued to retain its importance in the Middle Ages, and it is from there that the “ Masters of Como,” the Traveling Freemasons, proceeded to traverse Europe in the 10^th century, and to erect cathedrals, monasteries, and palaces in the various countries which they visited. But this body, whose acts form the most valuable portion of the historical testimony of the connection between the Roman Colleges of Artificers and the corporations of Freemasons in the Middle Ages, will be hereafter discussed and described in a more extended manner For the present, this simple allusion to them must suffice

We next come to the consideration of the architectural condition of Transalpine Gaul, or Gaul proper, under the Roman domination. This subject may be briefly discussed, as the early condition of Roman architecture in Gaul will be more diffusely treated in a subsequent chapter.

The name of Transalpine Gaul was given by the Romans to that country which extended from the Pyrenean mountains to the river Rhine, within which limits modern France is embraced. It was first conquered by the Roman arms under Julius Caesar, and remained a province of the empire until its final decline. The Gauls represented to have been a ferocious and sanguinary people, though at the time of the conquest Caesar found an improvement in the manners of some of the tribes. But their progress toward civilization and refinement was rapid after they came under the dominion of the Romans. Caesar had formed a legion of Gaulish soldiers whom he armed and drilled after the Roman fashion, and subsequently when he had arrived at the Dictatorship he made them Roman citizens, and sent Roman colonies to several of the cities.

Under the Emperor Augustus, Gaul became rapidly Romanized. Schools were established in the large towns, and the Latin language and the Roman law were adopted. In religion there was a compromise and there was a mixture of Gallic and Roman worship, though wherever the Romans made a permanent settlement, temples were erected to the Roman deities.

Architectural works were pursued with great energy but with little prudence. Temples and other public buildings, together with bridge, roads and aqueducts, were erected over all the country. These must have cost immense sums, and as the expansion was wholly defrayed by the inhabitants without aid from the mother government, great distress began to prevail among the people, which led to several mutinies.

But though the embellishments of the Roman architects had impoverished the colonists, the influences of refinement in art continued long after these troubles to prevail, and in Gaul we find an almost uninterrupted connection between the architecture of the Roman colleges and that of the mediaeval Freemasons.

That part of Gaul which lay along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and which the Romans emphatically called the Province (Provincia), had been civilized and Romanized long before the conquest of the other parts of the country. It was in the towns of this province that the most extensive operations in architecture were exhibited. It must be remarked however, that all over Gaul outside of the Provincia, as well as within it, there are ample evidences of the splendid style of architecture that was cultivated by the architects who accompanied the legions, or the colonists who went from Rome to settle in Gaulish towns.

Baeterrae, now Beziers received a colony of soldiers of the seventh legion, who constructed a causeway, of which some traces still exist. There are also the vestiges of an amphitheater and the remains of an aqueduct.

Arelate, now known as Arles, was a city of the Provincia. The Roman remains are very numerous there; among them an obelisk of Egyptian granite which was excavated some centuries ago, and in 1675 was set up in one of the public squares. The amphitheater was estimated as capable of holding twenty thousand persons. There is also an old cemetery which contains many ancient tombs, both Pagan and Christian.

Nemausus, the modern Nimes, which was also a city of the Provincia, contains many remains of the skill of the old Roman architects and the splendor of their works. The amphitheater, not quite as large as that of Arles, is in a good state of preservation. There is also a temple still existing which, as Arthur Young says, in his Travels in France is beyond comparison the most light, elegant, and pleasing building that he ever beheld. Under the modern name of “ Maison Carree” it is now used as a museum of painting and antiquities.

But the noblest monument that the Romans have left in Gaul is the aqueduct now called the Pont du Gard, which is between three and four leagues from Nimes. The bridge on which the aqueduct is laid is still solid and strong, and in says Mr. George Long, “ a magnificent monument of the grandeur of Roman conceptions, and of the boldness of their execution.”

It is useless to extend these descriptions farther. All over Gaul were cities colonized by the Romans, who imparted to the native inhabitants a portion of their skill, their taste, and their refinement. Temples, amphitheaters, theaters, aqueducts, and public and private buildings of every kind are to be found in all the large and many of the small cities of modern France, which, sometimes well preserved and sometimes in ruins, always indicate that the spirit of architectural -enterprise was imparted to the people under the Roma government and by Roman architects and builders. How well that spirit was preserved and how it became afterward developed in the Freemasonry of the Middle Ages will remain to be elucidated in our further historical researches.

Britain was twice invaded by Caesar, but on neither occasion did he stay long enough in the island to effect any influence on the inhabitants. Augustus afterward planned an expedition to Britain, but the plan was never consummated. It was not until the time of Claudius that any serious attempt at conquest was made. Under his orders an army was led by Aulus Plautus into the southeastern part of the island. The city of Camalodunum, now Malden, was taken. Claudius, who had visited Britain to partake of the triumphs of the victory, returned to Rome and assumed the surname of Britannicus in attestation of his success, leaving his general, Plautus, to complete the conquest, which, however, he did not accomplish.

Vespasian soon after subdued the Isle of Wight and took twenty of the oppida or British towns. His son Titus also distinguished himself in many battles with the native tribes.

But though the island was at this time penetrated to some extent by the Roman legions, and the southern coasts were occupied by them, the island was not yet conquered. The struggle between the

independent spirit of the natives and the ambitious designs of their Roman invaders lasted for nearly half a century, and the subjection of the whole island was not achieved until the reign of Domican. Thereafter Britain took the form and felt all the influences of a Roman province, but unlike Spain and Gaul, a discontented one.

It is hardly germane to the objects of the present work to trace, with any particularity of detail, the progress of the Roman power under the various emperors who governed the island from the date of its conquest to the final withdrawal of the Roman armies in the beginning of the 5^th century.

It is sufficient to say that during the period of time intervening between these two epoches, Britain had become completely Romanized. Colonies were founded, cities possessing the right of Roman citizenship were established, legions were distributed in various places, veteran soldiers and immigrants from the imperial city had made permanent settlements, so that, as Gildas says, it was to be viewed not as a British but as a Roman island.

“Britain,” says Sharon Turner, “was not now in the state in which the Romans had found it. Its towns were no longer barricaded forests, nor its houses wood cabins covered with straw, nor its inhabitants naked savages with painted bodies or clothed with skins. It had been, for above three centuries, the seat of Roman civilization and luxury. Roman emperors had been born and others had reigned in it. The natives had been ambitious to obtain and hence had not only built houses, temples, courts, and market-places in their towns, but had adorned them with porticoes, galleries, baths, and saloons, and with mosaic pavements, and emulated every Roman improvement. They had distinguished themselves as legal advocates and orators and for their study of the Roman poets. Their cities had been made images of Rome itself, and the natives had become Romans.” (1)

It can not be doubted that the skill and experience of the Roman architects who accompanied the legions or who came from Rome to Britain after its conquest had been imparted to the native Britons, and that the chain of connection between the Roman colleges and the local Colleges of Artificers in the island was well established. Of this, numerous inscriptions and the remains of Roman buildings, found everywhere in modern England, furnish ample evidence.

In Dorchester, which was the Roman Durnovaria, besides the remains of the old Roman ruins and several camps, those of what was probably an amphitheater attest its former importance and the labors of the Roman builders.

In Dover, the ancient Dubris, there is now an octagon tower attached to a church, and which is almost built of Roman bricks. It is supposed to have been a lighthouse in the time of the Romans.

London, or Londinium, was a very old city, and was the capital of ancient Britain as it now is of modern England ‘Though not invested by the Romans with the rights of a municipality, it was always, as Tacitus says, from the abundance of its trade, a place of great importance. The remains of Roman monuments which have been found in London show that it contained many splendid buildings. When the foundations of an old wall which bordered the river were laid open, several years ago, it was found to be composed of materials that had been previously used in the construction of ancient buildings.

“The stones of which this wall was constructed,” says Mr. Charles Roach Smith, (1) “were portions of columns, friezes, cornices, and also foundation-stones. From their magnitude, character, and number, they gave an important and interesting insight into the obscure history of Roman London, in showing the architectural changes that had taken place in it.” Architectural fragments, and the remains of tessellated pavements in great number have been discovered, which attest the magnificence of the Roman city, and traces of temples have also been found.

It has been said that London was the station of a cohort of native Britons, which was contrary to the usage of the Roman Emperors, who never stationed auxiliaries in their native countries, but we know that a colony of veterans had been established at Camalodunum or Malden not far off, and there are inscriptions which attest the presence, at various times, of the soldiers of the second, sixth, and twentieth legions in the city. It is easy, therefore, to trace, as we must, the construction of these magnificent works to Roman architects, supplied by the legions or the colonies.

Eboracum, or York, is familiar to the Masonic scholar from the important part that it plays in the traditional history of English Freemasonry. It was a town of much importance ill the times of the

Romans, and seems to have been a favorite place of residence. It was the permanent station of the sixth or victorious legion. The Emperors Severus and Constantius died there, and it is said to have

been the birthplace of Constantine the Great. Among the memorials of the Roman domination which have been found at York are numerous remains of temples, baths, altars, votive tablets, and even private residences. Of the many inscriptions that have been preserved, one dedicated to the Egyptian god Serapis, and a tablet or slab containing the carved figure of a man with a cap and chlamys, or short mantle, who is stabbing a bull, indicate the introduction by the Romans of the worship of a foreign god as well as the cultivation of the mystical rites of Mithras.

In the beginning of the 5^th century, the Roman Empire being imminently threatened with downfall, the legions and the Roman authority, which had ruled and protected Britain for so long a period, were withdrawn. The people were left to defend themselves from the incursions of the Danes and other barbarous invaders from the opposite shores of the Continent. Many changes took place in the laws, the language, and the habits of the island. In time, after many wars, Britain became Anglo-Saxon England.

But, as on the retirement of the Romans, many voluntarily remained, because they had become habituated to the country and, in numerous cases, had been connected by intermarriages with the natives, Britain did not altogether lose the influence of the seed that had been sown. Especially in the art of building, although there was a deterioration, all the effects of the Roman civilization were not lost. And it will not, I think, be difficult to trace the development of the system of trade guilds which afterward existed among the Anglo-Saxons and the English to the suggestions of the similar guilds of the Roman colleges. But the consideration of this question must be postponed to a future chapter.

What has been here attempted has been to show that the Roman colleges, sending their architects to the colonies and (cities established ‘in the conquered provinces of the Roman Empire, had secured, in an uninterrupted succession, not only the principles of architecture but the comprehensive and well-regulated system of work which, beginning at the earliest period of Roman history in the Colleges of Artificers, was to be carried throughout its acquired dominions by its legions and its colonists, and finally to be developed in a modern form in the corporations of operative Masons of the Middle Ages, and finally in the lodges of Speculative Masons of the present day.

So far the first and second links of this chain of connection have been shown; we her close the history with the fall of the Roman dominion over the provinces at the beginning of the 5^th century. As we proceed in our investigations our inquires must bring us successively to the condition of architecture and its gradual growth into new systems and various styles in all the countries which were once under the Roman dominion.

We shall, I believe, find the principles of architecture changing from the influences of different causes exerted at different times, Architecture will be constantly changing its features. The Roman, the Byzantine, the Gothic, and other styles will succeed and displace each other, but the system of cooperative or guild labor, which is the true connecting chain between the ancient and the modern methods of building, will always prevail and show, in every successive age, the unweakened influence of the old Roman guild or college.

CHAPTER V

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EARLY MASONRY IN FRANCE

The condition of Masonry in Gaul, which afterward became France, immediately subsequent to the decadence of the Roman Empire, and afterward up to the Middle Ages, we are by no means as familiar as we are with its condition during the same period in Germany and in Britain. French Masonic writers have been too speculative in their views, and have given too loose a rein to their imaginations, to permit us to attach any value to the authenticity of what they present as historical statements.

This is a fault, which it is but fair to say has been shared by the English writers of what has been called Masonic history. Clavel and Thory are hardly to be considered more reliable as historians than Anderson and Oliver. In the works of each of these distinguished writers we find many statements which are hardly plausible, and which, although offered as historical facts, are wholly unsupported by any authentic authority.

But recently in England a new school of Masonic history has sprung up, which is rapidly clearing away the cobwebs of absurdity and inconsistency, of doubt and error which had been woven around the pure form of history by the older writers of the last and the beginning of the present century.

In France, no such school has been established. In that country there have been no Hughans, Woodfords, or Lyons to exhume from their sepulcher, on the shelves of national or private libraries, the old charters and capitularies which might throw some light on the real condition of the Masonic sodalities which were left behind in Gaul on the retreat of the Roman legions, and which were afterward developed, by a gradual but uninterrupted growth, into the building corporations of the Middle Ages.

If the scholars of France supply us with no valuable assistance in our inquiries on this subject, we shall look in vain for aid from English or German writers.

These have, in general, thought it a task sufficiently arduous to seek the elucidation of the Masonic history of their own countries, and have not, therefore, found either time or inclination to labor, to any great extent, in other fields.

Even Findal, who is somewhat exhaustive in his account of the early and mediaeval Masonry of Britain, and more especially of Germany passes over that of France without notice. Indeed he begins his chapter on French Masonry with the year 1725 as his starting-point, and thus entirely ignores all the events that preceded the organization of the modern lodges in Paris after the revival, as it is called, which took place in London in the year 1717.

Hence his history is not really that of Masonry in France, but only that of the French Grand Lodge.

From Kloss, another German writer of eminence, we derive no better information. He wrote in two volumes a History of Freemasonry in France, Drawn from Authentic Documents, but his theory is that the Institution was introduced into France from England, and he goes, like Findal, no farther back than to the organization of a French lodge in 1715, under the auspices of the Grand Lodge of England.

It will be seen, when we come to the consideration of the origin of the Grand Lodge of Speculative Masons in France, that there is great question of the correctness of this date, for the researches of Bro. Hughan have led to the doubt whether there was a legal lodge in France, deriving its authority from the English Grand Lodge before the year 1732. This, however, is not germane to the present inquiry.

It is altogether in vain that we look in the pages of French Masonic writers, such as Thory and Clavel, for any documentary history of French Freemasonry anterior to the beginning of the 8^th century.

Thory, in his Acta, Lalomorum, commences his annals, so far as they relate to France, with the year 1725, and the establishment of a lodge in Paris by the titular Earl of Derwentwater. Not a single word does be say of the condition of the association, either as Operative or Speculative, previous to that date.

Clavel, in his Histoire Pictitresaite, gives a very loose and indefinite account of the origin of Freemasonry in France. He traces it, and in so far he is correct, to the Roman Colleges of Artificers through the architects of Lombardy, and passes very rapidly on to the connection of the French operative Masons with the building corporations of Germany and the Grand Lodge of Strasburg. But he does not attempt to show how that connection was effected. There is no objection to the theory which he propounds. His principal fault, as an historian, lies in his extreme generalization and in the meagerness of his details. Taking as his point of departure the Roman colleges, he leaps almost at a bound from them to the mediaeval corporations. He devotes no attention to the period which immediately succeeded the fall of the empire, nor to the influences exerted on, or the methods pursued by, the Roman and Gallic Masons who were left in Gaul on the departure of the legions, and which led to the gradual development of the guilds, sodalities, or lodges which sprang up in time as the successors of the Roman colleges.

But another falling of Clavel as an historian, and one which produces the most unsatisfactory results upon the minds of his readers. is that he produces no documents, does not even refer to any, and cites no authority to corroborate any of the statements that he makes.

Even in a writer of acknowledged care and attention to the credibility and genuineness of the facts that he records, such a method of treating an historical narrative would be objectionable. But what little claim Clavel’s unsupported assertions have to our respect, and how far they are from necessarily demanding our belief, may be learned from the fact that he cites as an undoubted instance of the existence of a Masonic lodge in the year 1512, what is now known to have been merely a convivial society of literary men who met at Florence in that year under the title of the “ Society of the Trowel.” It counted some of the most distinguished inhabitants of Florence among its members. Its symbols were the trowel, the square, the hammer, and the level, and its patron saint was St.Andrew. Vasari describes it as a festive association of Florentine artists, who met annually to dine together. He describes the origin of its existence and its title to the merely accidental circumstance that certain painters and sculptors, dining together in a garden, observed in the vicinity of their table a mass of mortar in which a trowel was sticking. Some rough practical jokes passed thereupon, such as casting portions of the mortar on each other and the calling for the trowel to scrape it off.

The allusion to an implement of operative masonry in the title of the society, led Clavel, as it has done Reghellini, Lenning, and some others, to believe that it was a Masonic organization. But a reference to the authority of Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters would have shown that the apparently professional title was actually selected by a mere accident and in reference to a jocular proceeding which suggested the name.

