Chapter I Origins and Imitations
Chapter II Legend & Romance
Chapter III Primitive Rites & Symbols
Chapter IV The Ancient Mysteries
Chapter V The Roman Collegia
Chapter VI The Gothic Builders
Chapter VII The Gothic Cathedrals
Chapter VIII The Comacine Masters
Chapter IX The Old Charges
Chapter X The Guild System
Chapter XI The Operative Masons
Chapter XII Transition
Chapter XIII The First Grand Lodge
Chapter XIV The Great Division
Chapter XV Masonry Reunited
FROM time immemorial Freemasonry has exercised the right to ask of each of its votaries whence he came and whither he was traveling. That right is reciprocal and the individual Mason is equally entitled to demand of the Fraternity in turn that it tell in what springs of human aspiration it had its origin and to what deeps of human need it bends its course.
The answer to neither part of the question can be conclusive. If memory could go back to Masonry's beginning, it would be a misuse of words to describe its past as immemorial. The best account of its remote history is that it had not one origin but many origins. The best augury to be spoken of its future is that since heretofore it has never failed to respond to the contemporaneous requirements of humanity there is no reason to suppose it ever will fail.
Many attempts have been made to answer the questions more explicitly. These have failed because of difficulty in perceiving the simple fact that Freemasonry is not a thing which was created at a given moment but is a growth. Of an ancient palace it is often possible to say that the foundations were laid in the reign of this monarch or of that one. But who shall say when the seed of the oldest Sequoia tree of California was planted, or. who, if he could say, might tell, also when the parent stem which fathered that seed flourished in its turn of grandeur?
It is apparent from the most casual study of the records of primitive peoples that their religions, philosophies, social systems, folk thoughts and folk ways had much in common, however widely they may have been separated from one another by time or clime. Comparisons between these and certain superficial phenomena of Freemasonry disclose resemblances which cannot but arrest the attention of reflective minds. Even if there had been no pretentious claims of antiquity for the Craft, intuition would at once be able to bridge the chasms of centuries and connect it with more than one of the ancient societies that have flourished in the past, and which, in all essentials save that of chronological continuity, form with it a part of the common human inheritance.
Numerous ponderous tomes gathering dust on library shelves prove only too well, however, that there has been no scarcity of optimistic brethren, eager to support with all the vigor scholarship or invention could command the most earnest arguments tending to show that precisely this missing element of chronological continuity can be supplied. Modern scientific criticism must reject most, if not all, of these extravagant assertions. It is content with unimpeachable evidence pointing to a respectable antiquity which the institution may fairly claim. But while it denies that continuity has been demonstrated for a period longer than has elapsed since the middle centuries of European history, it is prepared to show Freemasonry's spiritual unity with antecedent societies of remote ages and even with cognate societies existing in the obscurest corners of the earth of today. It finds unmistakable evidences of a spiritual kinship binding all such groups together and in this truth it discovers cause for wonder and satisfaction far greater than the most extravagant romances of Masonic mythology are able to evoke. It admits that the foundation stones of the Fraternity are almost unbelievably old, but it does so on different grounds from those in which the legend makers of other days reposed a native and childlike faith.
There have been many such legends, but they have been so varied in character and conflicting in conclusions that an investigator approaching them for the first time might well be dismayed by even a casual examination of their vast array. That each of them should find ready acceptance is not surprising when it is remembered that man is incurably romantic. Make a tale brave enough, uniform it with noble trappings, embroider it with glamour and utter it in the cadences of minstrelsy, and it is characteristic of human nature that willing believers will accept it without troubling to inquire too closely into the substance of their faith. Still, the faith which is to endure must not be founded on quicksand. There may come a time when insinuations of doubt are whispered into an overcredulous one's ear. Once he becomes persuaded he has been imposed upon, he is likely to find the transition from unquestioning belief to outright disbelief easily and speedily made.
Skepticism of that kind has become rather a commonplace within the brotherhood and has done incalculable harm. Freemasonry cannot expect to perpetuate itself without an appeal to the intelligence, nor can it expect to retain the allegiance of intelligent members by insisting they accept as factual narratives legends which on their surface bear indisputable relationship to the folk tales of many races and religions. This sort of thing has worked damage, to the Fraternity on the outside, but has probably caused even greater damage among its own initiates. Among the profane it has led to acceptance of Hallam's bitter jibe, "The curious history of Freemasonry has unfortunately been treated only by its panegyrists or calumniators, both equally mendacious." The charge of mendacity is unfair since the defects complained of were due not to a desire to I deceive but to an easy inclination to believe what one wished to believe. Those old, glib tales of Masonic beginnings back in the mists of primordial time have wrought additional mischief in giving rise to a suspicion that, since the Fraternity's antecedents were not all that has been claimed for them, they therefore must have been more recent than its eighteenth-century apologists were willing to admit.
Such reasoning is fallacious. Happily for the good fame of Freemasonry recent critical methods have thrown light upon the whole, replacing much that was mythical and improbable by much that is credible, and giving new and sound reasons for believing that an antiquity which the eighteenth century could not establish by fable the twentieth century has established by reason and philosophy and research. But while the twentieth century denies credence to the elaborate legends of Anderson, Desaguliers, Preston and others of their school, it is likewise constrained to reject - or at least to modify - the harsh dictum of the learned Dr. Mackey, that the scholar "must accept nothing as history that cannot be demonstrated with almost mathematical accuracy."
Masonic historical writing may be divided roughly into two major schools, one sanguine and credulous, the other skeptical and iconoclastic. To the one no suggestion is too remote or preposterous for consideration provided only it tends to substantiate some theory preconceived; to the other nothing is acceptable which cannot be authenticated beyond the semblance of a doubt. The one walks dreamily in a golden haze; the other gropes in stolid patience among rugged foothills of fact, never raising its eyes to the glorious summits just beyond.
The world has come to realize, however, that historical truth implies something vastly more important than mere chronology or a bleak compilation of irrefutable evidence. "The historian ought not to conclude," wrote Ernest Renan, "that a fact is false because he possesses several versions of it, or because credulity has mixed them with much that is fabulous." Because it was said that, at one period of the voyage, the sun was on their right-hand, or northward, side, Herodotus doubted the tale of certain Phoenician mariners that they had circumnavigated Africa. To the scientific knowledge which the learned Greek possessed that was an impossibility, yet it is the one circumstance which persuades modern science that the tale of the Phoenicians was true, since it is inconceivable that the Phoenicians could have imagined such a thing. They had simply passed south of the equator; Herodotus did not know about the equator. And so it often is: what seems today to be the truth may be proved error by tomorrow, a possibility to which the historian must remain perpetually alert. Legend may not be proof of a thing yet May strongly indicate the truth thereof. The story of George Washington and the cherry tree is legendary, but who shall deny that it reveals a more perfect insight into the character of the man than does the bald fact that he spoke profanely to one of his generals on the battlefield? The modern student of Freemasonry, fortunately, is not compelled to rely upon legendary lore on the one hand, or, on the other, the documentary researches of skeptics. The Fraternity's claim to ancient beginnings rests upon a surer foundation than either can supply. Its ascertainable age is great, but its probable age is greater. In substantially its present form, as a speculative society, it has existed for more than two centuries. In its earlier operative form it existed through many other centuries - at least through a great part of that long period when Gothic builders were dotting Europe with God's cathedrals. it is significant that at the earliest moment to which that form can be traced, it already had venerable legends boasting of beginnings far more remote.
The oldest known Masonic document is a manuscript poem found in the 1830's, in the King's Library of the British museum and published in 1840 by James O. Halliwell, who was not a member of the Fraternity. Different scholars have assigned various dates to it, but it is probably not much older than the year 1390 and not much younger than the year 1445. It is known as the Halliwell Manuscript and as the Regius Poem, the two names being interchangeable.
The poem consists of 794 lines of rhymed English verse. It bears the Latin title, Hic incipiunt constitutiones artis gemetrioe secundum Euclydum, which may be translated as "Here begin the constitutions of geometry according to Euclid." This title probably explains how a paper of such Masonic importance came to be so long overlooked since it was no doubt cast aside as a treatise in doggerel on the science of mathematics.
The first eighty-six lines tell a legend of the foundation of Masonry In Egypt by the mathematician, Euclid, and its introduction into England in the reign of King Athelstan, an Anglo-Saxon monarch who ascended the throne in A.D. 924. This is followed by an account of a great assembly of the Craft - other legends say this convention took place at York in the year 926 - under the patronage of Prince Edwin. Certain regulations for the governance of the society, divided into fifteen articles and fifteen points, are included in this division. Then follows an ordinance regarding further assemblies; after this come forty-eight lines recording a legend of the Four Crowned Martyrs. This is followed by another version of the origin of the Craft, which purports to trace its history from the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. The whole is finished off with rules for behavior at church and certain recommendations on etiquette.