There is hardly any necessity to refer to the writings of the Chevalier Ramsay, as throwing any light on the early history of Masonry in France. His theory is that Freemasonry originated among the Crusaders and was introduced into France by the Templars, who brought it with them on their return from Palestine. This hypothesis is now generally, perhaps I should say universally, admitted to be untenable. It comprises a history, or the figment of a history, not founded on facts nor supported by any documentary evidence, but one that was simply invented to sustain a preconceived theory. The theory was first invented and then the history was written. Hence it has been rejected by all scholars and has fallen into utter extinction together with the system of Strict Observance that was founded in it. In this work, which seeks to trace Freemasonry back to the Colleges of Artificers of Rome, it can of course have no place.

Rebold is a pleasing exception to the rest of his countrymen who have treated or attempted to treat this subject, though it is to be regretted that he has not thought proper to corroborate his statements by a reference to authorities, or by what would have been most valuable, the citation of any old records or constitutions. On the whole, however, he is more satisfactory than any other writer of early French Masonic history, and gives a fuller account of the institution as it existed when Gaul emerged from the dominion of Rome.

His history, briefly analyzed, is to the following effect lie says that Masonry was introduced into Gaul by the Roman confraternities of builders, one of which was attached to each legion of the army. He describes the vicissitudes to which these architects were solved to dine together annually, and as a memorial of the ludicrous event that had led to their organization as a dinner-club they called themselves the Societi della Cuechiara, or the Society of the Trowel. “Histoire des Trois Grandes Loges de Franc-macons en France,” Paris, 1864. subjected during the repeated conflicts of the Romans with the hordes of barbarians, whose alternate defeats and successes were followed by the destruction or the renewal of the labors of the Masons. At length, in the year 426, the victorious arms of Clovis, King of the Franks, put an end to the Roman domination, and the armies of the empire left, forever, the soil of Gaul.

But the confraternities of builders, which had come into the country with the Roman legions, remained there after their departure. They, however, underwent material alterations in their organization, and developed a new system, which Rebold thinks became the basis of that Freemasonry which existed for a long time afterward in France.

Moller, in his Memorials of German Gothic Architecture, when referring to the fact that the Roman architecture of the 5^th and 6^th centuries prevailed at a much later period in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Britain, explains the circumstance as follows:

“The conquerors did not exterminate the old inhabitants, but left to them exclusively, at least in the first periods of their invasion, the practice of those arts of peace, upon which the rude warrior looked with contempt. And even at a later time, the intimate connection with Rome, which the clergy, then the only civilized part of the nation, entertained, and the unceasing and generally continued use of the Latin language in the divine service, gave considerable influence to Roman arts and sciences. This must have been so much more the case, from the constant obligation of all freemen to devote themselves to war; whereby the practice of the arts was left almost exclusively to the clergy.”

The corporations of builders which had been attached, some to the legions and some to the governors of the provinces, under whose orders they had constructed many great edifices, then began to admit into their bosom a large number of native Gauls who had been converted to Christianity.

The most important modification, however, to which they were compelled to submit, was this that being originally a general association of artisians, whose central sect and school of instruction was at Rome, they were obliged to abandon this relation on the retreat of the Roman armies from Gaul, and the severance of all political connection between the province and the imperial, government.

The builders, as well as the other craftsmen, then divided themselves into a variety of sodalities, each being occupied with the cultivation of a different art or trade.

It is here that Rebold should have cited some authority for his statement of a fact that is contrary to what has always been supposed to be the true character of the Roman colleges. The division into different trades, which he supposes to have been a forced necessity in Gaul, was in existence, if history be correct, from the first organization of the colleges by Numa, when they were ten in number, which was subsequently increased to a large extent under the empire

These sodalities of different trades, he says, subsequently gave rise to the corporations or guilds of the Middle Ages.

Of these sodalities, that of the builders, or Masons, being the most important, and the one most needed in the countries where they were left after the departure of the Romans, especially in Gaul and Britain, were alone enabled to retain the ancient organization and the ancient privileges while they had possessed under the domination of the Romans.

But amid the continued invasions of barbarians, and the wars and political disturbances that followed, the confraternities of builders were at last everywhere without occupation. The arts and architecture among then; paralyzed by international contests, found a refuge only in the monasteries, where they were successfully cultivated by the ecclesiastics who had been admitted into the fraternity of Masons.

Among the most celebrated architects of France who were the products of those rnonastic schools of architecture, Rebold mentions St. Eloi, Bishop of Noyon; St. Fereol, of Limoges; Dalmac,

of Rodez; and Agniola, of Chalons, all of whom flourished in the 7^th century. But he says that there were among the laity, also, architects not less distinguished, under whose direction numerous edifices were built in Gaul and in Britain at a later period.

The most distinguished of those whom Rebold has described as architects and as the disciples of the monastic schools of architecture was St. Eloi, or Eligius. But St. Eloi was not an architect, but a goldsmith, having regularly served an apprenticeship to that trade, even after his appointment by Clothaire II. to the position of treasurer, or master of the mint. Subsequently, when fifty-two years of age, he was elevated to the bishopric of Noyon, for which he was obliged to prepare himself by two years of study and admission to ecclesiastical orders.

As a prelate be patronized, as many others had done, the architects by the erection of churches and monasteries. But his connection with Operative Masonry is rather through the guild organizations than through any close connection with the craft of building. He organized the monks of his abbey, according to St. Croix, (1) into a guild or school of smiths, for whom he drew up a code of regulations.

According; to the same authority the statutes for the government of the craftsmen of Paris, prepared in the 14^th century by Stephen Boileau, were but a transcript of those of St. Eloi.

Whittington says that St. Eloi belonged, properly, to the class of professional artists who were magnificently patronized and held in high estimation by him.

The writer of his life in the Spicilegium describes him as a very skillful goldsmith and most learned in all constructive arts.”

It is very evident that Rebold has so far given us the early history of architecture in France rather than that of Freemasonry. In this respect, his work follows, in its spirit, that of Dr. Anderson in the first and especially in the second edition of the Book of Constitutions. To the student of Masonic history such annals are of value only because of the traditional relations that exist between the Operative and the Speculative systems.

Well-authenticated history leaves us no room to doubt that the Romans introduced architecture into France, or, to speak more correctly, into Gaul at a very early period, and many magnificent ruins are still remaining in the older cities as Arles, Avignon, Nimes, and other ancient places, which are the vestiges of the labors of builders and architects under the Roman domination. In fact, when the barbarians began their invasions into Gaul, the soil was covered with the monuments of Roman art. Many of these were destroyed, but there still remained, in the 6^th century, a great number of public and private edifices which had been spared. In fact, there is at Nimes a temple and an aqueduct still remaining, in a state of excellent preservation. The former is now used as a museum of antiquities, and the latter, known as the pont du gard, is solid and strong, and is admitted by antiquaries to be the noblest Roman monument in France.

The people, during a long period of subjection to the Roman rule, had been traditionally educated in the architectural taste and spirit of Rome, and hence with the revival of the art of construction in the 6^th, 7^th and 8^th centuries, the Christian churches became but the reflection of the Pagan basilica, and the palaces of kings and the castles of nobles were but copies of the Romano-Gallic villas.

Hence French Masonic writers have, with a great claim to plausibility, assumed that the Masons of France were a continuation in regular and uninterrupted descent of the Roman Colleges of Artificers. This view has been strengthened by another historical fact, that admits of no doubt, that Charlemagne, whose name and that of his grandfather Charles Alartel are frequently referred to as patrons of Masonry in the old English records, was distinguished for his zeal in the erection of churches and palaces and brought many architects from Byzantium into France, founding there, or rather transplanting there, the Byzantine Order of Architecture which, however, afterward gave place to the Gothic, or that Order of which the mediaeval Freemasons were, it is generally conceded, the inventors.

Rebold, who, as an historian, occupies a middle term between the incredulous iconoclasm of the modern school and the facile credulity of the early Masonic annalists, says that after the final evacuation of Gaul by the Romans, about the end of the 5^th century, though many of the Colleges of Artificers which had been established under the Roman domination remained in Gaul, yet their organization underwent important modifications. In the first place the general association of the dim erent artisans who were necessary to the pursuit of architecture, religious, naval, and hydraulic, or the building of temples, of ships, and of bridges and aqueducts, being no longer able to maintain itself in a country which had been abandoned by the Romans, and having lost its center of action and its principal school at Rome, no longer practiced architecture as a profession in common and under one head, but was divided into various associations, each of which occupied itself thereafter with only the study and practice of a single art or trade.

It is in this way that he accounts for the rise of the corporations which flourished subsequently in the Middle Ages, and which were in the transition period between the ancient colleges and the modern lodges.

Of these different sodalities, which sprang out of the general association of artisans existing under the Roman Empire, the corporation of builders or masons, as being the most important fraction, preserved, says Rebold, their ancient organization and their ancient privileges, because the countries in which they resided after the departure of the Romans, being greatly in need of their services as builders, freely accorded to them the privileges which they had possessed under the Romans.

The Teutonic invaders of Gaul who drove out the Romans, though barbarians, were wise enough not to destroy the old monuments of Roman art and civilization, but to make use of and profit by them.

But in the same century the cathedral erected by Naumatius, Bishop of Auvergne, surpassed that of Perpeticus. Gregory of Tours, who was a native of Auvergne, describes the edifice with much eloquence of phrase in his Historia Francorum, and states the fact, interesting as showing the collection of high ecclesiastics with operative Masonry, that he built it according to his own designsecclesiam suo studio fabricavat.

The invasion of the Franks into Gaul in the 6^th century caused at first, amid the tumult of war, while the arts of peace were silent, the destruction of religious edifices. But the conversion and baptism of Clovis placed Christianity on a firm foundation and caused the preservation of the remaining monuments of the ancient civilization.

The Franks, who were a bold, enterprising and warlike offshoot from the great Teutonic race, and who were the real founders of the kindom which afterward became modern France, were notwithstanding their intestine broils and their conflicts with neighboring people, inclined to cultivate the arts of peace. They occupied, says Mr. Church, a land of great natural wealth and great geographical advantages, which had been prepared for them by Latin culture; they inherited great cities which they had not built, and fields and vineyards which they had not planted; and they had the wisdom not to destroy but to use their conquest.

The Franks were indeed friendly to Roman culture; preserved many of the Roman laws and customs, and accepted for their vernacular a modified form of the Latin language.

Hence architecture, which had languished during the stormy period when the Romans were unsuccessfully striving to defend their acquired provinces and the very existence of the empire itself from the barbarous hordes of northern invaders, began, in the 5^th and 6^th centuries, to revive, The confraternities of builders and the art of architecture to some extent, says Rebold, resumed activity.

The fact, already adverted to elsewhere, that the art of building, especially of religious edifices, had passed into the hands of the monks, is found to prevail also in the history of the art in France at this early period. The remarks of Mr. Whittington on this subject in his Historical Survey are well worthy of quotation.

“The ancient writers often mention instances of an abbot giving a plan which his convent assisted in carrying into execution. The edifices of religion owed their first existence to the zeal of the clergy. The more enlightened prelates invented or procured the plans and carried them into execution. But although from record as well as from probability we may conclude that the arts in this age were principally cultivated by the clergy, it is no less certain that there were persons who practiced them as a profession. What that powerful Order found necessary to promote by their own

exertions, they did not fail to patronize in others, and to the common masons and carpenters who might be found in the different cities of France persons of superior skill and intelligence were added who were invited from distant quarters by the enterprising liberality of the bishops. The superstition of the times and the authority of the Church secured them employment and protection;

they gradually increased in numbers and improved in science, till at length they produced the most able artificers from among themselves. France, in fact, at this time was not without professional artists, but they seem to have been neither numerous nor eminent, and the clergy were frequently left to their own exertions and resources. Gregory of Tours (who flourished in the 6^th century) speaks of several of his predecessors as if they had superintended the building of their churches, particularly Ommatius, who rebuilt the Church of Sts. Gervase and Protasius and began that of St. Mary; and he expressly affirms that Leo Bishop of Tours was an artist of great skill, particularly in works of carpentry, and that he built towers which be covered with gilt bronze, some of which had lasted till his time. One general spirit indeed seems to have prevailed among the French Bishops of the 6^th century to establish new churches and to improve the towns of their dioceses.”

The progress of architecture in the 7^th century under St. Eloi, or Eligius, and during the reign of Clothaire II., has already been referred to. In the 7^th and 8^th centuries the mode of building and the artistic taste of the builders remained about the same as in the 6^th, but the features were somewhat enlarged and enriched, and towers and belfries became common.

In the 9^th century, architecture and operative Masonry received a new impetus under the fostering care of Charlemagne. The buildings erected in his reign exceeded in taste and extent the works of preceding monarches. There was an increased intercourse with the East and with Byzantine artists. Italian architects were brought from Lombardy, and the monuments of ancient Rome were imitated.

The anonymous Monk of the Monastery of St. Gall, who wrote the Gestes de Charlemagne, in describing the cathedral of Aix-la Chapelle, which was erected by Charlemagne, says that it surpassed in splendor the works of the ancient Romans, and that for its construction he called together masters and workmen from all parts of the continent.

Rebold thinks that the fact that Charlemagne had sought for builders in other counties an evidence of their diminution in France. This is scarcely a legitimate conclusion. The monarch might very properly avail himself of the skill and experience of foreign artists, without necessarily indicating by their importation that there were none in his own country. The wrecks of the ancient Roman colleges were still remaining in Lombardy, and it has already been shown that there was a flourishing school of architecture at Como.

Indeed it cannot be doubted that the intercourse established by Charlemagne, between France and other countries of Europe, was very favorable to the progress and improvement of the arts. The number of artists was greatly increased, and they were supplied with better models for imitation.

“Charlemagne,” says Sismondi, “ was one of the greatest characters of the Middle Ages. Contrasted with his contemporaries, he possessed all the advantages of a man who was a stranger to his age. As we have seen before his time, extraordinary men who have subjugated a civilized people by the energy of a character hall savage, so in him we see a man who, being in advance of the civilization of his times, has subdued barbarians by the force of his intellect and by his knowledge. He combined the qualities of a legislator with those of a warrior, and united the genius which creates with the vigilant prudence which preserves and maintains an empire. lie drew together in one chain barbarians and Romans, the con querors and the conquered, and united them in a new empire. He laid the foundations of a new order for Europe, an order which essentially reposed on the virtues of a hero, and on the respect and admiration which he inspired.”

Such has been at all times the concurrent opinion of all historians with the exception of Voltaire, and perhaps a few others. And even they, while charging him with unproved faults and even crimes, admit the magnificence of his enterprises and the splendor of his reign. It is therefore singular that in the traditions of the early Masons his name has not been permitted to occupy a place.

In the Legend of the Craft, found in the Old Records of the English Masons, the introduction of Masonry into France is attributed to a certain Greek: artist who had been at the building of the Temple of Solomon, and came into France in the time of Charles Martel, who patronized the Craft made Masons, and gave them charges. (1)

The gross anachronism of making a workman at Solomon’s temple a visitor at the court of Charles Martel at once, exposes the great ignorance and the liability to error of the original composer of the “legend. It is not, therefore, at all improbable that he confounded Charles Martel with his grandson Charlemagne.

It is very evident that the spirit of the Legend does not apply to Martel, who, during his administration under two feeble kings, was fully occupied in wars with rebellious subjects, with the Saxons on the north and the Saracens from Spain in the south, and who had neither time nor inclination to devote to the arts of peace. The monks, who were then the principal builders, were not his favorites, and St. Boniface has not hesitated to call him “ the destroyer of monasteries.” It is hardly to be doubted that he destroyed more than he built.

Charlemagne, on the contrary, was, as we have seen, the patron of the arts of civilization, and might, with but a little stretch of imagination, be called the founder of ope rative Masonry in France. His intercourse with Byzantium and the East gives color also to the legend that he was visited by a Greek architect, which is simply a symbolic expression of the idea that Byzantine architecture and Greek art and culture were beginning to be introduced into France and the West during the period in which Charlemagne reigned.

We may, therefore, I think very safely correct the English Legend of the Craft by substituting the name of Charlemagne for that of Charles Martel.

Louis the Feeble, the son and successor of Charlemagne, though, as the sobriquet which was bestowed upon him imports, a prince of no force of character, yet patronized architecture, and in his reign many religious structures were built, under the superintendence of his architect. The name of this artist was Rumalde. We know scarcely more of him than the fact that he was the architect of Louis. Whittington thinks it probable that he was not an ecclesiastic, since it is clear that he practiced his art as a profession, and professional architects were at that time becoming common.

The universal belief that prevailed in the 10^th century, in the approaching destruction of the world and the advent of the millennium, had naturally the effect of paralyzing all industrial arts, and architecture made little or no progress.

But in the 11^th century there was a revival, and the records of that period contain the names of many distinguished architects, who were not monks but professional architects, for Masonry had for some time been passing away out of the hands of the ecclesiastics in those of the laity and the guilds.

The guilds or trade corporations, in France began about this time to take an active existence and to exert a powerful interest on the progress of the arts. The consideration of their history is well worthy of a distinct chapter. But our attention must now be turned to the early history of Masonry in other countries.

CHAPTER VI

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EARLY MASONRY IN BRITAIN

From the time of the conquest of Britain by Claudius to the final evacuation of the island by the Romans in the beginning of the 5^th century, a period of about three hundred and fifty years had elapsed. During this long occupation the Romans had held, if not undisputed, at least dominant sway over the greater part of the island. Roman legions had been permanently stationed in different towns; Roman colonies had been established; Roman citizens had immigrated and settled in greater numbers; Roman arts and civilization had been introduced; and, as we have already shown in a preceding chapter, the native inhabitants had become almost Romanized in their manners and customs.

It is not to be supposed that the domination for so long a continuity of years of a powerful empire, distinguished for its cultivation of the arts, should not have been productive of the effects that must always result from the protracted mixture of a refined with an uncivilized people.

Among the arts introduced by the Romans, there is none that could have so much attracted the attention of the natives as that of architecture. Of all the methods of human industry that are intended to supply the wants or promote the comforts of life, the art of building is placed in the most prominent position. All the arts says Cicero, which relate to humanity have a certain bond of union and a kind of kinship to each other. But it must be acknowledged that the art which proposes to secure to man a protection from the elements and a shelter from the inclemencies of the seasons must hold the highest place in the family scale. It is the first art that man cultivates in his progress from utter barbarism to civilization. It is the most salient mark of that progress. No sooner did the primitive Troglodytes emerge from their cave dwellings than they began to erect, however rudely, huts for their habitation.

And so when a nation or a tribe begins to make an advancement in civilization, its first step is to improve its mode of dwelling.

When conquest brings a superior race to ail ignorant and uncultured people, the industrial arts of the former are speedily diffused. among the latter, and architecture, as the most striking and the most useful, more speedily attracts the attention and is more readily imitated than any other.

When the Romans first invaded Britain they found the country inhabited by various tribes deriving their origin from different nomadic stocks, and therefore somewhat heterogeneous in their condition and their habits. The Belgians, for instance, who had passed over from Gaul and occupied, by the right of conquest, the coast bordering on the British Channel, were an agricultural people, and are described by Camar as being more advanced in the arts of civilized life than the tribes in the interior who were pastoral, who lived on milk and flesh and were clothed in skins.

Mela Pomponius, the Roman geographer, who wrote about the same time, describes the Britons as being in general uncivilized and much behind the continental nations in their social culture. Fields and cattle constituted their only wealth.

Mr. Wright, in an Essay of the Ethnology of South Britain at the Extinction of the.Roman Government, says that “we may form a notion best and most correctly of the mode of life and of the degree of civilization of the ancient Britons, by comparing them with what we know of those of the wild Irish and of the Celtic highlanders of Scotland in the Middle Ages. Living in sects or clans, each collected round a petty chieftain, who had his residence or place of refuge in the least accessible part of his little territory, they had no towns, properly so called, and no tie of union except the temporary one of war or a nominal dependence on some powerful chieftain who had induced by some means, a certain number of the smaller clans to acknowledge his sovereignty.”

Their houses, says Turner, were chiefly formed of reeds or wood, and were usually seated in the midst of woods, a space being cleared on which they built their huts and folded their cattle.

The improved condition of Britain, in consequence of their intercourse with their more civilized conquerors, is thus described by Mr.Wright: “Under the Romans, on the contrary, Britain consisted politically of a number of cities or towns, each possessing its own independent municipal government, republican in form and principle within themselves, but united under the empire through the fiscal government of the province to which they were tributary. Each of these cities inhabited by foreigners to the island, was expected to defend itself if attacked, while three legions and numerous bodies of auxiliaries protected the province from hostilities from without and held it internally in obedience to the imperial government. The country was unimportant and the towns were everything.”

The numerous inscriptions found in England in recent times prove another fact, namely, that the legionary troops which were sent from Rome to Britain did not pay merely ephemeral or transitory

visits, from which no important influence could have been derived, but that they remained in the same locality during the whole occupation of the country by the Romans, and actually constituted military colonies, making homes in the towns in which they lived, and insensibly imparting the use of the Latin language and the adoption of Roman manners to the people. So much, in fact, did they become identified with the native inhabitants, that they often made common cause with them in tumults or insurrections against the imperial government.

The result of this constant intercommunication must have been just that which might anywhere, under such circumstances, have been expected. The architects who accompanied the legions in their visits to Britain and who remained with them during its occupation did not confine their labors to the construction of military works, such as the erection of defensive walls and fortresses. They engaged during the period tranquillity which had been secured by the presence of strong bodies of troops in the peaceful avocations of their art. They organized their Colleges of Artificers, which, considering the works in which they were engaged, might correctly be designated as Colleges of Masons; they began the building of temples and other public edifices ; they took to their assistance the more intelligent natives, and introduced their Roman architecture by methods which imitated those of the Colleges at home.

The rude huts of the native Britons were replaced by more comfortable houses, and the art of building, under the guidance of the Roman Masons, assumed a new form and was prosecuted by new methods, which thus introduced the character and customs of the Roman Colleges into the island, and thus by the example of associated workmen continued the chain of connection which was to be more fully extended in Anglo-Saxon times by the establishment of building guilds.

Tacitus has shown us, in his Life of Agricola, how and at what an early period this system of Romanizing Britain began. In the last quarter of the 1^st Christian century, Agricola arrived in Britain, having been appointed governor of the province. The island, which had hardly yet recovered from the recent insurrection of Queen Boadicea, was still in an insurgent condition. The first efforts of Agricola were of course directed to the restoration of peace and order, and to the correction of civil and political abuses. His next business was to introduce a system of regulations whose tendency should be to civilize the natives. He encouraged them, therefore, says Tacitus, (1) by his exhortations and aided them by public assistance to build temples, courts of justice, and commodious dwellings. He praised those who were cheerful in their obedience; he reproached those who were slow and uncomplying, and thus excited a spirit of emulation. He established a plan of education and caused the sons of the chiefs to be instructed in learning and to cultivate the Latin language. The Roman dress was adopted by many, and the Britons, allured by the luxurious example of their conquerors, began to erect baths and porticoes and to indulge in sumptuous banquets.

To do all this was not within the narrow scope of native skill. In the erection of these improved edifices the Britons, being only partly reclaimed from their pristine barbarity, must have invoked and received the advice and assistance of the Roman architects.

The cooperative and guild-like methods of building practiced by these, as well as their skill in architecture, was thus imparted to the Britons. What had been wisely begun by Agricola was as wisely imitated by his successors in the provincial government, and the Roman Collegiate system was completely established in the island long before the extinction of the Roman domination and the fall of the Roman empire.

That the builders or Masons introduced into Rome, or educated there by their Roman Masters, had increased to a very great number is evident from a remark of the panegyrist Eumenius in his Panegyric of the Emperor Maximian. He describes the ancient Gallic city of Bibracte, afterward Augustodunum, but now the modern Autun, which abounds in the remains of Roman architecture, many of them in a good state of preservation. The re-edification of private houses and the construction of temples and other buildings with which Maximian had embellished the city, he attributes to the concourse of architects whom the emperor had brought from Britain, which province, he says, abounded with them. The number of these Roman architects in Britain was so great and their skill so preeminent, that, as we shoal hereafter see they were exported into many of the continental cities to construct buildings in the Roman method.

The remains of Roman buildings found at different times in England and a multitude of ancient inscriptions testify to the fact that the conquerors had brought their architectural art with them into Britain. But the mere existence of pieces of architecture would not alone serve to establish the connection of these Roman architects and their British disciples with the mediaeval guilds. In this way we might, as Anderson has done, write a history of architecture, but would hardly be authorized to call it a history of Freemasonry. It is necessary to show that the Roman architects not only brought with them their skill in the art of building but also introduced the associated methods of organization which had been practiced by the ancient Roman Colleges. Of this we have ample evidence.

The Reverend James Dallaway, in his Collections for an Historical Account of Masters and Free Masons, appended to his Discourses upon Architecture in England, says that the first notice that occurs of an associated body of Roman artificers who had established themselves in Britain is a votive inscription in which the College of Masons dedicate a temple to Neptune and Minerva, and to the safety of the family of Claudius Caesar. It was discovered at Chichester in the year 1725. It is a slab of gray Sussex marble and was found by the workmen who were digging a cellar and who ignorantly or carelessly fractured it. Having been pieced together the slab is now preserved at Goodwood, the seat of the Duke of Richmond, near Chichester.

In his History of West Sussex, Mr. Dallaway gives a facsimile of the slab and the inscription, which is in the following words:

EPTVMO ET MINERVAE

TEMPLVM

B.SALVTE. DO. DIVINAE

AVCTORITA. CLAVD.

GIDVBNI. R. IC. . .CAI. BRIT.

. . GIVM. FABROR. E. QVI. IN. FO.

C.D.S.D. DONANTE. AREAM.

... ENTE. PVDENTINI. FIL.

The original is here given, to furnish to the unlearned reader an idea of the character of the inscriptions, which are the palpable monuments of the labors of these Colleges of Artificers, which have been found in all countries into which the Romans extended their power. The literal, but in some places conjectural, translation of this inscription is as follows :

“The College of Artificers and they who there fireside over the sacred rites by authority of King Cogidubnus, the Legate of Tiberius Claudius Augustus in Britain, dedicated this Temple to Neptune and Minerva, for the welfare of the imperial family. Pudens, the son of Pudentinus,having given the site.”

In an article on the Origin and Progress of Gothic Architecture, by Governor Pownall, inserted in the 9^th volume of the Archaeologia of the London Society of Antiquaries, this subject of the influence of the Roman artists on the native Britons is exhibited in an interesting point of view.

When the Romans conquered and held possession of our isle, says Governor Pownall, they erected every sort of building and edifice of stone or of a mixture of stone and brick, and universally built with the circular arch. The British learned their arts from these Masters.

But the Continent being more subject to the ravages of invading barbarians than the isolated province of Britain, many of the Gaulish cities and the fortresses on the Rhine were destroyed. And when Constantius Chlorus resolved, at the close of the 3^rd century, to rebuild them, he sent to Britain for architects to execute the work of re-edification.

By this withdrawal of the builders from the island of Britain and by transferring them to the Continent, Britain itself soon lost the knowledge which it had formerly acquired of the Roman architecture.

But after the establishment of the Christian religion in the empire, missionaries being sent to the provinces to convert the inhabitants, they brought with them from Rome not only the new religion but a revived knowledge of the arts, and especially of architecture, which was necessary for the building of churches.

As to the influence produced upon the Britons by their conversion to Christianity, Camden tells us that no sooner was the name of Christ preached in the English nation, than with a most fervent

zeal they consecrated themselves to it and laid out their utmost endeavors to promote it by discharging all the duties of Christian piety, by erecting churches and endowing them; so that no part of the Christian world could show either more or richer monasteries.

Thus the skill, which for a time had been suspended if not lost, was again revived by the architects and builders who were again brought from Rome to Britain by the Christian missionaries, who, says Pownall, were the restorers of the Roman architecture in stone.

The huge buildings of stone erected by the monks in England, ought perhaps to be attributed to a later period when the Saxons had gained possesion of the island But as Christianity had been introduced into England before that period and under the Roman domination, we may accede to the hypothesis that some of that kind of work was done at that early period.

We may, therefore, grant a large amount of plausibility to that part of the Legend of the Craft which reports the tradition that under the usurped reign of Carausius, St. Alban had organized the fraternity of Masons and bestowed upon them his patronage.

Whether the Legend is correct or not in attributing this important work to the protomartyr, it may at least be accepted as traditionally preserving the historical fact that Freemasonry was reorganized after the Roman method by the Christian missionaries.

There is abundant evidence in the old chronicles that the method of building in stone and with circular arches was always designated as opus Romanum or the Roman work, and an edifice so constructed was said to be built more Romanum, or according to the Roman method.

The error of the legendists, however, is that they attributed personally to Carausius, the usurper of the imperial power, the patronage of Masonry and the appointment of St. Alban as his chief architect or Master Mason; an error in which they have been followed by Anderson and all other Masonic writers.

Of this statement there is no competent historical evidence. Bede, Matthew of Westminster, and all the other old chroniclers, describe Carausius as a man of very mean extraction, treacherous to the government which employed him, unfaithful to the people whom he was sent to protect, sacrificing their interests to his own greed for spoil, and distinguished only for his ability as a soldier.

Of the piety and Christian constancy of Alban the same writers are lavish in their praises, but they make no reference to his skill as an architect or to his labors under Carausius as a builder. Even of his martyrdom there are said to be great chronological difficulties. Matthew of Westminster places its date eleven years after the death of Carausius. This would not militate against his previous employment by Carausius as the steward of his household, to use the words of Anderson, and the Master of his works, if there were any historical evidence of the fact.

If we appeal to the testimony of Camden, whose laborious researches have left no authority uncollected and no statement unexamined which refer to the early history of Britain under the Romans, we shall find no support for the traditions of the legendists or for their expansion by Anderson and the writers who have servilely followed him.

Of Carausius we only learn from Camden that after his reconciliation with Maximian, he governed Britain in perfect peace, and that he repaired the wall at the mouth of the Clud and fortified it with seven castles. The only reference made by Camden to St. Alban is in a passage where he says that toward the end of Diocletian s and Maximian s reign a long and bloody persecution broke out in the Western Church and many Christians suffered martyrdom, among the chief of whom he names Albanus Verolamiensis or St.t Alban. But he makes no allusion to him as an architect, nor does he mention the name of the apocryphal Amphibalus. Further on he attributes to the town of Verulam the honor of having given birth to St. Alban, whom he calls a man justly eminent for his piety and steadiness in the Christian faith; who with an invincible constancy of mind suffered martyrdom the first man in Britain. He relates the legends which were extant in connection with his passion, but while he dwells on his piety and his constancy to the faith which gave him all his fame, he says nothing of his labors as an architect nor does he in any way connect him with Carausius.

We must, therefore, reject the whole story of Carausius and St. Alban as apocryphal ; so far as it implies that the Emperor was a great patron of Masonry and the Saint his Master Workman, we find no historical foundation for it ; but we may accept it as a mythical statement, the true interpretation of which is that there was a revival of Masonry in England toward the time of the extinction of the Roman doaana6on, through the influence of the Christian missionaries, a fact for the truth of which we have, as has already been seen, sufficient authority.

Anderson says that the true old Masonry departed from Britain with the Roman legions; for though many Roman families had settled in the south and were blended with the Britons, who had been well educated in the science and the art, yet the subsequent wars, confusions, and revolutions in this island, ruined ancient learning, till all the fine artists were dead without exception.

Mr. Fergusson, a more learned and more accurate writer than Anderson, has arrived at almost the same conclusion. He says : When Rome withdrew her protecting care, France, Spain, and Britain relapsed into, and for centuries remained sunk in, a state of anarchy and barbarism as bat if not wove than that in which Rome had found them three or four centuries before. It was in vain to expect that the hapless natives could maintain either the arts or the institutions with which Rome had endowed them. (3)

But Fergusson subsequently makes a very important admission which greatly modifies the opinion he had just expressed when, in continuing the paragraph, he says: But it is natural to suppose that they would remember the evidences of her greatness and her power, and would hardly go back for their sepulchers to the unchambered mole-hill barrows of their forefathers, but attempt something in stone, though only in such rude fashion as the state of the arts among them enabled them to execute.

This is all that the theory advanced in this work contends for.

The assertion of Anderson is altogether too sweeping and general. That of Fergusson admits that the influences of Roman domination had not been entirely obliterated by the departure of the legions. Rome, which had administered the government for centuries, could hardly fail, to use his own language, to leave some impress of her magnificence in lands which she had so long occupied.