The manuscript reveals internal evidence of various periods and authorships. Notwithstanding its extravagances and improbabilities it is of importance as showing that at a date approximately 300 years before the founding of the first Grand Lodge English. Freemasonry made vast and bold pretensions to antiquity; that it had legends analogous to those with which modern Masonry is famillar; that already it had a definite literature and traditions of its own, and that, regardless of the evidence adduced it boasted that it had been in existence in England for more than 450 years.
The word "maszun" of French origin, as applied to an operative craftsman in stone, was established in popular usage in England before the thirteenth century and appeared in a glossary compiled about the year 1217. In the seventh century English working masons are said to have dedicated a church to the Four Crowned Martyrs. Certainly the remains of a church dedicated to these saints are yet in existence and are known to have stood since the ninth century' or before the Norman conquest. As recently as 481 the Masons Company of London attended Mass on the f east day of the Four Crowned Martyrs, in accordance with what appears to have been a custom Well established.
By 1292 English masons were accustomed to speak of their working place as a "lodge." The fabric roll of Exeter Cathedral, compiled in 1396, applied to the members of this operative guild the name "freemasons." They were designated as "freemasons" in a statute of 1495. An earlier statute of the year 1360 prohibited secret agreements among masons and carpenters and pronounced annulment for all oaths binding them to secrecy which may have been in existence. In 1425 English masons were forbidden to hold their usual assemblies, but in 145 a code of laws, said to have been approved by Henry VI, was drawn up for the government of the Fraternity, thus clearly establishing the fact that at that time some sort of common bond united the separate units or working lodges. In 1472 a coat of arms was formally granted to "the Hole Craft and Felawship of Masons."
At precisely what period operative lodges began admitting non- Masons to membership cannot now be ascertained, but the practice was known in 1646 when the society at Chester and Warrington was recorded as having admitted Elias Ashmole, the antiquary, and Colonel Henry Mainwaring. There was nothing in the circumstance to indicate that this was a new thing. On the contrary, Dr. Plot, in his Natural History of Staffordshire, written in 1686, speaks of Freemasonry as being of greater request there than anywhere else, "though I find the custom spread more or less all over the Nation."
The four old lodges out of which, in the years 1717 - 1721, the first Grand Lodge was formed were typical of others scattered about England, Scotland, and Ireland, although by that time, because of the decline of Gothic architecture, the Craft had long been languishing to decay. The formation of the Grand Lodge definitely changed the character of English Masonry from an operative to what is now called a speculative basis. This change was regarded at the time as so much of an innovation that secretaries of some of the operative lodges burned their records for fear they might fall into the hands of the reformers and the secrets of the Fraternity thereby revealed. Nevertheless the continuity from operative to speculative is unbroken, and of the subsequent history of Masonry there is adequate, uninterrupted record.
This is not the time or place to inquire into the authenticity of the assertions in the Halliwell Manuscript or to analyze the chronological data of the Craft in Great Britain. These subjects will be discussed elsewhere in the present work. They are mentioned here to attest the truth of often repeated statements that there are Masonic records running from shortly after the Norman Conquest to the present day; that there is at least one Masonic document which is more than 500 years old and which asserts that English Freemasonry has existed since the tenth century; that the Freemasonry of today has a defensible right to consider itself the lineal descendant and heir of the ancient operative societies. The antiquity thus established might be called considerable, without overtaxing the ordinary meaning of the word, if there were not reasons for believing it even more ancient.
There are such reasons. They are to be found in the simple fact that Freemasonry, in its present state, is the product of an evolutionary development which is part and parcel of the growth of civilization itself. Even if it could be determined that English Freemasonry came into existence as a particular social entity at any given date - whether in the year 926 or the year 1717, earlier or later - there would still be sufficient reason for thinking that it was not then a wholly fresh creation but was rather the product of forces resident within itself which had been in motion at a time long anterior to that specific time.
To assume that this development has followed a direct line which can be retraced step by step is of course impossible. That cannot be done with whole races, much less with small and often casual groups of individuals. Englishmen and many Americans are fond, for instance, of describing themselves as of Anglo-Saxon stock, and, in a broad, general sense, the designation may be accepted as descriptively correct. But in both Great Britain and the United States infusions of other bloods have been so numerous and frequent that it may be doubted that a single living person can trace his ancestral blood stream as a pure and undiluted current running straight from some follower of Horsa and Hengist. The English language has a far greater number of words of Greek or Latin origin than of Anglo-Saxon. Yet this does not alter the basic truth that a town meeting in New England, a coroner's inquest in Texas, a legislative session in Queensland or Vancouver, a Parliament in London and a Congress in Washington are all lineal descendants of those meetings of the wise men, when elders of a North German village gathered in the shadows of their forest 1,500 and more years ago.
With equal certainty it may be said that the great brotherhood we call the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons is descendant of and heir to many primitive forms of human association which may have held their assemblies on high hills or in deep vales back in the days when the earth was young. That direct and unbroken connection cannot be established between them is of minor consequence. Whatever else it may be, Freemasonry bears within itself certain peculiarities which belong to the general cult history of the world. It is a manifestation in modern times of a tendency as old as humanity and as universal as mankind's instinct for religion. It is well that this is so, for were it otherwise, the Fraternity would conform to the usual trend of occultism and would insulate its members from their fellow men in the common task of making the best of life and of the world which actually is.
In the earliest communities of which there is record, a few men almost invariably set themselves apart to study the mysterious and the occult or to preserve some precious and secret bit of knowledge or magic. Such societies, when they attained to a real or fancied revelation of truth, sought to perpetuate the lore and to secure to themselves exclusive enjoyment of the power or dignity it might confer. Nor were they wholly selfish. Most of their secrets had to do with magic, in the power of which they placed complete confidence. That power would be extremely dangerous to a man who did not know how to employ it - a high explosive like the nitroglycerin or TNT of modern times which might blast the rash intruder. It was to his advantage as well as to that of the society that he be kept at a distance from this perilous truth.
That their jealously safeguarded truth might be transmitted to a worthy posterity it was their practice to find some concrete object which would represent it or express it and which could be depended on to remain constant, regardless of mutations in tribal speech. Chosen because of a real or fancied resemblance to the conception for which it was intended to stand, it was described by whatever happened to be the local equivalent of the Greek word "symbol," meaning "to compare." By natural development, the symbol soon came to be regarded as having taken on the attributes of that which it represented and thus, in time, to become in itself an object worthy of veneration.
In a slightly more advanced state of development, these societies began clothing their discoveries in allegorical language and legends. In still more sophisticated stages, they employed symbolical dramas. Thus, in the ancient Egyptian mysteries into which Moses is said to have been initiated, the sun god, Osiris, was represented as being set upon and slain by the powers of darkness and afterwards, his dismembered body having been sought out and found by Isis, as being restored to life. A somewhat similar idea appeared in the Persian Mysteries of Mithra, and the notion of a restoration to life after death was dramatized in some forms of the Dionysian and Bacchic Mysteries of ancient Greece, although the Greeks undoubtedly borrowed the idea from older Oriental races.
To protect themselves from intrusion, these early cults veiled their ritualistic activities in impenetrable mystery, binding their members by oaths solemn and awe-inspiring. To insure the propagation of their work by competent successors, they invented terrifying and painful ordeals by submission to which candidates for admission might prove their fortitude and zeal. That long and faithful apprenticeships might be served and the qualities of the members further tested, initiatory ceremonies were graduated into successive phases and dragged out over periods which sometimes ran into many years.
Finally, and in their highest moral and intellectual development, the cults invested their symbols and ceremonials with dual meanings, an exoteric or outer significance suitable to the understanding of less alert brethren, and an esoteric, or inner significance comprehended only by the most astute. This arrangement effected the additional service of opening illimitable scope to the speculative mind, so that in contemplation of the profounder mysteries of his cult, the mystic might immerse himself utterly in ecstasy and exaltation.
Amongst such highly civilized peoples as the Egyptians and Greeks of twenty or thirty centuries ago, this natural process reached its fruition in societies such as that of which Pythagoras was founder and prophet. Amongst primitive races, as those of modern New Guinea, it reaches its highest form in the men's tribal house, ornamented with the skulls of enemies slain in battle. Essential kinship between the ancient Pythagoreans and the savages of New Guinea is obvious, even if it be but little more tangible than the kinship which unites all sons of Adam. To deny it exists because no continuity between the two can be established is manifestly absurd.