The concurrent testimony of all historians will not permit us to deny or to doubt that after the extinction of the Roman dominion in Britain, there was a decadence of architecture as well as of the other arts. But this did not amount to a total destruction, but only to a suspension. Nations who have emerged from barbarism to civilization, and who for centuries have enjoyed the refinements of culture, do not at once relapse into their primitive savage state. There was certainly not sufficient time for the exhibition of this ethnological curiosity in the period embraced between the departure of the Romans and the firm establishment of the Anglo-Saxons. Nor was there that isolation which was necessary to hasten this fall from national light to national darkness. The southern parts of Britain, at least, were in too close a propinquity to more civilized and more Romanized Gaul to lose at once all traces of Roman refinement. And above all, the presence and the influence of the Christian missionaries who, coming from Rome, were uninterruptedly engaged in the task of converting the natives to the new faith, must have been a powerful stay to any downward progress to utter barbarism.

The links of the chain that united the builders of Britain with those of Rome had only rusted; they were not rudely snapped asunder. The influence of the methods of building pursued by the Roman Colleges of Artificers, who had done so much work and left so many memorials in Britain, were still to be felt and to be renewed when these links were strengthened and brightened by the Anglo-Saxons.

But this is anew and an important subject that demands consideration in another chapter for it brings us to an interesting phase in the history of Freemasonry.

CHAPTER VII

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MASONRY AMONG THE ANGLO-SAXONS

After the departure of the Roman legions and the withdrawal of the Roman protection, Britain, left to its own resources, was soon harassed by the invasions of Scots and Picts, by predatory excursions of barbarians from the opposite shores of the North Sea, and by civil distractions which were the natural result of the division of power among many rival petty principalities.

Among the Britons there was one leader, Gwotheyrn, or, as he is more generally called, Vothgern, who seems to have assumed, if he did not legally possess it, a predominating position over the other British princes. Feeling, after various unsuccessful attempts, that he could not, by his unaided forces, repulse the invaders, he sought the assistance of the Saxons.

The Saxons were a tribe of warlike sea-kings who occupied the western shore of what has since been known as the Duchy of Holstein, with the neighboring islands on the coast. Brought across the sea by the invitation of the Britons, they soon expelled the Picts and Scots. But, attracted by the delights of the climate and the fertility of the soil, so superior to the morasses of their own restricted and half-submerged territory, they remained to contest the possession of the island with its native inhabitants.

Hence there followed a series of conflicts which led at last to the expulsion of the native Britons, who were forced to retire to the southwestern parts of the island, and the establishment of tlie Saxon domination in England.

During the period of intestine wars which led to this change, not only of a government, but of a whole people, it is not to be supposed that much attention could have been paid to the cultivation of architecture or Masonry. Amid the clash of arms the laws are silent, and learning and the arts lie prostrate.

Yet we are not to believe that all the influences of the preceding four or Eve centuries were wholly paralyzed. Gildas, it is true, complains in querulous language and an involved style, in the Epistle which is annexed to his History, of the wickedness both of the clergy and the laity, but the greatest licentiousness is not altogether incompatible with the preservation of some remains of the architectural skill and taste which had been originally imparted by the Roman artificers.

The Saxons themselves were not a thoroughly barbarous people. The attempts to subdue the tribes of Germany as they had those of Spain, of Gaul, and of Britain were not very successful. The ferocious bravery of the Germans under the leadership of the great Hermann, into Herminius by Tacitus, was able to stem the progress of the Roman legions in the interior of the country and to confine them eventually to the possession of a few fortresses on the Rhine.

The German tribes, among whom we are, of course, to count the Saxons, were thus enabled to retain their own manners, customs, and language, while their communication with the legions, both in war and in peace, must have imbued them with some portion of Roman civilization.

Many new ideas, feelings, reasoning and habits, says Mr. Turner, must have resulted from this mixture, and the peculiar minds and views of the Germans must have been both excited and enlarged. The result of this union of German and Roman improvement was the gradual formation of that new species of the human character and society which has descended, with increasing melioration, to all the modern states of Europe.

Dr. Anderson, when describing the Saxon invasion of Britain, says that the Anglo-Saxons came over all rough, ignorant heathens, despising everything but war; nay, in hatred to the Britons and Romans, they demolished all accurate structures and all the remains of ancient learning, affecting only their own barbarous manner of life, till they became Christians.

Entick and Northouck, in their subsequent editions of the Book of Constitutions, havc repeated this slander, which, even if it were a truth, could not have forever obliterated the connection which we are seeking to trace between the Masonry of the Roman Colleges and that of mediaeval England; because, although it might have been suspended by Saxon barbabsn, it is easy to prove that it could have been renewed by subsequent intercourse with the architects of France.

But against this careless misrepresentation of Anderson and his subsequent editors, let us trace the more accurate and better digested views of the historian of the Anglo-Saxons.

Mr. Turner, when writing of the arrival of Hengist with his Saxon followers in England, says: The Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain must therefore not be contemplated as a barbarization of the country. Our Saxon ancestors brought with. them a superior domestic and moral character, and the rudiments of new political, juridical, and intellectual blessings. An interval of Aaughor and desolation unavoidably occurred before they established themselves and their new systems in the island. But when they had completed their conquest, they laid the foundations of that national constitution, of that internal polity, of those peculiar customs, of that female modesty, and of that vigor and direction of mind, to which Great Britain owes the social progress which it has so eniinently acquired.

The fact is that, though the Saxons introduced a style of their own, to which writers on architecture have given their name, they borrowed in their practice of the art the suggestions left by the Romans in their buildings, and used the materials of which they were composed. Thus a writer on this subject says that the Saxons appear to bave formed for themselves a tolerably regular and rude style, something midway between the indigenous and the Roman in its details, and he attributes this to the buildings left by the Romans in the country, which, though rare, must have been sufficiently abundant long after their departure from the island.

Abundant evidence will be shown in the course of the present chapter that there was not a total disruption of Saxon architecture and Masonic methods of associated labor from that which was first introduced into Britain by the architects of the Roman Colleges. There were, of course, some modifications to be attributed partly to a want of experienced skill, partly to the suggestions of new ideas, and partly to the influence of novel religious relations. The temple, for instance, of the Romans had to be converted into the church of the Christians, but the Roman basilica was the model of the Saxon church, and the Roman architect was closely imitated, as well as could be, by his Saxon successor. The spirit and the influence and the custom of the Roman College was not lost or abandoned.

Scarcely more than a century elapsed between the arrival of the Saxons and the entire subjugation of the country, and that space of time is to be divided among the briefer periods required for the continued successes of different chieftains. Thus it took Hengist only eight years after his first coming to firmly establish himself in the kingdom of Kent.

Only forty years after the establishment of the Saxon octarchy, Pope Gregory sent St. Augustine from Rome with missionaries to convert the Saxons to the faith of Christianity.

During all this interval many Roman buildings had existed in England, which, from their size and magnificence of construction, must have become models familiar to the Saxons. The temples of the Saxon idols had been constructed of wood, and as Gregory permitted them to be converted into Christian places of worship, the Saxon churches at first were almost all of that material. There was a deficiency of better materials. But we find an effort to use them whenever they could be obtained, so that a kind of construction called stone carpentry prevailed, in which we find a wood design contending with stone materials. But in not much later tinaes, and long before the Norman Conquest or the introduction of Gothic architecture, the Saxons built their churches, monasteries, and other public edifices entirely of stone.

Although it may be admitted that the pagan Saxons on their first arrival did indeed destroy many of the churches which had been erected by the British Christians and expelled the priests, yet it must be remembered that by the subsequent advent of Augustine from Rome a new life was restored to architecture and the arts, and that as Mr. Paley says, the frequent missions and pilgrimages to Rome, together with the importation of Italian churchmen, which took place as early as the end of the 7^th century, must have exercised great influence upon ecclesiastical architecture in England.”

It will be seen hereafter that the Saxons repeatedly resorted to the aid of foreign workmen from Rome or from Gaul in the construction of their churches, so that the influences of the Roman system which was derived in former times from the Roman Colleges continued at frequent intervals to be renewed, and the link of connection was thus kept unbroken.

The principal difference between the works of the Roman and the Saxon architects has been supposed to be that the former built in shine and the latter in wood. And if this were true, it is evident that all inquiry into the nature of Saxon architecture must be at an end ; for as the wooden edifices must have long since perished, all the remens of stone structures which have been excavated in England will have to be attributed to the age of the Roman domination before the invasion of the Saxons, or to that which succeeded the conquest by the Normans. The perishable fabrics of timber erected by the Saxons would have left no traces behind.

The erroneous opinion that the Saxons built all their churches of timber was first advanced by Stow, in his Survey of London, and afterward by Mr. Somner in his Antiquities of Canterbury, who says that before the Norman advent most of our monasteries and church buildings were of wood, and he asserts that upon the Norman Conquest these fabrics of timber grew out of use and gave place to stone buildings raised upon arches.

But the Rev. J. Bentham, in his History of the Cathedral Church of Ely, has refuted the correctness of this view with unanswerable arguments. He has shown that although there were some instances of wooden edifices, yet that the Saxon churches were generally built of stone, with pillars, arches, and sometimes vaultings of the same material. And he adds the following remarks, which are important in the present connection as showing that the Roman influence continued to be felt in the Saxon times, and thus that the chain which we are tracing remained unbroken.

“There is great probability that at the time the Saxons were converted the art of constructing arches and vaultings and supporting stone edifices by columns was well known among them; they had many instances of such kind of buildings before them in the churches and other public edifices erected in the times of the Romans. For notwithstanding the havoc that had been made of the Christian churches by the Picts and Scots, and by the Saxons themselves, some of them were then in being. Bede mentions two in the city of Canterbury. Besides these two ancient Roman churches it is likely there were others of the same age in different parts of the kingdom, which were then repaired and restored to their former use.”

Of the two Roman churches for whose existence Bentham refers to the authority of Bede, that venerable historian says, There was on the east side of the city a church dedicated to the honor of St. Martin, built while the Romans were still in the island, wherein the queen, who, as has been said before, was a Christian, used to pray, and of the other that Augustine recovered in the royal city a church which he was informed had been built by the ancient Roman Christians, and consecrated it to our Saviour.

In an article on Anglo-Saxon architecture, published in the Archaeological Journal for March, 1844, Mr. Thomas Wright (no mean authority on antiquarian science) has, like Mr. Bentham, successfully combated the doctrine that all the Saxon churches were wooden. I think, . he says, the notion Anglo-Saxon churches were all built of wood will now hardly find supporters. He admits, which none will deny, that there were structures of this kind. A few wooden churches are mentioned in Domesday Book, and we learn from other authorities that there were some others. But he contends that a careful perusal of the early chroniclers would afford abundant proof that churches were not only abundant among the Anglo-Saxons but that they were far from being always mean structures.

Speaking of the Saxon churches, which Odericus Vitalis tells us were repaired by the Normans immediately after the conquest, he remarks that if they had been mean structures and in need of repairs, it is more probable that the Normans would have built new ones. The conclusions which are to be drawn from Mr. Wright s article are that while there were undoubtedly some wooden structures, just as there are in this day, the Anglo-Saxons built many churches, and built them sumptuously of stone, and in the Roman manner.

The Rev. Richard Hart is therefore right when he says, on the authority of the architect Mr. Rukman, that in the construction of their churches, the Anglo-Saxons imitated Roman models; as might naturally be expected, considering that Rome was the source from which their Christianity had been derived, the birthplace of many of their prelates and clergy, and at that period the very focus of learning and civilization.

It has been conceded that during the comparatively brief period that was occupied by the Saxons after their arrival in Britain until they obtained complete possession of the country, the intestine wars between them and the natives must have had the effect of suspending the pursuit of architecture. But it has been shown that this suspension did not altogether obliterate the influence of the Roman builders. who had established their methods of building when the island was a province of the empire. And it has also been seen that the destruction by the Saxons of the Christian churches which had been built by Roman architects was not so thorough or so universal as has been supposed by some writers, and that they did not, as Northouck, amplifying the language of Anderson, says, root out all the sands of learning and the arts that the Romans had planted in Britain.

On the contrary, we have the evidence of the Venerable Bede and the repeated testimony of modern excavations that there were at the time of the Saxon conversion to Christianity at least two Roman churches standing which might serve as models for the Saxon Masons, and numerous remains of Roman buildings which afford materials for new structures.

And now, after the conversion, we find the chain connecting Roman Masonry with that pursued by the Saxons renewed and strengthened not only by these models, but by the direct influence of the prelates who were sent from Rome, and who brought with them or sent for workmen to Rome and Gaul, who might carry out More Romano (in the Roman manner) their designs in the building of churches and monasteries.

Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, a work, however, in which we must not place implicit confidence, says that on the permanent settlement of Augustine in Britain, at the close of the 6^th century, when Ethelbert, the King, had been converted, and the people generally were accepting the new, religion, the princes and nobles were very zealous in building and endowing churches and religious houses, and many of them travelled to Rome and other foreign parts to improve themselves in the sacred sciences.

That there was at that time a constant and uninterrupted communication between Rome and Britain is evident from the frequent epistles from Gregory, the Pontiff, to Augustine and to the King, Ethelbert. Missionaries were also sent to Britain to assist Augustine in his pious work, and it is not at all improbable that Masons came with them from Rome, or from Gaul, to be employed in the construction of churches and monasteries, with which the land was being rapidly filled.

But we have more to rely on than mere supposition. There are abundant records showing that workmen were imported from abroad for the purpose of building, and that thus the Roman method was renewed in the island.

Anderson is not, therefore, strictly correct when he says that the Anglo-Saxons, affecting to build churches and monasteries, palaces and fine mansions, too late lamented the ignorant and destructive conduct of their fathers, but knew not how to repair the public loss of old architecture. It has been shown that there were some models of Roman buildings still remaining, and there was no ignorance of the need of obtaining workmen from Rome or Gaul, and no want of opportunity to obtain them.

He is, therefore, more historically right when he adds, though it contradicts his former assertion, that these works required many Masons, who soon formed themselves into societies or lodges by direction of foreigners who came over to help them.

He is altogether wrong in saying that the Saxons adopted the Gothic style in building. That style of architecture was not invented until long afterward.

In the year 627, Edwin, King of Northumbria, who had been converted by Paulinus, one of the missionaries of Augustine, was baptized in the city of York, the capital of his kingdom. While receiving the necessary religious instructions he built a temporary church of timber, in which the sacrament of baptism might be administered. But immediately afterward, under the direction of Bishop Paulinus, he caused the foundation to be laid of a larger and nobler church, of stone, which, although immediately begun, was not finished until after his death, by his successor, Oswald.

Although Bede, in narrating the event, says nothing of any foreign aid that had been asked or received in its construction, yet it is evident from the facts that the church was built of stone and in a square form, like a Roman basilica, and would imply the necessity of Roman Masons, or other foreigners imbued with the Roman method, to superintend the work.

In the assembling of foreign Masons at York to erect St. Peter s Church, under the auspices of King Edwin, is supposed by modern Masonic writers to be the assembly incorrectly referred to in the Legend of the Craft as an assembly held at York, under the patronage of Prince Edwin, the son of Athelstan, three hundred years afterward. But this subject has been so thoroughly discussed in the preceding part of this work, under the head of the York Legend, that it is unnecessary to renew the controversy.

Besides St. Peter s, at York, Paulinus built many other churches. Some of them we know were of stone, and the others might have been of the same material, as Bentham says, for aught that appears to the contrary. He was certainly a great patron of ecclesiastical architecture, but Anderson makes no mention of him, although, according to his fashion, he should have styled him, as he does Charles Martel, a Right Worshipful Grand Master.

Another distinguished architect, of a not much later period, was Benedict Biscop, Abbot of Weremouth, whom the Roman Church has canonized. In the year 675 he built a church at Weremouth, and two monasteries, one at Weremouth and one six miles distant The Roman basilica, or Hall of Justice, was the model of all the early churches built by Roman architects, and the old basilica, were often converted with but little change into churches by the Christian emperors. from Jarrow. Of these Bede has given a particular account in his history of them. He tells us that the abbot went over into France to engage workmen to build his church after the Roman manner, and brought many back for that purpose The monk was prosecuted with such vigor that within a year the church was completed and divine service performed in it.

But a very important fact stated by Bede is that when the church was nearly finished Benedict sent over to France for artificers skilled in the mystery of making glass (an art hitherto unknown in Britain), who glazed the windows and taught the art to the Saxons. We learn from this statement that it was customary with the Saxons to seek assistance from the skill of the continental artists and handicraftsmen. This will explain the true meaning of the passage in the Legend of the Craft, which refers to the introduction of French and other Masons into England in the 7^th century, in the time of Charles Martel, and afterward at the supposed Assembly at York, in the 10^th century. And it affords a confirmation of what has been frequently said in the previous part of this work, that the Legend of the Craft, though often chronologically absurd and incorrect in many of its details, yet has throughout in its most important particulars a really historical foundation.