Analogies which seem to establish this affinity would relate them with equal intimacy to Freemasonry. But this kind of reasoning can easily be carried too far. Indeed, it is often pressed to such ridiculous lengths that uncritical and fanciful authors have professed to find in every sign and symbol, every ritual and ceremonial, some sort of proof that all are descendants of a primitive form of Freemasonry which spread over the whole world before the dawn of history.
The probable truth of the matter is less than that. It is conceivable that if human life exists on other planets beside ours, and has persisted through many ages, its social institutions in the main may have developed in pretty much the same way as have ours. Their peoples will have experimented with various forms of government, conducted investigations into the nature and origin of life, sought in planets, the animal world and in the growing trees, to read the will and purpose of the Creator, will have aspired to profounder knowledge, developed arts and sciences and industries.
If this is so, it is inevitable that these sensible beings will have formed their own cults, in which they employ allegorical teachings and symbolism. If it could be ascertained that such cults actually exist, it would merely mean that under given social environments, humankind might always be expected to react to stimulation in certain well defined ways. Nor, for all practical purposes, is the chasm which separates this planet from its nearest neighbor wider than is that which separates the Pythagorean philosophers from the head hunters of the River Fly.
It is manifest that Freemasonry has retained heirlooms which in one way or another have come to it out of the abundance of the past. Traces of the earliest form of sun worship are to be found in some of the ceremonials of the Lodge room. Its point within a circle and its five-rayed star were symbols of religious significance in many ancient faiths. Its two symbolical pillars are reminiscent of those held in esteem by the most ancient of peoples. Its mystic numbers, 3, 5 and 7, were regarded as potent charms fully 500 years before the Christian Era and for how much longer nobody knows. The orientation of the Lodge room may or may not go back to the first tabernacle erected in the wilderness by the Children of Israel, but certain it is that the crudest places of worship of our rudest ancestors were built to face the rising sun. The Legend of the Third Degree is curiously like other dramatic tales which enlivened the initiatory rites of pagan societies. The similarities could be enumerated extensively.
How the Fraternity came by any one of these, to say nothing of them all, no man knows. Some of them undoubtedly were handed down from generation to generation during the operative era, but there is no way of learning how the operatives acquired them. For their preservation it was by no means necessary that the medieval workman should understand their philosophical meanings. The mistletoe at Christmas continues to perform its part in the decorative scheme of things in many a household which never even heard of its ancient mystical significance as a memorial of that fatal arrow which slew the beautiful Balder, sun god of our Northern forefathers.
Such evidences of Masonry's share in the common stock of the world's cult phenomena, if rightly understood, make plain many things which have been obscure. It is true they do not prove the continuous existence of the Fraternity from before the Flood to the institution of the first Grand Lodge. They do not establish connection between it and any particular band, society, group or cult in existence before the Dark Ages. But they do reveal the essential kinship of Freemasonry with the religious and philosophical societies of previous ages; nor is there today any other similar society in the world which can deny Masonry's prescriptive right to claim these relics as its own or dispute with it the palm for honorable age.
Modern Freemasonry is in the truest sense a reservoir into which the cult lore and social experiences of countless eons of human experience have poured their treasures. Into this mighty lake streams have trickled from the remotest mountain tops; it is fed from innumerable founts. It signifies little how the life-giving waters have found their way into its bosom, by what channels they have come, across what continents they have flowed.
Fortunately for the peace of mind of the modern initiate there are no arbitrary tests of faith in these matters, so there can be no trials for heresy or danger of sorcerer burning. There are certain ancient doctrines known as the Landmarks which every duly obligated Freemason is bound to respect; there are prescriptions of Masonic conduct which he is bound to obey. But if he chooses to believe that the Fraternity descended by some mysterious process from the planet Neptune he is as free to do so as he would be to believe that Neptune itself is the ghost of a previous planetary incarnation of the world. Conversely, if he prefers to regard some of the ancient legends as pure allegories, there is none with authority to deny him that privilege. In either case, the great symbolical teachings of the Craft will remain unaffected.
EVERY ancient religion and every ancient society had its heroic age and its mythology; Freemasonry offers no exception to the rule. Toward the beginning of the present century and the end of the cocksure nineteenth, it was a fashion to look back with disdain upon the childlike fancies of the storied past. Nowadays we are less certain that all knowledge can be weighed and measured, or that the laboratory alone can resolve truth into its component elements. We are constantly confronted with the necessity of revising judgments in every department of science, philosophy and religion. Occasionally it happens that some tenet, once held and then rejected, must be revived in the light of more recent information.
In no departments of learning has this necessity become more apparent or been more frequently displayed than in those concerned with historical and literary criticism. Thus it has been found that many a folk tale, trivial in its content, has enwombed the germ of an important discovery. The skilled eye must therefore scan closely the lore of numerous almost forgotten peoples for intimations of their true greatness. When their mythologies are compared one with another,, a scroll not infrequent consequence is the unrolling of a scroll whereon is written an indispensable chapter in the annals of mankind.
Each taken alone, a Greek legend of Apollo, a Persian legend of Mithra, an Egyptian legend of Osiris, or a Norse legend of Balder might be dismissed lightly as a crude invention of barbaric minds, touched somehow with that instinctive feeling for beauty which dignifies and ennobles the human intellect. Taken together, with many another like them, they afford a clew to man's unceasing search for the truth about God, a search which at one time or another invariably leads the seeker's mind to "soar aloft and read the wisdom, strength and beauty of the Creator in the heavens." Apollo is the sun, Mithra is the sun, Osiris is the sun, Balder is the sun, and although each of these pagan deities had other attributes, they belong to a universal solar mythology the existence of which constitutes a set of facts the historian must ponder well if he is rightly to understand the unfolding of human faith.
Similarly it comes about that in considering the tales which have gone into the making of Masonic mythology, the student ought not to underrate their importance. As testimony to literal truth many of them are obviously to be disregarded; but as testimony to what men have believed to be the truth their value is incalculably great. When Herodotus doubted the tale of the seafaring Phoenicians he gave a useful measure of his own knowledge of astronomy. He doubted that tale because by the science of his day the southern limit of the earth was placed at about where the equator is now known to be. It would not be fair to ridicule his understanding because he knew nothing of the southern hemisphere; it would be equally unfair to ridicule the credulity of Masonic writers of the early eighteenth century because they knew nothing of some commonplace principles of modern criticism.
The philosophy of the 1700's had not advanced greatly beyond the limitations imposed by Aristotle; medicine had made little progress since the days of Hippocrates; physics and chemistry were but emerging from the penumbra of hermetic mysticism; men were still gravely debating the dogma of the divine right of kings; deists were questioning the literal infallibility of the Bible for reasons which would seem infantile even to agnostics of today; the science of comparative religion had not yet been born. In claiming antediluvian origins for the Fraternity the wish among eighteenth- century brethren was father to the thought; but before censuring them for an easy faith in what they wanted to believe, allowance should be made for their uncritical times and the nature and character of the source material with which they had to work. When modern writers, with far better means of information, fall into similar and infinitely less excusable errors, it is scarcely astonishing that Anderson and Preston and Oliver made no valiant struggle against the seductions of an attractive romanticism.
Mention has been made heretofore of the Regius Poem, but it is by no means to be supposed that this was the only early Masonic scripture of the kind. It remains the oldest of them, in respect of the time which has elapsed since it was put upon paper, but it bears every evidence of having derived from others still older. Another of considerable antiquity, known as the Dowland Manuscript and dating from about the year 1500, may be regarded as typical of the lore from which Anderson and the others drew their inspiration. Full as it is of anachronisms and historical absurdities, this document is nevertheless of great interest and importance.
According to the Dowland legend, Freemasonry existed before the Flood. It is related that the Israelitish patriarch, Lamech, had two wives, Adah and Zillah. By Adah he had two sons, Jabal, the father of tent dwellers and herdsmen, and Jubal, the ancestor of musicians. By Zillah he had Tubal-cain and a fourth child, a daughter. The four are said to have founded all the arts and sciences, but it is significant that the daughter speedily drops out of the narrative, although it is recorded of her that she instituted the art of weaving. Of the triumvirate of sons - Masonic observers will quickly catch the significance of the number three in this association - Jabal is set forth as the founder of geometry, Jubal as founder of the science of instrumental music, and Tubal - cain as founder of the science of smithcraft in gold, silver, copper, iron and steel.
Having a premonition of the impending deluge, the three brothers, it is related, determined to write their discoveries on two pillars, one of marble which could not be destroyed by fire and one of brick which would resist moisture. The record is somewhat obscure as to the postdiluvian fate of these records, with their data of Masonry, but there are auxiliary traditions that in later centuries one was found by Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian priest and scholar, and that the other was found by Pythagoras.
The legend next describes how Masonry flourished after the Flood. Nimrod is listed among its most influential patrons. Masons are said to have been employed in building the Tower of Babel; Abraham and Sarah to have taught its seven sciences to the Egyptians. In Abraham's time it became necessary to find an instructor for the youth of the land and the person to whom this task was assigned was a "worthy Scollar that height Ewclyde." Euclid is represented as having composed for his pupils a charge which in phraseology is strikingly like charges given in medieval operative lodges. Also he is said to have taught them geometry, which now "is called throughout all this land Masonrye."
Coming down to the times of Solomon, the legend discusses the building Of the Temple, the traditional three personages of that enterprise being King Solomon, Hiram, King of Tyre and Aynon, described as the son of Hiram of Tyre. This name is undoubtedly a variant of that of Hiram Abiff, although the builder of the Scriptural account was not a son of Hiram, but the son of a widow of the tribe of Dan; his father had been a certain goldsmith of Tyre. Engaged in the work was one Maymus Grecus, a Greek, who afterwards, it is said, introduced Masonry into France in the time of Charles Martel. The Craft was carried from France to England, where it received the encouragement of St. Alban, but died out after his time, being restored in the reign of Athelstan when Prince Edwin's great assembly of Masons was convoked at York.
The trifling details of implausibility involved in making contemporaries of Abraham and Euclid, of Solomon, Charles Martel and St. Alban, naturally did not trouble the simple workmen who repeated this and similar tales in their medieval assemblies. Such a story satisfied the curiosity of those who believed their fraternal society to be of impressive and continuous antiquity. It carried Freemasonry back to the early generations after Adam, squared it with the major incidents of the Old Testament, identified it with architecture and geometry and accounted for its translation from ancient Palestine to England by way of France. Passed along from mouth to mouth, the legend underwent modifications. Sometimes variants would appear and those possessing two or more versions would attempt to harmonize them; when that task seemed too great, they got around the difficulty by cheerfully including them all, as in the case of the Regius Poem. The hearer could take his choice as to what he would accept, if he could not accept it all.
After the formation of the first Grand Lodge, and especially after the Duke of Montagu became Grand Master in 1721, the Craft became immensely popular. There were notable accessions of members and the newly made brethren, being speculatives almost to a man, clamored for a historical literature reasonably authoritative. Diligent search was made for old manuscripts and particularly for constitutions and charges used in operative lodges. The Reverend James Anderson, a Scot, minister of a Presbyterian chapel in Piccadilly, was appointed chairman of a committee authorized by the Grand Master to prepare a book on the subject. He overshadowed his associates to such extent that they left the task in his hands and he prepared the memorable volume published in 1723 with the high-sounding title, The Constitutions of the Freemasons, Containing the History, Charges, Regulations, etc.., of that most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity. It was described as being "for the use of the lodges" and as being printed at London "In the Year of Masonry 5723; Anno Domini 1723.'
The historical portion of Anderson's book begins with a gay assumption that Adam must have had the liberal sciences, particularly geometry, written on his heart; that he no doubt taught them to his sons, and that they were handed down until they reached Noah, whose ark, though of wood, "was certainly fabricated by Geometry and according to the rules of Masonry." Noah and his three sons, "all Masons true," brought the Art with them across the Flood and handed it on so successfully that it was able to contribute to the building of the Tower of Babel. After the dispersion from that work, brethren carried it into all parts of the earth. Among other celebrities who embraced it was Nimrod. Priests and magi preserved and propagated it throughout Assyria and the neighboring lands. It was transported to Egypt by Mizraim, second son of Ham, and was employed there to control the annual overflow of the Nile.
Other descendants of Ham, this lively narrative goes on to say, made use of the art to build strongholds in Palestine, in South Arabia and in West Africa. Indeed, fortifications built with its aid by the Canaanites were so strong that Jehovah was compelled to intervene before the Israelites were able to overthrow them. Meanwhile the posterity of Japhet had been taking Masonry into the "isles of the Gentiles," and descendants of Shem were transporting it eastward from Assyria into Asia. Abraham was an adept and took Masonry with him to Egypt. Moses, following divine instructions in the erection of the first tabernacle, became "the General Master Mason, " and was "divinely inspired with more sublime knowledge in Masonry." Thanks to him, Israel became "a whole kingdom of Masons, well instructed under the conduct of their Grand Master, Moses."
Having brought his story down to the time of Solomon, Dr. Anderson goes into elaborate description of the building of the Temple under the supervision of King Solomon, Hiram of Tyre and Hiram Abiff. When the task was done, the master workmen scattered into all parts of the world, in every known land teaching their art to the freeborn sons of eminent persons. In this way it reached the Greeks, although chief credit for its propagation among them is given to the researches of Pythagoras, through whose influence "Geometry became the darling study of Greece." Afterwards Euclid gathered up the scattered fragments of geometric science and "digested them into a method that was never yet mended." Ptolemeus Philadelphus, King of Egypt, became a proselyte and ultimately reached the exalted rank of "General Master Mason."
The Romans borrowed Masonry from their neighbors and in time, Dr. Anderson hopefully observes, it is to be "rationally believed that the glorious Augustus became Grand Master of the Lodge at Rome." He supposes the ancient Britons got the art from Rome but lost it in the days of the Anglo-Saxons. It was restored to England by craftsmen sent over by Charles Martel. Encouraged by the later Saxon kings, it maintained a precarious foothold. Athelstan imported many more Masons from France, who took over "charges and regulations preserved from the Roman times." Athelstan's son, Prince Edwin, summoned a council of the Craft at York and a general lodge was constituted, with Edwin as Grand Master. Then Dr. Anderson gives what purports to be an account of the manner in which the institution was preserved down to the time of the Grand Lodge over which Montagu was then presiding.
It is easily perceived that Dr. Anderson had merely taken the old legends, furbished them up, eliminated their more glaring anachronisms, supplied connecting links wherever these were wanting and rewritten the whole into an imaginative, spirited and coherent tale. It probably did riot occur to him that its basic hypotheses were in doubt; it would not have occurred to him to question the literal and historical accuracy of the Pentateuch. He was too scholarly to confuse the periods of Abraham and Euclid or those of Solomon and Charles Martel.. He might attribute those inconsistencies to the garblings of traditions repeated by generation after generation of unscholarly men. Assuming the basic facts to be correct, he could look upon himself as one whose sole function was to reconstruct the story in the light of ripe scholarship. Surely to the just of mind it is possible to ascribe at least that much of sincerity to the worthy dominie and to dissent in his behalf from Hallam's bitter indictment for mendacity.
More than half a century later William Preston opened the third section of Book I of his Illustrations of Masonry - a work destined to long usefulness - with the words, "From the commencement of the world, we may trace the foundations of Masonry." Dr. George Oliver, eager not to be outdone in conferring antiquity upon a society to which he made truly magnificent contributions, asserted in his Antiquities that the Craft "existed before the creation of this globe, and was diffused midst the numerous systems with which the grand empyreum of universal space is furnished."
Unfortunately for the good fame of Masonic scholarship, the credulity of the eighteenth century did not pass with the eighteenth century. Tradition then sealed with the official imprimatur of the Fraternity was destined to survive for many years, during which to question it was to incur an imputation of Masonic heresy. It would be rash to say that it has passed away even yet, although in recent times it has moved in a new direction through developments in archeology, criticism and the science of symbolism.
In 1886 American Freemasonry was deeply stirred by the appearance of a book which even now continues to cause mild astonishment among informed brethren. The title itself was sufficient to make the judicious grieve, for in all its panoplied fulsomeness it read: Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches 1500 Years Ago: Their Relation to the Sacred Mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea, and India: Freemasonry at a Time Anterior to the Temple of Solomon. This book was written by Augustus le Plongeon, who undertook to show that Freemasonry was first brought to America from Egypt or Atlantis or some other ancient place twelve millenniums ago, at which time it had already become gray from unimaginable antiquity.
Not to be outdone by the enthusiastic le Plongeon, Dr. Albert Churchward came next upon the scene with his Origin and Evolution of Freemasonry, his The Arcana of Freemasonry and his Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man. It is somewhat hard for a reader to be sure, from perusal of so many thousand pages of closely packed theories, precisely how old Dr. Churchward believes Freemasonry to be. On page 11 of Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man he speaks of "20,000 years ago," and goes on to remark that then, as now, it was scattered over the face of the globe. Elsewhere in the same book he suggests the antiquity as "probably 50,000 years." But in piecing together numerous other references scattered through his latest volumes there are reasons to think that in his heart of hearts Dr. Churchward is inclined to suspect that it must be 600,000 years old - or at any rate that it began to take form that long ago. He thus imparts to the Craft an antiquity which ought to satisfy the most covetous of fancies.