The historians of that period supply us with many proofs that churches and monasteries were erected by the Saxons of stone after the Roman manner, or that they sent abroad for architects to superintend the construction of their buildings.

Eddius Stephanus, who flourished at the beginning of the 8^th century, and whose name has been transmitted to posterity by his Life of Saint Wilfrid, informs us that that saint, who was also Bishop of York about the middle of the 7^th century, erected many sumptuous buildings in his diocese and thoroughly repaired the church of St. Peter at York, which had been much injured in the war between the Mercians and the Northumbrians. But Eddius especially refers to two churches built by Wilfrid, the one at Ripon in Yorkshire and the other at Hexham in Northumberland.

Of the former he says that Wilfrid built a church at Ripon from the foundations to the top of polished stone, (1) and supported it with various columns and porticos. This polished stone as a material and these columns and porticos, where arches would probably be required, indicate the presence and the instruction of Roman architects, whether they came from Rome or Gaul.

But of all his works, the church of St. Andrew at Hexham seems to have been the most magnificent. Hexham was a part of the crown-lands of the Kings of Northumbria, and, having been settled in dower on Queen Ethelrida by King Egfrid, a grant of it was made to Wilfrid for the purpose of erecting it into an episcopal see.

Wilfrid began to lay the foundations of the cathedral church in the year 674. Eddius speaks of it in terms of great admiation, and says that there was no other building like it on this side of the Alps. He describes its deep foundations and the subterranean rooms, all of wonderfully polished stones, and of the building consisting of many parts above ground, supported by various columns and many porticos, ornamented with a surprising length and height of walls, and surrounded by mouldings, and having turnings of passages sometimes ascending or descending by winding stairs, so that he asserts that he had not words to explain what this priest, taught by the spirit of God, had contemplated doing.

Five centuries after, in 1180, the remains of this famous church were still standing, though in a condition of decay. Richard, Prior of Hexham, who lived at that time, describes the church with still more minuteness. He says that the foundations were laid deep in the earth for crypts and subterranean oratories, and the passages underground which led to them were contrived with great exactness. The walls were of great length and height, and divided into three separate stories, which were supported by square and other kinds of well-polished columns. The walls, the capitals of the columns which supported them, and the arch of the sanctuary were decorated with historical representations, images, and various figures in relief, carved in stone and painted in an agreeable variety. The body of the church was encompassed with penthouses and porticos which, above and below, were divided with wonderful art by partition walls and winding stairs. Within the staircases and upon them were flights of stone steps and passages leading from them, both ascending and descending, which were disposed with so much art that multitudes of people might be there and go all around the church without being perceived by any one who was in the nave. Many beautiful private oratories were erected with great care and workmanship in the several divisions of the porticos, in which were altars in honor of the Blessed Virgin, of St. Michael, Archangel, of St. John the Baptist and of the holy Apostles, martyrs, confessors, and virgins, with the proper furniture for each. Some of these, Prior Richard says, were remaining; at his day, and appeared like so many turrets and fortified places.

Of a church of such grand proportions, such massive strength, and such artistic construction, it cannot, for a single moment, be supposed that it was built by the uncultivated skill of Saxon Masons. The stone material, the supporting arches, the intricate passage, the winding stairs, all proclaim the presence of foreign architects and a continuation or a resumption in England of the methods of Roman Masonry.

Nor is this at all improbable. Wilfrid, although a Saxon, had from an early age received his ecclesiastical education in Rome, and after his return to Northumberland had not only maintained a constant correspondence with, but had made several visits to, the imperial city, and was personally well acquainted with France. When, therefore, he commenced the construction of important religious houses of such magnitude, he had every facility for the importation of foreign workmen, and there can be no reason for denying that he availed himself of the opportunities which were afforded to him. Indeed the Venerable Bede conceeds this when he says that the most reverend Wilfrid was the first of the English bishops who taught the churches of the English nation the Catholic, that is the Roman, mode of life.

During the long period of forty-five years, in which he occupied the Episcopal See of York, Bishop Wilfrid caused a very great number of churches and monasteries to be built, and must in that way have greatly enlarged and improved the architectural skill of his people by the introduction of foreign artists.

Singularly enough, neither Anderson nor his successors, Entick and Northouck, in the various editions of the Rook of Conctitutions have thought him to be worthy of the slightest mention, though undoubtedly we have historical evidence that he was far better entitled than that less important and less useful man, St. Alban, to have it said of him that he loved Masons well and cherished them much.

Indeed all that is said in the Legendof the Craft of the protomartyr might with more plausibility be ascribed to Wilfrid, Bishop of York.

Bentham, in his History of the Cathedral Church of Ely, has said of Wilfrid, relying on the almost contemporaneous authority of Bede, of Eddius Stephanus and of Richard, the Prior of Hexham, that in consequence of the favor and the liberal gifts bestowed upon him by the kings and the nobility of Northumberland, he rose to a degree of opulence so as to vie with princes in state and magnificence and was thus enabled to found several rich monasteries and to build many stately edifices. In the prosecution of these great undertakings he gave due encouragement to the most skillful builders and artificers of every kind who were eminent in their several trades. He kept them in his service by proper rewards, or, as the Legend of the Craft says of St. Alban, he made their pay

right good

Some of these he obtained at Canterbury, whither they had been introduced by Augustine to aid him in the construction of the churches in Kent. Eddius is distinct on this point, for he says, in his Life of Wilfrid, that when he returned home from his visit to Canterbury, he brought back not only skillful singers, who might instruct his choirs in the Roman method of singing, but also Masons and artists of almost every kind.

Richard, Prior of Hexham, says that he secured from Rome, Italy, France, and other countries where he could find them, Masons and skillful artificers of other kinds, whom he brought to England for the purpose of carrying on his works.

William of Malmesbury also says that to construct the buildings that Wilfrid had designed Masons had been attracted from Rome by the hope of liberal rewards, and both Eddius, his biographer, and William of Malmesbury concur in declaring that he was eminent for his knowledge and skill in the science of architecture.

The spirit of improvement and the skill in architecture which had been introduced into Northumberland by its Bishop were not confined to his own country, but through his influence were extended to the other kingdoms of the Heptarchy. They made their way even into the more northern parts of the island, for Bede informs us that in the beginning of the 8^th century, Naitan, King of the Picts, sent messengers to Ceolfrid, Abbot of the Monastery of Weremouth, praying to have architects sent him to build a church in his nation after the Roman manner.

Hence, says Bentham, it should seem that the style of architecture generally used in that age in England was called the Roman manner, and was the same that was then used at Rome in Italy and in other parts of the empire.

Mr. John M. Kemble, when commenting on circumstances like these in the learned Introduction to his Diplomatic Codex of the Saxon Era, has very justly said that the great advance in civilization made especially in Northumberland before the close of the 7^th century proves that even the rough denizens of that inhospitable portion of our land were apt and earnest scholars.

The next eminent Saxon patron of Masonry of whom we have any record is Albert, who in 767 became the successor of Egbert as Archbishop of York. The church which had been built by Paulinus in the 7^th century, having been much dilapidated by a conflagration and not having been sufficiently repaired, was wholly taken down by Albert, who determined to rebuild it. This he did with the assistance of two eminent architects, his disciples, Eanbald, who succeeded him in the see of York, and the celebrated Alcuin, who afterward introduced learning into the court of Charlemagne, of whom he became the preceptor. Alcuin, in a poem On the Pontiffs and Saints of the Church of York, has given a full description of the rebuilding of the church, from which we may learn the degree of perfection to which architecture had then arrived. We find in that description the account of a complete and exquisitely finished piece of architecture, the new construction of a wonderful church, as Alcuin expresses it, consisting of a tall building supported by solid columns, with arches, vaulted roofs, splendid doors and windows, porticos, galleries, and thirty altars variously ornamented. This templum, says the poem of Alcuin, was built under the orders of the Master Albert by his two disciples, Eanbald and Alcuin, working harmoniously and devotedly.

The predatory aggressions of the Danish pirates, and their more permanent invasion in the latter part of the 9^th century, though marked by all the atrocities of a barbarous enemy, and with the destruction of innumerable churches and monasteries and the burning of many towns and villages, must of course have suspended for a time all progress in architecture. But it could have been only a temporary suspension. Their occupancy lasted but twelve years, and the knowledge of the Roman method which had been acquired by the Saxons could not have been lost in that brief period, nor were all the monuments of their skill destroyed. Enough remained for models, and many of the old Masons must have been still living when civilization was renewed in England by the restoration of Alfred to the throne.

Asser, the contemporary and the biographer of Alfred or whoever assumed his name, admits that during the Danish domination Matthew of Westminster, a Benedictine monk who lived in the 14^th century and whose narrative of events is valuable because it is that of a careful observer, tells us that with a genius of his own, not hitherto displayed by others, Alfred occupied himself in building edifices which were venerable and noble beyond anything that had been attempted by his predecessors, and that many Frenchmen and natives of other countries came to England, being attracted by his amiable and affable character and by the protection and gifts which he bestowed on all strangers of worth, whether noble or low-born. Among these foreigners we must naturally suppose that there were many architects and builders from France and Italy, who came to find employment in the various works on which the king was engaged. Matthew also tells us that Alfred bestowed one-sixth of his revenues on the numerous artisans whom he employed and who were skillful in every kind of work on land.

Florence of Worcester, a monk who wrote in the 12^th century, says that among the other accomplishments of Wilfrid he was skilled in architecture and excelled his predecessors in building and adorning his palaces, in constructing large ships for the security of his coasts, and in erecting castles in convenient parts of the country.

Indeed all the chroniclers of his own and following ages concur in attributing to the great Alfred, the best and wisest monarch who ever sat on the English throne, the resuscitation of Saxon architecture and the introduction anew into the kingdom of foreign architects from Italy and France, so that the connection between the Roman and the Saxon was continued without material interruption.

In the last year of the 9^th century, Alfred was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward, a prince who has been described as inferior to his father in learning and the love of literature, but who by his martial prowess greatly extended the boundaries of his dominions. lieve was written as late as the latter part of the 12^th century (“Essays on Archaeology,” i., 183). But even if this were correct, it would not affect the truth of the statement in the text.

In 924 Edward was succeeded by his illegitimate son, Athelstan. Although the records of the old chroniclers of England speak only of a few monasteries that were founded by Athelstan, the legendary history of the Craft assigns to him an important character as having granted a charter for the calling of an Assembly of Masons at the city of York. And to this Assembly the legendist as well as all modern writers up to a very recent period have sought to trace the origin of Freemasonry in England.

This subject has already been very fully discussed in the chapter on the York Legend, in the first part of the present work, and it will be unnecessary to renew the discussion here. I will only add

that since writing that chapter I have diligently examined all the charters granted by King Athelstan, copies of the originals of which are contained in the Codex Diplomaticus, published by the English Historical Society, and have failed to find in them any one in which there is the slightest allusion to the calling of an Assembly of Masons at York. If such a charter ever existed (of

which I have no idea), it has been irretrievably lost. The nonappearance of the charter certainly does not prove that it never was granted, but its absence deprives the advocates of the York theory of what would be the best and most unanswerable evidence of the truth of the Legend.

In fact Edgar, his nephew, who ascended the throne in 959, after the brief reigns of his father, Edmund, his uncle, Edred, and his brother, Edwy, was a greater encourager of architecture, or, as the old historians of Masonry would have called him, a better patron of the Craft, than Athelstan. During his reign the land was so seldom embroiled in strife that the early chroniclers have styled him Edgar the Pacific. Thus was he enabled to devote himself to the improvement of his kingdom and the condition of his subjects. He founded more than forty monasteries, and among them the magnificent abbey of Ramsay, in Huntingdonshire. From a description of this abbey, given in its history, which has been preserved by Gale, we are led to believe that in the reign of Edgar the old style of building churches in the square form of a basilica or Roman Hall of justice was beginning to be abandoned for the cruciform shape, as more symbolically suited to a Christian temple. He built also the old abbey church of Westminster, which Sir Christopher Wren says, in the Parentalia, was probably a good, strong building after the manner of the age, not much altered from the Roman way.

This way, Wren says, was with piers or round pillars (stronger than Tuscan or Doric), round-headed arches and windows. And he refers, as instances of this method borrowed from the Roman, to various buildings erected before the Conquest.

Whatever may be said of the private and personal character of Edgar and he can not be acquitted of the charge of licentiousness, as a monarch he certainly sought to improve the condition of his kingdom, to secure the comfort of his subjects, and to encourage the cultivation of the arts and sciences, among which architecture was not the least prominent.

It is hardly necessary to pursue the details of the condition of the art of building in the few remaining years of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty. Such a plan would be appropriate to a professional history of English architecture. But enough has been said to maintain the hypothesis of the origin and rise of Masonry, which is the special object of the present work.

It has already been shown that the system of associated workmen in the craft of building arose in the Roman Colleges of Artificers, of Builders, or of Masons, call them by either name; that this system, with the skill that accompanied it, was introduced from Rome into Britain at the time of the real conquest of that island by Claudius, by the artisans who followed the legions and became colonists of the province ; that on the accession of the Saxons to the government of the country, though the Britains were driven to the remoter parts of the island in the West, monuments of the Roman workmen remained to perpetuate the method; that the Saxons themselves were not a wholly barbarous people, and that by their rapid conversion to Christianity the communication with Rome was renewed through the missionaries who came to them from that city; that when the monks began the construction of religious houses they sent to Italy or to Gaul for workmen who were educated in the Roman method ; and that thus, by the architectural works which were accomplished under ecclesiastical auspices, the continuous chain which connected the Masons of the Roman Colleges with the Saxon builders remained unbroken.

From the death of Edgar to the final extinction of the Saxon dynasty and the establishment of the Norman race upon the throne of England, though history records few great architectural achievements, nothing was absolutely lost of the skill and the methods of Masonry which had been acquired in the lapse of centuries and from continual communications with foreign artists. Even the interpolation of the reigns of three Danish kings, of which two were very brief, produced no disastrous effects. So when Harold, the last Saxon monarch, was slain at the battle of Hastings, in the year 1066, and the crown passed into the possession of the Norman William, many specimens of Saxon architecture were still remaining.

There is one episode in the history of the Anglo-Saxons which is of too much importance to be passed over without an extended notice. I allude to the establishment of Guilds. These were confraternities which, as will hereafter be shown, gave form and feature to the organization of the modern Masonic Lodges.

But this is a subject of so much interest in the present inquiry that it can not be dismissed at the close of the investigation of a different though cognate topic. Its consideration must therefore be deferred to the succeeding chapter.

CHAPTER VIII

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THE ANGLO-SAXON GUILDS

A guild signified among the Saxons a fraternity or sodalily united together for the accomplishment by the cooperative exertions of the members of some predetermined purpose.

The word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon verb gildan, “to pay,” and refers to the fact that every member of the Guild was required to contribute something to its support. hence Cowel defines Guilds to be “ fraternities originally contributing sums towards a common stock.”

Assuming that the characteristic of a Guild organization is that it is a society of men united together for mutual assistance in the accomplishment of an object, or for the cultivation of friendship, or for the observance of religious duties, we may say that the Guild has under some of these aspects existed in all civilized countries from the earliest ages.

The priesthood of Egypt was a fraternity containing in its organization much that resembles the more modern Guild, the priests possessing peculiar privileges and constituting a body isolated from the rest of the nation, by the right of making their own laws and electing their own members, who were received into what may be appropriately called the sacerdotal Guild, by certain ceremonies of initiation. The trades and handicrafts were divided into their various professions. Thus the artificers and the boatmen of the Nile were each a separate class, and as the practice of a trade was made hereditary and was restricted to certain families, we may well suppose that each of these classes constituted a Guild. And it may be remarked, in passing, that while the handicraftsmen and traders were generally held by the higher orders among the Egyptians in low repute, the art of building seems to have occupied a higher place in the national estimation, for while we find no record on the funeral monuments of any of the other working-classes, the names of architects alone appear in the inscriptions with those of priests, warriors, judges, and chiefs of provinces, the only ranks to which the honor of a funeral record was permitted.

The Eranos among the Greeks was in every minute respect the analogue of the Guild. Donnegal defines it to be “ a society under certain rules and regulations having a fund, contributed by the members, formed for various purposes, such as succoring indigent members.”

Clubs or societies of this kind established for charitable or convivial purposes, and sometimes for both, were very common at Athens, and were also found in other cities of Greece. These Grecian Guilds were founded on the principle of mutual relief. If a member was reduced to poverty, or was in temporary distress for money, he applied to the Eranos, or Guild, and the relief required was contributed by the members. Sometimes it was considered as a loan, to be repaid when the borrower was in better circumstances. The Eranos met at stated periods, generally once a month, had its peculiar regulations, was presided over by an officer styled the Eranarches, and the Eranistai, or members, paid each a monthly contribution. There does not really appear to have been any material difference between the organization of these sodalities and the Saxon and mediaeval social Guilds.

It is scarcely necessary, after the description that has already been given of the Roman Colleges of Artificers, to say that they were analogous to the Craft Guilds. Indeed, it is a part of the hypothesis maintained in the present work, that the latter derived, directly or indirectly, the sugges6on of their peculiar form as associated craftsmen from the former.

The Agape or Love Feasts of the early Christians, though at first established for thecommemoration of a religious rite, subsequently, became guild-like in their character, as they were sustained by the contributions of the members, and funds were distributed for the relief of widows, orphans, and the poorer brethren. Indeed, they are supposed by ecclesiastical writers to have imitated the Grecian Eranos. The Government looked upon them as secret societies, and they were consequently denounced by imperial edicts.

Brentano, who has written a learned introduction to Toulmin Smith’s English Guilds, published by the Early English Text Society, is disposed to trace the origin of Guilds to the feasts of the old German tribes from Scandinavia, which were also called Guilds. Among the German tribes, all events that especially related to the family, such as births, marriages, and deaths, were celebrated by sacrificial feasts in a family reunion. Similar feasts took place on certain public occasions and anniversaries, which often afforded an opportunity for the conclusion of alliances for piracy and plunder by one tribe or another.

I am not inclined to trace the origin of the Saxon and English Guilds to so degenerate a source, and I subscribe to the opinions expressed by Wilda, one of the ablest of the German writers on this subject, who cannot find anything of the true nature of the Guild in these Scandinavian feasts of the family. Hartwig, who has also investigated this point, agrees with Wilda.

Yet it is very evident that the sentiment of the Guild-that is, the desire to establish fraternal relations for mutual aid and protection-was not peculiar to the Saxons. It may rather be contemplated as a human sentiment, arising from the innate knowledge of his own condition, which makes man aware of his infirmity and weakness in isolation, and causes him to seek for strength in association with his fellow-man.

The similitude, therefore, if not the exact form of the Guild, has appeared in almost all civilized nations, even at the remotest periods of their own history. Wherever men accustom themselves to meet on stated occasions, to celebrate some appointed anniversary or festival and to partake of a common meal, that by this regular communion a spirit of fraternity may be established, and every member may feel that upon the association with which he is thus united he may depend for relief of his necessities or protection of his interests, such an association, sodality, or confraternity, call it by whatever name you may, will be in substantial nature a Guild.

Wilda thinks that the peculiar character of the Guilds was derived from the Christian principle of love, and that they actually originated in the monastic unions, where every member shared the benefits of the whole community in good works and prayers, into the advantages of which union laymen were afterward admitted.

But the untenableness of this theory is evident from the fact that the same characteristic of mutual aid existed in the pagan nations long before the advent of Christianity, and was presented in those sodalities which represent the form of the modern Guild.

Besides the admission of Wilda and Hartwig that the early Saxon Guilds were so tinctured with the superstitious customs of the pagan sacrificial feasts, and that the Church had to labor strenuously and for a long time for their suppression, would prove that we must look beyond the monasteries for the true origin of the Guild.

I am inclined, therefore, to attribute them to that spirit of associated labor and union of refreshment which had existed in the Roman Colleges of Artificers, where, as has been already shown, there exited that organized union of interests which continued to be displayed in the Guilds.

I will not aver that the Guilds were the legitimate and uninterrupted successors of the Roman Colleges, but I will say that the suggestion of the advantages to be derived from an association in work, regulated by ordinances that had been agreed on, governed by officers who might judiciously direct the exercise of skill and the employment of labor, the result of all of which was a combination of interests and the growth of a fraternal feeling, was suggested by these Roman institutions, and more especially adopted by the Craft Guilds, which, at a later period in the Middle Ages, directed all the architectural labors in every country of Europe.

Of these Craft Guilds many authors have traced the origin to the Roman Colleges. Brentano does not absolutely deny this hypothesis, but he thinks it needs to be proved historically by its defenders. He thinks it more probable that they descended from “ the companies into which, in episcopal and royal towns, the bond handicraftsmen of the same trade were ranged under the superintendence of an official, or that they took their origin from a common subjection to police control or from common obligations to pay certain imposts.”

It was in Germany that these episcopal communities existed.

Arnold, in his Constitutional History of the German Free Cities, describes one at Worms in the 11^th century. To the Manor of the Bishop were attached, among other dependants, a class of villeins or bondsmen called dagewardi. These were divided into colossi, or workmen on the country manor, and operaiii, or handicraftsmen, who were ranged, according to their trades, into different unions or societies. And it is from these that the continental Guilds of the Middle Ages have been erroneously supposed to have been derived. Still, when their bondage ceased, these societies may have developed themselves into Free Guilds; but the Free Guilds existed before, and the bond unions enforced by episcopal authority must have been organized simply for the convenience of the employer. There could not have been in them any of the peculiar characteristics of the free and independent Guild. But even if this speculative notion of Brentano, that the Guilds were derived from the enforced association of the episcopal and royal bond handicraftsmen, were admitted to be correct, it would be only lengthening the chain which connects them with the Roman Colleges by the insertion of another link, for we should have to look to these Roman sodalities for the idea of union and concerted action, which in either of those instances must have influenced the combination of handicraftsmen.

However, Brentano immediately repudiates the views which he had just advanced, and admits that they deserve no further consideration, because Wilda has shown that the Craft Guilds did not spring from subjection, but arose from the freedom of the handicraft class.

Now, it is precisely in this point that the Craft Guilds most resemble the Roman Colleges. Founded originally in the earliest days of Rome for the express purpose of giving to the workingclasses a separate and independent place in the public polity, they preserved this independence to the latest times and cultivated the spirt of freedom which sprang naturally from it.

Their spirit of freedom and independence indeed often bordered upon excess. Thus they were watched and feared in the latter days of the republic and during the empire because their love of freedom sometimes led them to inaugurate conspiracies against the Government, which they supposed had the design of subverting or diminishing their privileges. To protect these privileges and to preserve this freedom they instituted the office of Patrons, men of distinction and influence, not of their trade, but selected from the order of patricians. who were to be the conservators of their franchises.

There is abundant historical evidence that the system of Guilds was well known to the Anglo-Saxons. Mr. Toulmin Smith, to whom we are indebted for the collection of Guild charters of a later date, says that “ English Guilds, as a system of widespread practical institutions, are older than any kings of England. They are told of in the books that contain the oldest relics of English laws. The old laws of King Alfred, of King Ina, of King Athelstan, of King Henry I., reproduce still older laws in which the universal existence of Guilds is treated as a well-known fact, and in which it is taken to be a matter of course that everyone belonged to some Guild. As population increased Guilds multiplied; and thus, while the beginnings of the older Guilds are lost in the dimness of time and remain quite unknown, the beginnings of the later ones took place in methods and with accompanying forms that have been recorded.”

But it is not upon those laws alone that we have to depend for proof of the antiquity of the Saxon Guilds. The records of a few of the old Guilds still remain and show that the idea of association for mutual assistance, which is the very spirit of the Guild organization, was prevalent at least twelve centuries ago among our Saxon ancestors.

Among the laws of Ina, who reigned from 688 to 725, are two which relate to the liability of the brethren of a Guild in the case of slaying a thief. King Alfred also refers to the duties of the Guild when he decrees that in the case of a crime the Brothers of the Guild (gegyldan) shall pay a portion of the fine.

The Judicia Civitatis Lundonia or Statutes of the City of London, contain several ordinances for the regulation of the various Guilds, and prescribing the duties of the members. The “ Cnyhten Gyld,” or Young Men’s Guild, is mentioned by Stow as existing in the time of King Edgar, who granted the liberty of a Guild for, ever to “thirteene knights or soldiers well beloved of the king and the realme (for service by them done), which requested to have a certaine portion of land on the east part of the city, left desolate and forsaken by the inhabitants by reason of too much servitude.”

Thirteen was a favorite number in the religious guilds. Ducange explains the reason in a quotation which he makes from an Epistle to the Church of Utrecht, wherein it is said that a fraternity, commonly called a Guild, was formed, consisting of twelve men to represent the twelve apostles, and one woman to represent the Virgin Mary.”

The text of the “ writing,” or charter, by which Orky instituted a Guild at Abbotsbury has been preserved. Orky was the “ huscarl,” of one of the household troops, of Edward the Confessor, and there is a charter of that monarch extant in which he gives permission to Tole, the widow of Orky, or Urk, to bequeath her lands to the monastery at the same place in which the Guild was established.

The original charter of Orky’s Guild, as written in the AngloSaxon language, with a generally correct translation into English, has been inserted by Thorpe in his Diplomatarium. (4) As it is one of the earliest of the Saxon charters that is extant, and as it will be interesting in enabling the reader to collate its provisions with those of the later Guilds on the pattern of which the Masonic Guilds, or Fraternities, were formulated, it is here presented entire. It must, however, be observed that it was not a Craft, but a religious Guild, and hence we find no allusion to the privileges and obligations of the former, which always composed a part of their ordinances.

ORKY’S GUILD AT ABBOTSBURY.

“Here is made known in this writing that Orky has given the Guildhall and the place at Abbotsbury to the praise of God and St. Peter, and for the guildship to possess now and henceforth of him and his consort for long remembrance. Who so shall avert this, let him account with God at the great day of judgment.

The “huscarlas,” says Kemble, were among the Saxons, and, until after the Norman Conquest, the household troops or immediate body-guard of the King. “The Saxons in England,” vol. ii., p. 118. (4) “Diplomatarium Ang.,” pp. 605-608. I have ventured to make a few alterations in Thorpe’s translation, to conform more strictly to the Anglo-Saxon original. “ Now these are the covenants which Orky and the guild brothers at Abbotsbury have chosen to the praise of God and the honor of St. Peter and their souls’ need.

“This is first : Three nights before St. Peter’s Mass, from every guild brother one penny, or one penny worth of wax, whichever be most needed in the monastery, and on the mass’ eve one broad loaf, well raised and well sifted, for our common aims; and five weeks before Peter’s Mass day let every guild brother contribute one guildsester full of clean wheat, and let that be rendered within two days, on pain of forfeiting the entrance fee (ingang), which is three sesters of wheat. And let the wood be rendered within three days after the corn contribution, from every full guild brother (riht gegyldan) one burthern (byrthene) of wood, and two from those who are not full brothers, or let him pay one guild sester of corn. And he who undertakes a charge, and does it not satisfactorily, let him be liable in his entrance fee, and let there be no remission. And let the guild brother who abuses another within the guild, with serious intent, make atonement to all the society to the amount of his entrance, and afterward to the man whom he abused, as he may settle it, and if he will not submit to compensation, let him forfeit the fellows lip and every other privilege of the Guild. And let him who introduces more men than he ought, without leave of the steward and the purveyors (feomera), pay his entrance. And if death befall anyone in our society, let each guild brother contribute one penny at the corpse for the soul, or pay according to three guild brothers (gylde be pry gegildum). And if any one of us be sick within sixty miles, then we shall find fifteen men who shall fetch him; and if he be dead thirty; and they shall bring him to the place which he desired in his life.

And if he die in the vicinity, let the steward have warning to what place the corpse is to go, and let the steward then warn the guild brothers, as many as ever he can ride to or send to, that they come thereto and worthily attend the corpse and convey it to the monastery and earnestly pray for the soul. That will rightly be called a guildlaw which we thus do and it will beseem it well both before God and before the world; for we know not which of us shall soonest depart hence. Now we believe through God’s support that this aforesaid agreement will benefit us all if we rightly hold it.

“ Let us fervently pray to God Almighty that he have mercy on us ; and also to his holy Apostle St. Peter, that he intercede for us and make our way clear to everlasting rest; because for love of him we have gathered this guild (gegaderodon). He has the power in heaven that he may let into heaven whom he will, and refuse ,whom he will not; as Christ himself said to him in his Gospel: ‘Peter, I deliver to thee the key of heaven’s kingdom; and whatsoever thou wilt have bound on earth, that shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou wilt have unbound on earth, that shall be un- bound in heaven.’ Let us have trust and hope in him that he will ever have care of us here in the world, and after our departure hence, be a help to our souls; May he bring us to everlasting rest.”

These covenants, which in later Guild charters are called ordinances, and by the Mason Guilds constitutions, very clearly define the objects of the association. These were not connected with the pursuit of any handicraft, but were altogether of a religious and charitable nature. Infirm brethren were to be supported, the dead were to be buried, prayers were to be said for the repose of their souls, and religious services were to be performed. There was an annual meeting on the feast of St. Peter, and regulations were made for the collection of alms on that day for the benefit of the poor. Especial attention was paid to the preservation of fraternal relations of mutual kindness between the members.

In all this we see the germ of those similar regulations which are met with in the “ Constitutions of the Freemasons,” compiled in the 15^th, 16^th, and 17^th centuries, and which were, mutatis mutandis, finally developed in the regulations of the Speculative Masons in the 18^th century.

The essence of the regulations of this as well as of two other Guilds established about the same time, one at Exeter and the third at Cambridge, was the binding together in close fraternal union of man to man, which was sometimes fortified by oaths for the faithful performance of mutual help.

The charter of the “ Thanes’ Guild at Cambridge “ has been published by both Thorpe and Kemble from a Cottonian manuscript. As it contains some points not embraced in the charter of the Orky Guild, it is here presented, as a further means of collation with the charters of the later Craft Guilds. The original is of course in Anglo. Saxon, and I have adopted the translation of Thorpe, with the exception of a few emendations.

THE THANES’ GUILD AT CAMBRIDGE.

Here in this writing is the declaration of the agreement which this society has resolved in the Thanes’ Guild at Cambridge. That then is first that each should take an oath to the others on the halidom of true fidelity before God and the world. And all the society should support him who had most right If any guild brother die let all the guildship bring him to where he desired; and let him who should come thereto pay a sester (about eight quarts) of honey ; and let the guildship inherit of the deceased half a farm. And let each contribute two pence to the alms and thereof bring what is fitting to St. Aetheldryth. And if any guild brother be in need of his fellows’ aid and it be made known to the fellow nearest to the guild brother and, unless the guild brother himself be nigh, the fellow neglect it, let him pay one pound. If the lord neglect it, let him pay one pound unless he be on the lord’s need or confined to his bed. And if any one slay a guild brother let there be nothing for compensation but eight pounds. But if the slayer scorns the compensation let all the guildship avenge the guild brother and all bear tile feud. But if a guild brother do it let all bear alike. And if any guild brother slay any man and he be an avenger by compulsion and compensate for his violence and the slain be a nobleman let each guild brother contribute half a mark for his aid; if the slain be a churl (ceorl) two oras (100 pence) if he be Welch one ora. But if the guild brother slay any one through wantonness and with guile, let himself bear what he has wrought.

And if a guild brother slay his guild brother through his own folly let him suffer on the part of the kindred for that which he has violated, and buy back his guildship with eight pounds, or forever forfeit our society and friendship. And if a guild brother eat or drink with him who slew his guild brother unless it be before the king or the bishop of the diocese or the aldermen, let him pay one pound unless with his two bench comrades (gesetlung) he can deny that he knew him. If any guild brother abuse another let him pay a sester of honey unless he can clear himself with his two bench comrades. If a servant (cniht) draw a weapon let the lord pay one pound and let the lord get what he can and let all the guildship aid him in getting his money. And if a servant wound another let the lord avenge it and all the guildship together, so that seek he whatever he may (sece whet he sece) he have not life (feorh). And if a servant sit within the storeroom let him pay a sester of honey ; and if any one have a footstool let him do the same. And if any guild brother die out of the land or be taken sick let his guild brethren fetch him and convey him, dead or alive, to where he may desire, under the same penalty that has been said, if he die at home and the guild brother attend not the corpse And let the guild brother who does not attend his morning discourse (morjen space) pay his sester of honey.”

In this agreement of an early Guild, we will again notice that, though the regulations are few, they all partake of that spirit of mutual kindness which has characterized the Guild organizations of all ages, and of which the Masonic Lodge is but a fuller development

The principal points worthy of notice are as follows:

1.There was an oath of fidelity.

2.The sick were to be nursed and the dead buried.

3.A brother was bound to give aid to another brother if he were called upon.

4. If a member got into trouble or difficulty the Guild was to come to his assistance.

5. The injuries or wrongs of a member were to be espoused by the Guild.

6. To associate knowingly with one who had done injury to a member was a penal offense.

7. The severest punishment that could be inflicted on a member was expulsion from the body.

These seven points embrace the true spirit of the Masonic institution, and may be advantageously collated with the mediaeval Constitutions, and with the regulations and obligations of the modern Lodges.