Of all the possible fields of research, symbolism has yielded most readily to the labors of the cultivator. The reasons of this are obvious. Since cults have existed in all lands and ages and since symbolism has invariably been enlisted to perpetuate their teachings, no great exercise of ingenuity is required to see that cults widely scattered in space and time must have hit upon similar basic doctrines and must have employed similar, if not identical, signs and symbols with which to record their teachings. All such cults may be described as a kind of freemasonry, just as Freemasonry may be described as a kind of cult. It is safe to predict that if a group of scholarly innovators attempted tomorrow to elaborate a new Masonic degree and to fashion for it a new system of signs and symbols, they could not create a comprehensive ritual without unconsciously imitating others known somewhere in the world of long ago.
The fallacy of all this sort of thing is that it reasons by analogy alone whereas analogy at best supplies but contributory evidence. This is the kind of thinking which the late Woodrow Wilson described by his picturesque phrase about a "one-track mind." If a more prosy word may be employed, one who thinks in that fashion may be said to possess a "lineal" mind, a mind under compulsion to retrace every given thing to some antecedent point in history.
Working in any historical field, such a mind finds chaos, which it hates as Nature abhors a vacuum. jungles of fact lie all about and it is unhappy if it cannot reduce the confusion to system. It must lay down charts and diagrams, neatly building roads, boring tunnels, erecting bridges. It agonizes over breaches and gaps, reasoning that although such things are they ought not to be. When urged on by uncontrollable enthusiasm or unchastened by proper self-criticism, it finds the temptation to re-interpret all facts in the terms of its own obsession too great to be resisted. Rarely is it inclined to scan closely the authenticity of a bit of evidence which appears to support its theories.
From Anderson to extremists of the modern anthropological school, minds of that type have been particularly attracted by the speculative possibilities of Freemasonry. However they may have differed in other respects they have always had one delusion in common - they have confidently held that there was such a thing as the origin of Masonry. All attempts which have been made to trace Freemasonry in some unbroken line to Solomon's Temple, to the Egyptian mysteries, to the Essenes, to the Druses, to the Knights Templar, to the Gypsies, to the Comacine Masters, to the Rosicrucians or to any of a thousand other suggested sources, have been vitiated by the errors characteristic of the lineally minded historian. He presupposes the untenable theory that a complex cultural development like Freemasonry began with one man or a group of men at one time and in one place and that it remained within the custody of an uninterrupted succession of legitimate heirs.
The historical mind which works laterally as well as lineally is quick to concede that it is beyond the capacity of human intelligence to reduce the tangle of all humanity's past to a single simple scheme of rational progression. It knows well that at best the searcher for truth must rest content with a handful of facts here and another handful there, with gaps, guesses and probabilities in between; that there must be much groping through the dark by aid of working hypotheses and tentative theories, which are to be retained as long as they do work and do explain but must be discarded when new discoveries make them no longer reasonable.
To such a mind the known facts and plausible guesses about Freemasonry indicate that it has unfolded and taken form in pretty much the same general fashion as that which marked other social developments, examples of which are the church and the family. Or, to return to a form of illustration already used in the present work, it finds Freemasonry to be a social Gulf of Mexico into which many river systems, with thousands of tributaries, have emptied themselves. Therefore this type of mind is not disturbed overmuch if unable to trace so many streams back to a single fountainhead.
It is wise for the student to be on guard against the enthusiasms of the single-track mind and against the ambitions of those who have their own systems to set up or wish to demolish the systems set up by others. Freemasonry is a world within itself, going on all the while, busy with countless internal activities, and naturally tending to subdivide into self-determining groups. Here is one which looks upon the institution as primarily a religious society serving as a handmaid to the church. There is one which regards it as a club to further social pleasures. Yonder is one which sees in it a form of theosophic occultism, in custody of some Ancient Wisdom which is to be propagated through the lodges. Another finds in it a form of mysticism, a secret path along which the soul may travel the Way of Divine Union. Still another interprets it as a school for moral and intellectual culture. The protagonist of each group observes the whole institution from the viewpoint of his particular prepossession. He is not to be charged with dishonesty if in writing of Masonic history he deludes himself into the belief that all facts fit into the mosaic of his pet theory, yet it should always be borne in mind that the function of the advocate, of the special pleader, is necessarily different from that of the historian.
The first notably successful attempt to make Masonic history conform to the canons of scientific criticism was made by Robert Freke Gould, originally in his History of Freemasonry, next in his A Concise History of Freemasonry and then in essays contributed to Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. This distinguished soldier, lawyer and scholar, born in Devon, England, in 1836, was made a Mason in Royal Naval Lodge No. 429, Ramsgate, in 1855. Between 1880 and 1882 he published the various parts of his History of Freemasonry. In 1903 he published the Concise History, which, without being an abridgment of the earlier work, reviews and revises some of its important conclusions. Five years after Gould's death in 1915 the Concise History was revised by Fred J. W. Crowe.
These two works together have had a wider reading, have been more often quoted and have plowed more deeply into Masonic thought than any other contribution to Masonic literature since Dr. Oliver's appeared. The significance of this lies in the fact that Gould's fame rests upon his rigid adherence to the canons of historical writing obeyed by scientific historians in nonMasonic fields. His work cuts across the Fraternity's scriptures like a mountain range, dividing them into two distinct categories of before Gould and after Gould, making it now impossible for a self- respecting student to follow the old uncritical habit of accepting every floating rumor as Masonic history.
This man's influence was in a sense institutionalized by the founding in London of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge of Research No. 2076, which, although it was not Gould's "lengthened shadow," and is not in any sense his creation or his creature, nevertheless has during two score years of uninterrupted industry built solidly and permanently into Masonic thought the ideals of historical scholarship to which Gould devoted the latter half of his career. The petition for the warrant of this lodge was signed by nine brethren the list of their names reads, to those who have sat at their feet, like a legend from some storied scroll: Sir Charles Warren, William Harry Rylands, Robert Freke Gould, Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford, Walter Besant, John Paul Rylands, Sisson Cooper Pratt, William James Hughan and George William Speth.
A warrant was granted by the Grand Master, under date of November 28, 1884, naming Sir Charles Warren as first Worshipful Master. Owing to the absence of Sir Charles from the country the lodge was not constituted until January 12, 1886. Its by-laws contained a provision that the membership should never exceed forty. Later, at the suggestion of George William Speth, its first secretary, the lodge organized its Outer Circle, through which Masons in all parts of the world have opportunity to procure the published transactions of its deliberations.
In a brief speech at the time of consecration, Sir Charles set forth the purpose of Quatuor Coronati Lodge in one succinct sentence. "This Lodge," he said, "will be the platform where literary Masons can meet together to assist each other in developing the history of the Craft." Seldom has a plan adopted at the inception of such an enterprise been more faithfully or more successfully carried out. From 1886 until today Quatuor Coronati Lodge has continued to publish its yearly volumes under the title Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, now a household word among studious Masons. It is no exaggeration to say that these volumes constitute the most important set of Masonic books in existence and that they set up a standard in the field of Masonic history to which scholarship must conform if it is to maintain its self-respect.
Honest craftsmanship of this kind is slow and laborious, but it is the only kind truly worth doing. It has meant painstaking examination of diffuse and incomplete records. Often it has encountered formidable resistance of obstinate secrecy, resistance firmly rooted in the esoteric character of much Masonic doctrine. Men are naturally persuaded more by their emotions than by reason, and such historical spade-work is in itself anything but emotional. It has been hard to convince many skeptics that Freemasonry has everything to gain and nothing to lose by a scientific appraisal of its records and traditions; that while a few illusions may be lost in the process, it will establish realities infinitely more valuable than the illusions.
Yet that is the truth. Gradually the old mists and fogs are lifting even from the vales; everywhere the strong sunlight of reality discloses the handiwork of patient and sturdy human endeavor. Freemasonry has always been what it is today, a society or societies of men, unequipped with supernatural faculties, unendowed with mysterious gifts of magic, men living out their lives in the human world as other men do, acting always upon their environment and in turn being forever acted upon by it. The Fraternity as it is came slowly and gradually into existence, drew freely from innumerable other human cultures and experiences as all human societies have done. To penetrate to its inward life, and to trace the development of that life from century to century and from place to place, is a discipline in culture that carries within itself its own reward. The history of Masonry is one chapter, written at divers times and often in strange alphabets, of the great history of mankind. It has its Tintagels and Camelots, shrouded in the golden haze of myth and legend; it has its own strong and material edifice, built foursquare to all the winds that blow, the foundations going down to the bedrock of human nature and its soaring towers pointing upward to God.
NO more fascinating task is set for the Masonic student than that of tracing survivals of primitive cult influence which to this very day remain in our legends and rituals. It is an employment not without its risks. Like Ulysses, the inquirer needs to be bound securely to the mast of his ship of exploration, for he must voyage upon seas populated by sirens pleading in dulcet voices that he jump overboard and lose himself in uncharted currents of speculation. All around the hardy mariner lie inviting isles. Their names are legion - the isle of the Ancient Mysteries, the isle of the Essenes, the isle of the Druses, the isle of the Comacini, the isle of the Roman Collegia. Perched upon each is a seductive temptation urging the voyager to step ashore and there end his quest. If he is a skilled geographer who knows an island from a continent it will pay him to pause here and there for rest and refreshment, but he must be continually on guard not to mistake some San Salvador for the mainland.
Almost every important ancient cult has been suggested as the progenitor of Freemasonry, Most of these early societies are looked upon as having, at least in some sense, paved the way for our Fraternity or, as Dr. Joseph Fort Newton aptly phrased it in The Builders, as having been prophecies of Masonry. Consideration of these organizations belongs rather to the realm of philosophical reconstruction than to that of Masonic history. Yet they possess high value for the historian because they enable him to gain insight into the nature of secret societies in general, regardless of special objectives and of their likeness to the Fraternity. When regarded as analogues rather than as ancestors they occupy a legitimate place in Masonic literature.
They contributed much to the general stream of Western culture upon which Freemasonry has made large draughts. It is reasonably certain that vestiges of their ideals, symbols and rites have found their way, by avenues often impossible to discover, into the sum total of ideals, symbols and rites which now constitutes Freemasonry. The study of them is therefore as important to the Masonic historian as the study of comparative religion is to the theologian. Once the mind is divested of the notion that because all these societies are alike in many respects they are therefore one, they mutually support and explain one another. Few things are more clearly established than that certain rites and symbols now employed by Masons were practiced and used in times long anterior to the Christian era. Whether they always had the same significance they now have is of relatively small importance.
The rite of circumambulation, as a certain mystical journey about the Lodge room is technically described, may be mentioned as a conspicuous example. Circumambulation is very old and well-nigh universal. The Egyptians used it in their cult practices, carrying images of Isis or Osiris around their temples and altars. The Jews had similar solemn ceremonies, as when the priests marched in a circle about the sacrifices. The Israelites under Joshua performed an elaborate ceremonial of circumambulation when they paraded, according to the story in the sixth chapter of the Book of Joshua, around the walls of Jericho. The Arabs practiced circumambulation almost as frequently as did the Jews. To this day it is used by many sects of Brahmanism. The priest must drive around a sacred tree or pool during his initiation. On arising he must face the rising sun and then walk about in a circle, keeping the center to his right. The laws of Manu prescribe that in the marriage ceremony the bride must circumambulate the domestic hearth. Ancient Buddhists built stone galleries about shrines to accommodate pilgrims who came to pay homage by circling an image of their divinity.
Homer describes how Achilles led the weeping hosts of Greece thrice about the body of Patroclus, in this fashion, it is to be supposed, paying divine honors to the dead hero. In Greek sacred dances circumambulation was often reversed: the movement from right to left was called the strophe and that from left to right the antistrophe. The Romans considered this leftwise movement as black magic, certain to bring ill fortune; their word sinister, meaning left, retains disturbing connotations even when brought over into English. Certain Roman marriage ceremonies included circumambulation.
Among Celts of all regions the rite was practically universal. Celtic physicians made circuits around the sick to invoke the healing power; mourners followed a body in solemn procession about the graveyard before laying it in the tomb. In religious exercises there were processions by priests and people around the church, that practice being retained in Roman Catholic ritual when a bishop is to be enthroned. J. G. Frazer in Balder the Beautiful describes a Scottish custom of circumambulation as observed in the Highlands as recently as 1850.
It is probable that in Freemasonry the rite has been used from the earliest times. In one of the very old York rituals the Entered Apprentice, when demonstrating his right to be made a Fellow, passed from station to station, where Master and Wardens each put his master's piece to a different test. North American Indians had a somewhat similar custom, as in the Pawnee ceremony of "Hako," and similar practices have been observed among native tribes of Central America and South America.
What gave rise to this rite in the first place? A clew is furnished in a saying attributed to the priests of Apollo at Delos, as preserved in one of the hymns of Callimachus: "We imitate the example of the sun." In the northern hemisphere the sun rises in the east and appears to move to the west by way of the south. Almost all ancient peoples and almost all peoples living today in a state of primitive culture - although there are exceptions among the Eskimos - look upon the sun as one of the principal sources of life and power and therefore worship it. Circumambulation is thus a product of sun worship.
Why did ancient peoples believe that imitating the sun)s journey through the skies was an act of worship? It was because of their simple faith in what anthropologists have come to call "sympathetic magic." They believed they could gain power over natural forces and propitiate demons by imitating them. The modern red man will beat his drum and scatter dust in the air to compel rain to come, the drum rattle representing thunder, the dust the falling rain. The man who thus prays for rain, according to magician's logic, compels the rain. But if he reverses his formula, thereby practicing black magic, in contradistinction to favorable or white magic, he might drive the thunder back into the sky and the rain back into the cloud.
Circumambulation originally was just such an imitative magical rite. In their higher forms some of the Ancient Mysteries employed a central ceremonial in which there was a drama in imitation of the experiences and perhaps the tragic death and resurrection of the sun god. The tenacity with which such customs persist, once they are thoroughly established, is among the marvels of human history. They may, and often do, change their significance as time goes on.
A striking example of this is described by Miss Margaret Murray in The Witch-Cult in Central Europe, one of the most fascinating books in the whole literature of anthropology. The learned author shows that witchcraft was not a temporary or local delusion, peculiar to a few individuals, but was a well-established religion, "organized," as Cotton Mather grimly observed, "like Congregational churches." This religion, which appears to have originated before the Christian era, managed to survive the most savage opposition until almost the present time. Indeed there is no assurance it does not still exist in some of the backwashes of civilization, just as voodooism has persisted among superstitious Negroes in parts of our own South, and has reasserted itself in parts of Haiti.
Frequently some popular custom is retained long after its earlier significance has been forgotten. Christmas and Easter observances in various parts of the world still retain evidences of pagan origin. It is not at all difficult to believe that some portions of the Masonic ritual - seemingly so alien to modern ways of thought - have descended by some such process from ancient societies, the very names of which have been forgotten. Curious old emblems and rites have become embedded in the rituals like shards in a geologic composite, washed there from ancient shores. Circumambulation is one; another is that custom, observed in another ceremonial, which has reference to something of a metallic kind.
To primitive peoples the discovery and subsequent use of metals must have given cause for constant wonder, and may have proved as subversive of long-accepted notions as was the elucidation of the Copernican theory of astronomy to the philosophy of medieval Europe. Men had been accustomed to implements of wood, bone and stone and, believing in their inherent magic, built them into their religious practices. Then appeared new and strange substances, endowed with more potent magic. It is reasonable to suppose that there was long and bitter contention between orthodox practitioners of stone magic and heretical practitioners of metal magic.
Something of the kind still exists among savage races. Among the Bangala of the Upper Congo the smith is supposed to employ witchcraft in the exercise of his calling. In Manipur iron ore is deemed to be under the protection of a god, and a magical ritual is practiced in connection with mining. The Malays believe that gold, so long as it lies in the ground, possesses a soul, but that the soul takes flight after mining, so they employ magical rites when working with this precious metal. Instances of the kind might be multiplied almost indefinitely.
Ancient astrologers were acting in accordance with such accepted notions when they sought to establish associations between the heavenly bodies and metals. They worked out a scheme in which each planet had its metallic symbol, allying lead with Saturn, tin with Venus, bronze with Jupiter, iron with Mercury, alloy with Mars, silver with the moon and gold with the sun. The planet was supposed to have magical power over its metal, the metal magical power over its planet. It is far from improbable that in the old Masonic rites this doctrine was vaguely reflected in the significance attached at a given moment to something of a metallic kind.
In the period when the Masonic ritual was evolving into its eighteenth-century form, such ideas were widely accepted even among the educated classes and were taken for granted among the trade craftsmen. What more natural than that survivals from primitive culture should find place in the rites, some of them no doubt being remainders of magical practices of ancient builders? The ritual as now employed is but an amplified form of others in use before the Grand Lodge era of 1717. It is therefore in just such vestiges that relics of genuine antiquity are to be found, immeasurably more reliable than verbal tradition and the extravagant fancies of those who have tried to trace direct descent from any particular ancient society.