That this collation of the older and the newer Constitutions may be more conveniently made, it will be necessary to anticipate the chronological sequence, and to present the reader the ordinances of two Craft Guilds, both of the 14^th century.

The first of these Constitutions, though the date affixed to it makes it apparently sixty years later than the second, was really much older. Foulmin Smith says that “the internal evidence shows that the substance of the ordinances is older than the date given.” As, in the beginning, they are said to be ordinances “ made and of ancient time assigned and ordained by the founders of the Guild,” he conjectures that they were first written in Latin, and that what we have “ are the early translation of a lost original with some later additions and alterations.”

The document now presented to the reader, and which has been taken from Toulmin Smith’s collection of English Guilds, which was published by the Early English Text Society, is the Guild of the Smiths of Chesterfield. The Guild united with that of the Holy Cross of Merchants in 1387. But as has already been said, the date of its institution must have been much earlier.

GUILD OF THE SMITHS OF CHESTERFIELD.

(The paragraphs are numbered for the convenience of future reference. There is no numbering in the original.)

1. “This is the agreement of the Masters and brethren of the Guild of Smiths of Chesterfield, worshipping before the greater cross in the nave of the church of All Saints there. The head men are an Elder Father, Dean, Steward and four Burgesses by whose oversight the guild is managed. Lights are to be found and be burnt before the cross on days named.

2. “ If any brother is sick and needs help, he shall have a halfpenny daily from the common fund of the guild until he has got

well. If any of them fall into want they shall go, singly, on given days, to the houses of the brethren where each shall be courteously received, and there shall be given to him, as if he were the Master of the house, whatever he wants of meat, drink and clothing, and he shall have a halfpenny like those that are sick and then he shill go home in the name of the Lord. 3. “ On the death of a brother twelve lights shall be kept burning round the body, until buried, and offerings shall be made. Round the body of a stranger or of the son of a brother, dying in the house of a brother four lights shall be kept burning. 4. “ If it befall that any of the brethren, by some hapless chance, and not through his own folly, is cast into prison, all his brethren are bound to do what they can to get him freed and to defend him.

5. “If any sick brother makes a will, having first bequeathed his soul to God, his body to burial and the altar gifts to the priests, he shall then not forget to bequeath something to the guild according to his means.

6. “ Whenever any one has borrowed any money from the guild, either to traffic with or for his own use, under promise to repay it on a given day, and he does not repay it, though three times warned, he shall be put under suspension, denunciation and excommunication-all contradiction, cavil and appeal aside-until he shall have wholly paid it. If he has been sick, the claim of the guild must be first to be satisfied. And if he dies intestate, his goods shall be held bound to the guild, to pay what is owing to it, and shall not be touched or sequestrated until full payment has been made to the guild.

7. “ Should it happen, [which God forbid] that any brother is contumacious; or sets himself against the brethren; or gainsays any of

these ordinances; or being summoned to a feast will not come; or does not obey the Elder Father when he ought nor show him due respect; or does not abide by what has been ordained by the Elder Father and greater part of the guild : he shall pay a pound of wax and half a mark. Moreover he shall be put under suspension, denunciation and excommunication, without any contradiction, cavil or appeal.

8. “ Any one proved to be in debt, or a wrong-doer, shall be deemed excommunicate, and shall presume to come to the meetings of the brethren, his company shall be shunned by all, so that no brother shall dare to talk with him, unless to chide him, until he has fully satisfied the Elder Father and the brethren, as well touching any penalty as touching the debt or wrong doing. 9. “ To keep and faithfully perform these constitutions, all the brethren have bound themselves by touch of relics.” Although, as its name imports, this is the sodality of a body of handicraftsmen, yet there is no reference to any regulations for work. In this respect it more resembles a Social than a Craft Guild. This deficiency is, however, supplied in the ordinances of the Tailors’ Guild at Lincoln, which is next to be given. This circumstance is ,one of the internal evidences that the Smiths’ Guild was much older than its charter purports.

The Tailors’ was a Craft Guild, and its provisions for the regulation of labor, though few, are striking and may be profitable compared with the more developed system subsequently adopted by the Masonic Craft Guilds. The date of the institution of the Tailors’ Guild is the year 1328. The paragraphs are here numbered for reference, as in the case of the former Guild.

THE TAILORS’ GUILD AT LINCOLN.

1..” All the brethren and sisters shall go in procession in the feast of Corpus Christi.

2. “ None shall enter the Guild as whole brother until he has paid his entry, a quarter of barley, which must be paid between Michaelmas and Christmas. And if it is not then paid, he shall pay the price of the best malt as sold in Lincoln Market on Midsummer day. And each shall pay 12 pence to the ale.

3. If any one of the Guild falls into poverty (which God forbid) and has not the means of support he shall have every week 7 pence out of the goods of the Guild; out of which he must discharge such payments as become due to the Guild.

4. “ If any one dies within the city, without leaving the means for burial, the Guild shall find the means according to the rank of him who is dead.

5. “ If any one wishes to make pilgramage to the Holy Land each brother and sister shall give him a penny; and if to St. James or to Rome a halfpenny; and they shall go with him outside the gates of the city of Lincoln, and on his return they shall meet him and go with him to his mother church.

6. “ If a brother or sister dies outside the city on pilgrimage or elsewhere, and the brethren are assured of his death they shall do for ,his soul what would have been done if he had died in his own parish.

7. “When one of the Guild dies, he shall, according to his means, bequeath 5 shillings or 40 pence or what he will to the Guild.

8. “ Every brother and sister coming into the Guild, shall pay to the chaplain as the others do.

9. “ There shall be four mornspeeches held in every year, to take order for the welfare of the Guild ; and whoever heeds not his summons shall pay two pounds of wax.

10. “ If any Master of the Guild takes any one to live with him as an apprentice in order to learn the work of the tailors’ craft, the apprentice shall pay 2 Shillings to the Guild or his Master for him, or else the Master shall lose his Guildship. 11. “ If any quarrel or strife arises between any brethren or sisters of the Guild, (which God forbid) the brethren and sisters shall with the advice of the Graceman and Wardens do their best to make peace between the parties, provided the case is such as can be thus settled without a breach of the law. And whoever will not obey the judgment of the brethren shall lose his Guildship, unless he thinks better of it within three days, and then he shall pay a stone of wax, unless he have grace.

12. “ On feast days, the brethren and the sisters shall have three flagons and six tankards with prayers and the ale in the flagons shall be given to the poor who most need it. After the feast, a Mass shall be said and offerings made for the souls of those who are dead.

13. “ Four lights shall be put round the body of any dead brother or sister until burial and the usual services and offerings shall follow.

14. “ If any Master of the Craft keeps any lad or sewer of another Master for one day after he has well known that the lad wrongly left his Master, and that they had not parted in a friendly and reasonable manner he shall pay a stone of wax. 15. “ If any Master of the Craft employs any lad as a sewer, that sewer shall pay 5 pence or his Master for him. 16. “ Each brother and sister shall every year give 1 penny for charity when the Dean of the Guild demands it, and it shall be given in the place where the giver thinks it most needed together with a bottle of ale from the store of the Guild. 17.” Officers who are elected and will not serve are to pay fines.”

It will be seen, on an inspection of these seventeen ordinances, that the Guild of Tailors of Lincoln combined the character of a Religious and a Craft Guild, The 15^th and the 16^th statutes regulate the conduct of the Masters in the prosecution of their trade, but all the others are appropriate to the regulation of religious services, to the practice of charity, and the inculcation of friendly and fraternal relations among the members.

In process of time the Craft Guilds, without losing altogether their religious features, which have been preserved to this day in the institution of Speculative Masonry, which is descended from them, began to enlarge the number of their ordinances for the regulation of work and workmen. As it will be necessary to give directly a specimen of the old Constitutions of the English Mediaeval Masons, which were nothing more nor less than ordinances of Masonic Craft Guilds, it will be proper, at the expense of a little recapitulation, to glance at the progress of these Craft Guilds. Some of the facts will refer equally to the Craft Guilds of the Continent, but only incidentally, as that topic will be treated hereafter as an independent topic. For the present our attention must bedirected exclusively to the rise and growth of the English Guilds of Craftsmen

It has been already seen that in the 11^th century, and even before, the inhabitants of a town were divided by the officers who governed the municipality, into freemen and bondsmen. To this last class belonged the handicraftsmen who were subjected to the payment of certain taxes and the performance of certain feudal services.

But there was also a class of free handicraftsmen who were not, as respects the carrying on of their business, subjected to the same servile indignities as the bondsmen. As the law made the distinction between the bond and free craftsmen, there was no necessity for the latter to enter into any association for the protection of their rights and privileges. They already formed a part of the governing and law-making power of the municipality, and were thus able to protect themselves.

But by a course of revolutions, which it is unnecessary to detail, the free handicraftsmen lost their place in the general Guild of the citizens. The burghers then began to feel a desire to subject them to the same imposts as were paid by the bond craftsmen.

These burghers, anxious for the prosperity of their towns, allowed foreigners. on the payment of a fee, to carry on their trade, which of course greatly affected the interests of the free craftsmen, by introducing competition.

Hence arose the necessity of association for that mutual protection of interests, which could not have been effected if the craftsmen continued in an isolated state, and from this arose the formation of Craft Guilds, which took the suggestion of their form from the older Guilds which had preceded them, most of which were, however, of a social or religious character.

The Craft Guilds thus established to suppress the encroachments of the burghers on their rights consisted at first, both in England and on the Continent, in France and in Germany especially, of the most eminent of the Craftsmen who were free, freedom being an indispensable qualification for admission into the fraternity.

But after the bond craftsmen were, by the liberal and humanizing progress of the age, emancipated from their bondage, many of them, leaving the companies into which they had been distributed during their bondage by there masters, became members of the Guilds of free craftsmen.

So now the handicrafts were divided into those who had always been free and those who had originally been bondsmen. And the only way in which the ci-devant bond craftsman could mingle on equal terms with the free craftsmen was by obtaining admission into and becoming, as it is called, “free of the Guild.” This was a high privilege and not easily conceded or obtained.

The free craftsman always held aloof from the craftsman who was not free, the word free not being used as the opposite of bondsman, but only to indicate one who was not a freeman of the Guild and who worked outside of its regulations.

We find that this allusion to freemen of the Guild is constantly used in the old charters. Such expressions as Free Carpenters, Free Weavers, Free Tailors, are not, it is true, to be found on record, though it is not unlikely that they were in colloquial use. But in the charter of the Guild of Tailors of Exeter, granted by Edward IV., and the original of which is in the archives of the Corporation of Exeter, whence it was copied by Toulmin Smith, (1) is the following heading of one of the sections of the Ordinances:

“The Othe of the Free Brotherys “-i.e., The Oath of the Free Brothers.

“ Free Brothers “ was a recognized expression in the early period of the organization of Craft Guilds, to indicate one who was a freeman of the Guild. The Masons appear to have preserved the use of the epithet with great pertinacity and used the term “ Freemason “ to distinguish those who were free of the Guild from those “rough layers” or “cowans” who had not been admitted to the privileges of the fraternity and with whom they were forbidden to work.

In every Masonic Constitution that has been preserved is the ordinance that “ no Mason shall make any mould, square, or rules to any rough layer.” The Free Mason could not, by the laws of the Guild, engage in labor with one who was not free.

It is thus that I trace the derivation of the word “ Freemason,” used now exclusively to indicate the member of a Lodge of Speculative Masons, but originally to denote a Mason who was free of his Guild.

I think this derivation much better than that which was the origin of the term to the French Frere Macon, or Brother Mason. Such a derivation would necessarily assign the birth of the English Masonic Guilds to a French parentage, a theory not only wholly unsupported by historical authority, but actually in contradiction to it. Indeed the French themselves have repudiated the idea, for they call a Freemason not a “ Frere Macon,” or brother Mason, but a “ Franc Macon,” Franc being the old French for free.

At first the Craft Guilds were voluntary associations, and could enforce their regulations only by the common consent of the members, but as in time some of these, unwilling to submit to the restrictions laid upon them, would withdraw and carry on their trade independently, it was found necessary to obtain the authority from the law, of the land to punish such contumacy and to protect the interests of the Guilds.

This was effected by a confirmation of the Guild ordinances by the lord, the citizens, or afterward by the King, and in this way arose the charters under which, after the time of Henry I., all the Craft Guilds acted and continued to act to the present day.

This process did not, however, entirely cure the evil, and in the 12^th century artisans of different trades and mysteries in London, being unwilling to unite with the incorporated Guilds or being un, able to obtain admission into them, erected themselves into fraternities without the necessary powers of incorporation. These were not recognized by the companies of freemen and were condemned by the king for their contumacious proceedings. (1) They were opprobriously denominated “ Adulterine Guilds,” and they remind us of the Collegia illicita, or unlawful Colleges, among the Romans, as well as of the “clandestine Lodges “ among the modern Speculative Masons.

The number of these Adulterine Guilds in the year 1180 was, according to Madox in his History of the Exchequer, fourteen, but no Guild of Masons is enumerated in the list.

Before proceeding to a comparison of the statutes, ordinances, or regulations of these early Guilds with the Masonic constitutions contained in the Old Records of the Order, it will be proper, at the expense of some recapitulation, to survey briefly the condition and character of these Saxon and Norman Craft Guilds. I have said on a former occasion, and here repeat the assertion, that an investigation of the usages of these Mediaeval Guilds and a comparison of their regulations with the old Masonic Constitutions will furnish a fertile source of interest to the Masonic archaeologist and will throw much light on the early history of Freemasonry.

The custom of meeting on certain stated occasions was one of the most important of the Guild regulations. ‘These meetings of the whole body of the Guild were sometimes monthly, but more generally quarterly. At these meetings all matters concerning the common interests of the Guild were discussed, and the meetings were held with certain ceremonies, so as to give solemnity to the occasion. The Guild chest, which was secured by several locks, was opened, and the charter, ordinances, and other valuable articles contained in it were exposed to view, on which occasion all the members uncovered their heads in token of reverence.

The Guild elected its own officers. This was a prerogative peculiar to the English Guilds. On the Continent the presiding officer was frequently appointed by the municipal or other exterior authorities.

In the early Saxon Guilds, and for some time after the Conquest, the presiding officer was called the “ Alderman.” At a later period we find him designated sometimes as the “Graceman,” sometimes as the “Early Father,” and sometimes by other titles.

But eventually it became the uniform usage to call the chief officers of the Guild the “ Master and Wardens,” a usage which has continued ever since to prevail and which was adopted by the Speculative Masons.

The Craft Guilds not only directed themselves to the welfare of their temporal concerns, such as the regulation of their trade, which was called a “ Mystery,” but also took charge of spiritual matters, and for that purpose employed a priest or chaplain, who conducted their religious services and offered up masses or prayers for the dead. In this connection each Guild appears to have had a patron saint, and they were often connected with a particular church, where, on appointed occasions, they performed special services, and received in return a participation in the advantages of all the prayers of the church.

In these respects they resembled the Roman Colleges of Artificers, which, it will be remembered, were often connected with a particular temple, and the College was dedicated to the God worshipped therein.

Almsgiving was also practiced by the Guild, and while there was a general distribution of food and money to the poor indiscriminately, special attention was paid to the wants of their own indigent members, their widows and orphans.

To support the current expenses of the Guild an entrance-fee was demanded from every one on his admission, and all the members contributed monthly or quarterly a certain sum to the general fund.

The Guild administered justice among its members, and inflicted punishments for offenses committed against the statutes of the Guild. These punishments consisted of pecuniary fines, or of suspension, or even expulsion, commonly called excommunication. They discouraged suits at law between the members, and endeavored to settle all disputes, if possible, by arbitration.

Finally, there was an annual festival on the day of the patron saint of the Guild, when the members assembled for religious worship, almsgiving, and feasting. It was deemed an offense for any one to be absent from this general assembly without sufficient excuse. There was also a ceremony of admission and an oath administered to the candidate on his reception. As these will be of great importance in a comparison of the usages of the Saxon Guilds with the Masonic sodalities, I copy the following form of admission and oath from the charter of St. Catherine’s Guild at Stamford. The date of this charter is 1494, but Smith observes that there is internal evidence showing that the Guild was established at a much earlier period.

ADMISSION OF BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN THE GUILD OF ST. CATHERINE.

Then it is ordained that when the said first even-song is done, the Alderman and his brethren shall assemble in their hall and drink; and there have a courteous communication for the weal of the said Guild. And then shall be called forth all those that shall be admitted brethren or sisters of the Guild; and the Alderman shall examine them in this wise: ‘Sir or Syse be ye willing to be brethren among us in this Guild and will desire and ask it in the worship of Almighty God, our Blessed Saint Mary and of the Holy Virgin and Martyr Saint Catherine in whose name this Guild is founded and in the way of charity ? And by their own will they shall answer, ‘Yea’ or Nay. Then the Alderman shall command the Clerk to give this oath to them in form and manner following:

“’This hear you, Alderman: I shall true man be to God Almighty, to our Lady Saint Mary, and to that Holy Virgin and Martyr Saint Catherine in whose honor and worship this Guild is founded; and shall be obedient to the Alderman of this Guild and to his successors and come to him and his brethren when I have warning and not absent myself without cause reasonable. I shall be ready at scot and lot and all my duties truly pay and do; the ordinances, constitutions and rules what with the council of the same Guild, keep, obey and perform and to my power maintain to my life’s end; so help me God and halidome and by this book.’ And then kiss the book and be lovingly received with all the brethren; and then they drink about; and after that depart for that right” Such is a brief sketch of the principal characteristics of the early Guilds. The main object of presenting it has been to enable the reader to compare these regulations with those of the Old Masonic Constitutions of the 15^th, 16^th, and 17^th centuries, so as to show the growth and development of the Masonic law from them. It will, for the sake of convenient reference, be therefore necessary to select from these Old Masonic Constitutions one at least, and one of the earliest, that the reader may in making his comparison have the regulations of the Guild and the charges of the Masons side by side before him. But this investigation will perhaps be better continued in a separate chapter.

CHAPTER IX

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THE EARLY ENGLISH MASONIC GUILDS

TO Brother William James Hughan are we indebted, more than to any other person, for the collection and publication of all the Masonic Guild ordinances that have been preserved in the British Museum, in the archives of old Lodges, or in private hands.

In the beginning of his work on The Old Charges of the British Freemasons (a book so valuable and so necessary that it should be in the library of every Masonic archaeologist), Brother Hughan says:

“Believing as we do that the present Association of Freemasons is an outgrowth of the Building Corporations and Guilds of the Middle Ages, as also a lineal descendant and sole representative of the early, secret Masonic sodalities, it appears to us that their ancient Laws and Charges are specially worthy of preservation, study and reproduction. No collection of these having hitherto been published we have undertaken to introduce several of the most important to the notice of the Fraternity.”

As Brother Hughan is distinguished for the accuracy and fidelity with which he has himself made, or caused to be made by competent scribes, copies of these Constitutions from the originals, I shall select from one of the earliest of them the ordinances or regulations, which shall be collated with those of the early Saxon Guilds, specimens of which have been given in the preceding chapter.

An account of these Old Records, as they are sometimes called, will be found in the first part of this work, where the subject of the Legend of the Craft, which they all contain, is treated. It will be unnecessary therefore to repeat here that account.

I might have selected for collation the statutes contained in the poem published by Halliwell, or those in the Cooke manuscript, as both are of an older date than any in the collection of Hughan. But as they are all substantially the same in their provisions, and the latter have the advantage of greater brevity, I shall content myself with referring occasionally, when required, to the former.

The manuscript which is selected for collation is that known as the Landsdowne, whose date is supposed to be 1560. The date of the manuscript is, however, no criterion of the date of the Guild whose ordinances it recites, for that was of course much older. It is thought to be next in point of antiquity to the poem published by Mr. Halliwell, to which the date of 1390 is assigned, and Hughan says that “the style of calligraphy and other considerations seem to warrant so early a date being ascribed to it.” In copying the statutes from the copy published by Brother Hughan, I have made an exact transcript, except that I have numbered the statutes consecutively instead of dividing them, as is done in the original, into two series. This has been done for convenience of collation with the Guild ordinances inserted in the preceding chapter and which have been numbered in a similar method. The orthography, for a similar reason, has been modernized,

CHARGES IN THE LANDSDOWNE MANUSCRIPT.

1. “You shall be true to God and Holy Church and to use no error or heresy, you understanding and by wise mens teaching, also that you shall be liege men to the King of England without treason or any falsehood and that you know no treason or treachery but that you amend and give knowledge thereof to the King and his Council; also that ye shall be true to one another (that is to say) every Mason of the Craft that is Mason allowed, you shall do to him as you would be done to yourself. 2. “Ye shall keep truly all the counsel of the Lodge or of the chamber and all the counsel of the Lodge that ought to be kept by the way of Masonhood, also that you be no thief nor thieves to your knowledge free; that you shall be true to the King, Lord or Master that you serve and truly to see and work for his advantage; also you shall call all Masons your Fellows or your Brethren and no other names.

3. “Also you shall not take your Fellow’s wife in villainy, nor deflower his daughter or servant, nor put him to disworship; also you shall truly pay for your meat or drink wheresoever you go to table or board whereby the Craft or science may be slandered.”

These are called “the charges general that belong to every true Mason, both Masters and Fellows.” Then follow sixteen others, that are called “charges single for Masons Allowed.” The only difference that I can perceive between the two sets of charges is that the first set refer to the moral conduct of the members of the Guild, while the second refer to their conduct as Craftsmen in the pursuit of their trade. The former were laws common or general to all the Guilds, the latter were peculiar to the Masons as a Craft Guild. The second set is as follows:

4. “That no Mason take on him no Lord’s work, nor other mens, but if he know himself well able to perform the work, so that the Craft have no slander.

5. “That no Master take work but that he take reasonable pay for it, so that the Lord may be truly served and the Master live honestly and pay his Fellows truly; also that no Master or Fellow supplant others of their work (that is to say) if he have taken a work or else stand Master of a work that he shall not put him out without he be unable of cunning to make an end of his work; also that no Master nor Fellow shall take no apprentice for less than seven years and that the apprentice be able of birth that is freeborn and of limbs whole as a man ought to be, and that no Mason or Fellow take no allowance to be made Mason without the assent of his Fellows at the least six or seven and that he be made able in all degrees that is freeborn and of a good kindred, true and no bondsman and that he have his right limbs as a man ought to have.

6. “Also that a Master take no apprentice without he have occupation sufficient to occupy two or three Fellows at least. 7. “Also that no Master or Fellow put away lords work to task that ought to be journey work.

8. “Also that every Master give pay to his Fellows and servants as they may deserve, so that he be not defamed with false working.

9. “Also that none slander another behind his back to make him lose his good name.

10. “That no Fellow in the house or abroad answer another ungodly or reprovably without cause.

11. “That every Master Mason reverence his elder; also that a Mason be no common player at the dice, cards or hazard nor at any other unlawful plays through the which the science and craft may be dishonoured. 12. “That no Mason use no lechery nor have been abroad whereby the Craft may be dishonoured or slandered.

13. “That no Fellow go into the town by night except he have a Fellow with him who may bear record that he was in an honest place. 14. “Also that every Master and Fellow shall come to the Assembly if it be within fifty miles of him if he have any warning and if he have trespassed against the Craft to abide the award of the Masters and Fellows. 15. “Also that every Master Mason and Fellow that have trespassed against the Craft shall stand in correction of other Masters and Fellows to make him accord and if they cannot accord to go to the common law. 16. “Also that a Master or Fellow make not a mould stone, square nor rule to no lowen nor set no lowen work within the lodge nor without to no mould stone.

17. “Also that every Mason receive or cherish strange Fellows when they come over to the country and set them on work if they will work as the manner is (that is to say) if the Mason have any mould stone in his place on work and if he have none the Mason shall refresh him with money unto the next Lodge.

18. “Also that every Mason shall truly serve his Master for his pay. 19. “Also that every Master shall truly make an end of his work task or journey which soever it be.”

Now, in the collation of these “Charges” with the ordinances of the early Guilds we will find very many points of striking resemblance, showing the common prevalence of the Guild spirit of religion, charity, and brotherly love in each, and confirming the The Freemason must not make for one who is not a member of the Guild a mould or pattern stone as a guide for construction of mouldings or ornaments, whereby he would be imparting to him the secrets of the Craft. The word “lowen,” which is found in no other manuscript, is supposed to be a clerical error for “cowan.” It is just as probable that it is a mistake for “layer,” a word used in other manuscripts and denoting a “rough mason.” The stone-mason and the bricklayer are at this day separate trades. But whether the correct word be “cowan” or “layer,” the object of the law was the same, namely, that a member of the Guild should not work with one who was not. opinion of Hughan, and the hypothesis which has been constantly advanced, that the one was an outgrowth of the other.

The religious spirit which pervaded all the Guilds is here exhibited in number 1, which requires the Mason to be true to the Church and to use no error or heresy.

The charge in number 2, to keep the counsel of the Lodge, is met with in nearly all the Guild ordinances. Thus in the ordinances of the Shipmen’s Guild, of the date of 1368, it is said: “Whoso discovereth the counsel of the Guild of this fraternity to any strange man or woman and it may have been proved . . . shall pay to the light two stone of wax or shall lose (forfeit) the fraternity till he may have grace. That is he shall be suspended from the Guild until restored by a pardon.”

The same regulation is found in the ordinances of several other Guilds, whose charters have been copied by Toulmin Smith. In those of the Guild of St. George the Martyr, dated 1376, there is no option afforded of a pecuniary fine. The words of the statute are that “no brother nor sister shall discover the counsel of this fraternity to no stranger on the pain of forfeiture of the fraternity forevermore.” Nothing short of absolute expulsion was meted out to the betrayer of Guild secrets.

In the “Charges of a Free Mason,” said to be “extracted from the ancient Records,” published by Anderson in 1723, and adopted by the Grand Lodge, soon after the Revival, for the government of the Speculative Masons, this principle of the Guilds has been preserved. It is there said, in Charge VI., sec. 5, that the Mason is “not to let his family, friends, and neighbours know the concerns of the Lodge.” It is at this day an almost unpardonable crime to disclose the secrets of the Lodge. The spirit of the Guild has been preserved in its successor, the modern Lodge.

The prohibition in the fourth charge, to dishonour a brother, or “put him to disworship,” is found in the earliest of the Guilds. That of Orky, for example, prescribes a punishment to any member who “misgretes,” that is, insults, abuses, or injures another member. The Guild was always careful to preserve a feeling of brotherly love and harmony among its members, a disposition which is also the characteristic of the Masonic fraternity. Hence we find the tenth point of these Masonic charges declaring that “none shall slander another behind his back.” But the very language of the fourth point of the charges would appear to have been borrowed from the ordinances of some of the Guilds.

In those of the Guild of the Holy Trinity, whose date is 1377, we meet with these statutes:

“No one of the Guild shall do anything to the loss or hurt of another, nor allow it to be done so far as he can hinder it, the laws and customs of the town of Lancaster being always saved.

“No one of the Guild shall wrong the wife or daughter or sister of another, nor shall allow her to be wronged, so far as he can hinder it”

From the fifth to the twentieth charge, the regulations principally relate to the government of the Craft in their work. There is some difficulty in comparing these with the early Craft Guilds, from the paucity of charters of the latter which have been preserved. But wherever there are any points common to both, the analogy and resemblance between the two is at once detected.

Thus in the Charter of the Guild of Fullers at Lincoln, which Guild was begun in 1297, it is said that “none of the Craft shall work at the wooden bar (full cloth), with a woman, unless with the wife of a Master or his handmaid.”

Toulmin Smith says that he cannot explain this restriction. But it was in fact only an effort of the Guild spirit common to all the Craft Guilds, which forbade one who was a member or freeman of the Guild from working with one who was not a member.

The Guild of the Tailors of Exeter had an ordinance that “no one shall have a board or shop of the Craft unless free of the city.” And in the charter of the Guild of Tylers or Poyntours (pointers of walls) of Lincoln it is said that “no Tyler or Poyntour shall stay in the city unless he enters the Guild.”

The same spirit of exclusiveness is shown in the seventeenth point of the Masonic Constitutions, which forbids a Master or Fellow from working with a Cowan, or one who was not a “Mason Allowed,” that is to say, one who has been admitted into the fraternity or Guild.

This exclusion from a participation in labour of all who were not members of the sodality was a regulation common to all the Craft Guilds, but was perhaps more fully developed and more stringently urged in the Constitution of the Masonic Guild than in those of any of the others. It is from this principle of exclusiveness that the modern Lodges of Speculative Masonry have derived their strict regulation of holding no communication with Masons who have not been “duly initiated,” or with Lodges which have not been “legally constituted.”

Contumacy, rebellion, or disobedience to the laws of the Craft or of the Guild was severely punished. The ordinances of the Smiths’ Guild of Chesterfield prescribed that any brother who is “contumacious or sets himself against the brethren or gainsays any of these ordinances” shall be suspended, denounced, and excommunicated. A similar regulation is to be found in other Guilds.

According to the Landsdowne Statutes, a Mason is required to be true to every member of the Craft, and to reverence his elder or superior, and in the points of the statutes of the Masonic Guild, as set forth in the Halliwell MS., it is said that the Mason must be “true and steadfast to all these ordinances wheresoever he goes.”

Suits at law between the members were discouraged and forbidden, except as a last resort, in all the Saxon Guilds.

The Shipmen’s Guild provided that the Alderman (or Master) and the other members should do their best to adjust a quarrel, but if they were unable, then the Alderman should give them leave “to make their suit at common law.”

In the Guild of the Holy Cross it was declared that no brother or sister of the Guild should go to law for a debt or a trespass until he had asked leave of the Alderman and of the men of the Guild.

The Statutes of the Guild of St. John the Baptist, enacted in, 1374, are more explicit. There it is said that a member “cannot sue until he has shown his grievance to the Alderman and Guild brethren that are chief of the Council,” and it adds that “the Alderman and the Guild brethren shall try their best to make them agree; and if they cannot agree they may make their complaint in what place they will.”

The same provision is met with in all the Constitutions of the Masonic Guild. The earliest of them, the Halliwell MS., prescribes in case of a dispute a “love-day” or arbitration. The Landsdowne says that when a wrong is done by one of the members to another, the other Masters and Fellows must try to make them agree, and if they cannot agree they may then “go to the common law,” which is the very expression used in the Shipmen’s Guild above cited.

It is a very strong proof of the connection between the early Guilds and the modern Lodges that this reluctance to permit the brethren to carry their personal disputes out of the Craft and into the publicity of the courts was fully developed in the “Charges of the Speculative Masons,” adopted in 1723. In these it is said, in the true spirit of the old Guilds to which Speculative Masonry succeeded, that, “with respect to Brothers or Fellows at law, the Master and Brethren should kindly offer their mediation, which ought to be thankfully accepted by the contending brethren; but if that submission is impracticable, they must, however, carry on their process or law-suit without wrath and rancour.”

It is needless to extend these comparisons. Sufficient has been done to show that there is a close resemblance in their mode of organization, method of action, constitution, and spirit between the Saxon Guilds and the modern Masonic Lodges, which actually are, under another name, only Masonic Guilds. This resemblance indicates an historical connection between the two, and this connection may be more closely traced through the civic companies of London and other cities of England. That these latter were the direct off-shoot from the former is a fact generally admitted by writers on the subject, and of it there can be no doubt. “ In the Trade Guilds,” says Mr. Thorpe, “we may see the origin of our civic companies.”

History of Freemasonry

by

Albert Mackey

CONTENTS

PART I PREHISTORIC MASONRY

PART II HISTORY OF FREEMASONRY

PART FIVE A.A.S.R.

PART SIX FREEMASONRY IN OTHER COUNTRIES

HISTORY OF FREEMASONRY

CHAPTER II

THE ROMAN COLLEGES OF ARTIFICERS

CHAPTER III

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GROWTH OF THE ROMAN COLLEGES

CHAPTER IV

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THE FIRST LINK : SETTLEMENT OF ROMAN COLLEGES OF ARTIFICERS IN THE PROVINCES OF THE EMPIRE

CHAPTER V

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EARLY MASONRY IN FRANCE

CHAPTER VI

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EARLY MASONRY IN BRITAIN

CHAPTER VII

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MASONRY AMONG THE ANGLO-SAXONS

CHAPTER VIII

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THE ANGLO-SAXON GUILDS

ORKY’S GUILD AT ABBOTSBURY.

THE THANES’ GUILD AT CAMBRIDGE.

GUILD OF THE SMITHS OF CHESTERFIELD.

THE TAILORS’ GUILD AT LINCOLN.

ADMISSION OF BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN THE GUILD OF ST. CATHERINE.

CHAPTER IX

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THE EARLY ENGLISH MASONIC GUILDS

CHARGES IN THE LANDSDOWNE MANUSCRIPT.