The mere fact that an early association was organized in a manner roughly resembling that of modern Freemasonry, having lodges, perhaps with tyled doors, governed by officials similar to the Master and Wardens, or even calling them by those names, and practicing ceremonies of initiation, proves nothing with regard to the institution of Masonry, since such methods of organization are natural and inevitable. Thousands of these societies might have come and gone without having brought this Fraternity into being. No doubt thousands did come and go, obeying a tendency as universal as any other form of social activity.
The importance of this tendency in the history of social development was given deserved emphasis by Professor Hutton Webster in his Primitive Secret Societies,, a book now out of print and almost impossible to obtain. In this work the author collated a vast amount of material gathered from original sources. The headings of his eleven chapters deserve repetition, since they give in epitome an outline of the evolutionary process through which secret societies have apparently gone: I. The Men's House; II. The Puberty Institution; III. The Secret Rites; IV. The Training of the Novice; V. The Power of the Elders; VI. Development of Tribal Societies; VII. Functions of Tribal Societies; VIII. Decline of Tribal Societies; IX. The Clan Ceremonies; X. Magical Fraternities; XI. Diffusion of Initiation Ceremonies.
Professor Webster holds that whereas in modern civilization sexual solidarity and consciousness of kind help to explain the various clubs and societies of men and women with which we are so familiar, in primitive societies there is added to these forces one even more potent, namely, widespread belief that sexual characteristics can be transmitted from one individual to another. For this reason primitive folk make a point of keeping the sexes as separate as possible. The institution known as the Men's House is an admirable agency for that purpose and is to be found wherever there are primitive peoples.
The Men's House is usually the largest structure in the settlement. It is community property, serving as council chamber and town hall, as guest house for strangers and as sleeping quarters for the men. Elders and other eminent persons receive assignments of seats in keeping with their dignity. Tribal treasures and the trophies of war and the chase are placed here for safety.
Women and children, and men not fully initiated, are rarely or never permitted to enter. The house serves as a club for bachelors whose residence there until they are married is a continuation of that seclusion from the society of women which the initiatory period is intended to secure. Indeed, it is a constant reminder to younger men that settled family life with a private abode is the privilege of the older men, who alone have marital rights over the women of the tribe. It is an important factor in the restraints savage races deem of the utmost importance to prevent promiscuity between the sexes.
"In Mexico and Central America," says Professor Webster, "the Men's House is found among tribes living in primitive conditions. The Hulchol Indians of the Mexican state of Jalisco have the Tokipa, the 'house of all.' The Tejas, an old Mexican tribe, had special houses used solely for tribal meetings. With many of the interior tribes of Honduras, the village consists merely of one large building like the long houses of the Borneo aborigines. The back part of such a structure is partitioned off into small bedrooms for married couples and unmarried women. A platform immediately under the roof serves for the boys. Among the Isthmian tribes 'each village has a public, town, or council house' and these are also found among the Guatemala Indians.
"The secret councils and assemblies of the Nicaragua Indians were held in a house called Grepon. In every city and town of ancient Mexico there were large houses situated near the temples where the young men were taught by the priests. These Telpuchcali, as they were called, appear to have been used also as the sleeping resorts of the young men. Very similar were the Calpules found in the provinces now a part of Guatemala."
Admittance to the Men's House must be preceded in most cases by an initiatory rite during which the candidate, usually in early adolescence, is required to undergo many ordeals. The formalities include such ceremonies as painting the body or daubing it with clay; use of noise-making instruments; dances; imitation of death and resurrection; bestowal of a new name; circumcision or some other form of ceremonial mutilation; recitation of tribal traditions; exhibition of sacred or magical objects.
A somewhat vague similarity of some of theses rite to certain ceremonies practiced in Masonic lodges has encouraged not a few Masonic writers in the belief that the origin of Freemasonry is to be sought among these primitive customs. Perhaps the most influential of these is J.S.M. Ward, founder of what he has denominated the "anthropological school" of Masonic thought. In his widely circulated and somewhat sensational book, Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods, he says: "Our present system is derived originally from the primitive initiatory rites of our prehistoric ancestors. I base this contention on the fact that many of our most venerated signs and symbols, grips and tokens, are used today by savage races with precisely the same meaning as with us. I cannot agree with those who would contend that it is either a matter of coincidence or else that they are purely natural signs which express simple elementary sentiments."
Up to a certain point it is possible to accept this argument, but beyond that point a cautious investigator cannot conscientiously go. There can be little doubt that a few elements in the ritual are survivals from very old rites, but those survivals are a negligible part of our "present system." Nor is it obvious to a reader of Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods that the author has made out a clear case showing that such symbols, signs, grips and tokens as are used by savage races have "precisely the same meaning as with us," or that many of those same emblematic devices are not in fact purely natural gestures.
It is an elementary principle of evidence that where there are opposed interpretations of the same set of facts the presumption is in favor of that which is easiest, simplest and most in keeping with ordinary human experience. There is indeed an easy and simple explanation of the resemblances to be found between Freemasonry and the secret associations of barbarous tribes. It is that both institutions are the natural outcome of man's natural reaction to his social environments. There are analogies between the primitive secret society and the modern Fraternity, but the differences separating them are infinitely greater than are the resemblances uniting them. The prima-facie case is that there is little kinship between them, other than natural kinship of all mankind, and the burden of proof must rest upon those who would seek to maintain a contrary view. Analogy itself is not proof so long as its implications can be controverted by an opposed but equally probable hypothesis. Most if not all of the analogies suggested in Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods can be explained by reasonable hypotheses other than those which the author of that work so firmly defends.
For one thing, all authentic and indisputable testimony now extant is that our "present system" grew out of a more primitive system which developed slowly in the Middle Ages. It would be strange indeed if all the symbols, signs, grips and tokens used by savage races had "precisely the same meaning as with us," when there is reason to doubt that the symbolism of Speculative Freemasonry has "precisely the same meaning" as the symbolism of Operative Masonry had, say, in the fifteenth century.
Moreover, nothing can be more incredible than that primitive races, even if they employed rites identical in form with our own, should attach the same meanings to them. This must necessarily be so because of differences in cultural levels and in psychology. The evolutionary processes of social development are clearly defined. In his earlier stages man views with wonder the manifestations of nature and covets for himself the power to control and bend them to his own service. This ambition he seeks to make potent by taboos and magic. He might, for instance, draw a circle in the sand and let it stand for the moon, and he might even put a point in the center of that circle and let it stand for himself or anything else. In a brief course of time the symbol would come to take on the attributes of that which it was designed to represent and its creator would venerate it with superstitious awe.
It is not until he has reached a far higher stage of spiritual and intellectual development that man's wonder at the manifestations of nature results in more reasonable religious, philosophical and ethical convictions. If he then came upon his predecessor's circle in the sand, it is conceivable he might adopt it for a symbol but of different import. It might occur to him that the circle represented the all-enveloping mercy of God and that the point represented man at the center thereof. Thus two individuals standing at opposite poles of cultural progress might employ the same object, each to represent his highest conception of the natural or the supernatural. But to say the symbol has precisely the same meaning to them would be absurd.
Therefore if a member of an Indian cult should chance to employ a sign or token identical or even similar to a sign employed by a Freemason, the presumption must be that his understanding of it and the Freemason's are radically different. To overcome that presumption the strongest evidence is necessary; it cannot be done by mere analogy. It is possible that both have derived the symbol from a common social progenitor, but it is equally possible that either might have invented it for himself; or at any rate that lineal ancestors invented it each for his own use. So long as the possibility of coincidence is not eliminated, the problem cannot be looked upon as solved, and so the elaborate theories of Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods must be set down as ingenious and interesting rather than as convincing.
NO theories of the beginnings of Freemasonry have been more alluring than those which assume they are to be found among the Ancient Mysteries of Greece and Rome. The study of those societies is in itself entrancing. It leads the imagination into realms of enchantment - lands of pagan temples, white and mysterious upon lordly hills, and of sylvan glades bathed in moonlight and redolent of incense and flowers. It murmurs of tinkling cymbals, sensuous music and languorous antiphones, of chanting priests; it discloses garlanded youths and maidens dancing in mystic measures, altars alight with sacrificial fires and subterranean crypts were fear-struck neophytes tremble under solemn and portentous ordeals. Here the population of an Attic village streams out in procession, following the kalathos, or sacred basket, and shouting praises to Demeter, goddess of the harvest. There the adepts of a Pythagorean cult shroud themselves in secrecy and silence.
The sophisticated student will discover behind most of the ceremonials the operation of a mechanism which in all ages has driven occult associations along a well-defined system of development. If he be familiar with modern Masonic ritual and know something of the growth of the Fraternity, at almost every step he will stumble over a movement that is familiar, and contemplating these he is likely to neglect the concomitant observation that there are differences almost as important as the similarities.
It will be well for that student if he keeps always before his mind that sound Masonic precept which bids a man beware lest he be misled by resemblance or similitude. There is not one of the Ancient Mysteries which has not been solemnly nominated for the honor of being acclaimed the fount and origin of Freemasonry. Where candidates are so numerous and the vote is so evenly distributed, election must be difficult. It is simpler to dismiss the contest with the assumption that each society left its impress upon the social consciousness of the Graeco-Roman world and that Freemasonry is indebted to all of them. It must be remembered that with the coming of modern civilization these cults did not pass away, as night passes with the coming of day, but that they entered into new forms and continued, under other names and with other objects.
The cult influence which flowed into Europe from the Orient and the Levant came in two major streams. The older - and by older is meant the one which has ascertainable chronological precedence - came along the highway that entered the West through Greece. When Greek civilization gave way to Roman, Hellenic culture passed along what it had borrowed from the East, enriched by the embellishments wrought by Grecian genius and learning. Rome again tapped the Oriental store to add to what she had already taken from her illustrious neighbor. But when Roman religions and religious societies made way for new faiths, there was no clearing away of old cults. Rather there was gradual transformation in which old and new commingled. Thus that learned student of Mithraism, Franz Cumont, was able to condense much philosophical history into a single paragraph when, in The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, he said:
"About the time of the Severi the religion of Europe must have presented an aspect of surprising variety. Although dethroned, the old native Italian, Celtic and Iberian divinities were still alive. Though eclipsed by foreign rivals, they lived on in the devotion of the lower classes and the traditions of the rural districts. For a long time the Roman gods had been established in every town and had received the homage of an official clergy according to pontifical rites. Beside them, however, were installed the representatives of all the Asiatic pantheons, and these received the most fervent adoration from the masses. New powers had arrived from Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and the dazzling Oriental sun outshone the stars of Italy's temperate sky. All forms of paganism were simultaneously received and retained, while the exclusive monotheism of the Jews kept its adherents, and Christianity strengthened its churches and fortified its orthodoxy, at the same time giving birth to the baffling vagaries of gnosticism. A hundred different currents carried away hesitating and undecided minds, a hundred contrasting sermons made appeals to the conscience of the people."
An epoch of such seething mental and spiritual unrest was ideal for the development of cults. Wherever men could seize upon an ideal and build it into a religious, philosophical, ethical, social or industrial system, they were certain to do so. Withdrawing themselves from the profane, securing themselves from intrusion by secret methods of identifying the true believers, the members felt themselves free behind the tyled door which shut their own circle in and shut all others out. But each true leader among them was possessed of notions of how things should be done which he had learned in previous associations; he cast his ideas into the melting pot. Out of this in time emerged the distinguishing practices of the new society.
A cursory examination of the important traits of the Ancient Mystery is therefore of considerable importance in any serious effort to comprehend some of the phenomena of those times which afterwards were destined to play a part in the evolution of Freemasonry. It has additional virtue in that it throws light upon what has been a puzzle to many - the process by which the modern speculative society grew out of a medieval guild and by which the medieval guild doubtless grew out of earlier organizations.
The Mysteries, which in Greece and Rome were frequently divided into two classes of Greater and Lesser, stood to the society of classical times much as religious denominations stand to that of our own age. Each had its peculiar set of ethical and religious dogmas, orders of priesthood, in many cases ranks or grades of members; they were frequently governed by official hierarchies and spread their beliefs in all possible places. A degree of secrecy usually attached to their ceremonies; when such was the case, admittance was by a ritual Of initiation. Among the most famous of them were those of Isis, Osiris, Serapis, Magna Mater, Mithra, the Cabiri, Adonis, Dionysos and the Eleusinia. It should be borne in mind that the Greeks did not use the word, mystery, in its modern sense, but rather as indicating a cleansing after pollution.
Of these perhaps the most famous were the Eleusinian Mysteries, a system of rites celebrated at Eleusis, originally a community apart from Athens but later a suburb of that city. They were observed in honor of Demeter, the Greek Ceres, and her daughter, Persephone, or Proserpina. In the course of centuries they underwent steady elaboration, so that what at first was a local and relatively simple rite became in time a complex and national religious institution.
Archeological discoveries indicate that the rites were performed at Eleusis long before the peoples afterwards known as Greeks came there from some northern or eastern region. In that prehistoric period they consisted of primitive magical practices, intended to increase the fertility of the land. Their magical character is inferred from the fact that the ceremonies did not at that time seek to inculcate a set of ideas to be believed, after the fashion of theology, but were made up of acts to be performed as a means of coercing the powers of nature into bringing about specific and practical results. These acts were considered as essential as the rude mechanics of plowing, sowing and reaping. The secrets of such rites were deemed to have what nowadays would be considered a money value, since to use them meant a plentiful yield of grain and to neglect them meant crop failure. In this early form the rites had the same general character and were as jealously guarded from outside knowledge as the secrets of the mason trade guilds came to be in later centuries.
As time passed, Eleusis was drawn into the environs of Athens, wheat fields gave way to city lots, the farmer was replaced by mechanics and tradesmen, deities once local became national gods and goddesses, and primitive customs of worship were transformed from their old pragmatic nature into the basis of a religious fraternity. There were no wheat growers to fight for the old secrets, but these relics of a simpler day served admirably as symbolical religious mysteries for the general welfare of the urban soul. In time the Eleusinia spread their influence beyond the confines of Athens and became the framework of a brotherhood for admission into which all Greeks were eligible.
At the stage of their highest development, the rites were divided into the Greater and the Lesser Mysteries. For the several weeks during which they were celebrated a general truce was proclaimed affecting all persons save those under penalty f or conspiracy or treason. Exiles could return home for the festival and none could be arrested for debt. Days were set apart for attendant amusements, such as athletic contests and horse racing, and there was a prolonged holiday of which the pleasure-loving Greeks took fullest advantage.
The mysteries proper were invested with such solemnity that any person not correctly introduced - the cowans and eavesdroppers of the times - might be punished with death for intruding upon them. Secrets of a solemn and inviolable character were intrusted to each initiate. If he revealed them he would be so accursed of the gods that it would be dangerous to dwell in the same house with him lest the roof fall. For betrayal of his trust he was liable to public and ignominious death. No individual could be admitted until after strict inquiry into his character to ascertain that he had not been guilty of murder or impiety. Men and women were admitted when the preliminary requirements had been satisfied.
Initiation began with a nine-day period of purification at Agrae. During this time the candidates had to keep themselves chaste and unpolluted. The primary stage - or first degree - concluded with a ceremony in which, wearing garlands and having under their feet the skin of some animal which had been slain on an altar of Zeus, the novices offered prayer and made sacrifices.
A year later the neophytes sacrificed a sow to Demeter and were then entitled to take higher degrees, thereby becoming known as Ephoroi and Epoptikoteroi. Wearing wreaths of myrtle, they repaired to their temple and underwent a symbolical purification by washing their hands in sacred water. The mystical lore was then read to them from a sacred book of two stones cemented together. After a brief catechism by the officiating priest, they were subjected to certain ordeals, in which terrifying objects were suddenly presented, the floors seemed to shake, lightning flashed on every hand and there were thunderous noises. When this ceremony of autopsia had been completed, the assemblage was dismissed in liturgical form. What Masons would call the Work of the evening was directed by a chief hierophant, who was assisted by three attendants, a torch-bearer, a crier and a person who, since he officiated at the altar, may be called a chaplain. There were various additional subordinate officials to look after incidental duties.
Striking as this evolutionary development of the Eleusinian cult must be considered, the story of Mithraism is even more remarkable. In it the historian traces a succession of religious and ethical theories from before the dawn of history almost to the present day. It alone Is sufficient to convince the skeptical that a well-defined cult or social movement is capable of adhering to a few simple basic ideas throughout innumerable transformations and to reproduce itself in countless forms and variations.
Mithra was one of the earliest of the gods of Iranian peoples, originally, it is believed, the god of light before dawn. As his name is close to the Sanskrit word mitra, for the sun, it is likely that he soon became identified with that planet and thus, in a fashion, was the Persian equivalent of Apollo. In Zoroastrianism he was exalted to the godhead, along with Ormazd. After the transfer of his worship to Phrygia, however, he was made the central divinity of a separate cult. The baptism of his followers in the blood of a young bull was a custom of Phrygian origin.
The image of this deity as venerated in Persia and earlier was hideous in the extreme, but this handicap was removed by some unidentified Greek sculptor of extraordinary genius, who devised the statue or plaque which ultimately became famous. In this the youthful god, with a Phrygian cap on his head and his garment thrown back, is shown resting his knee upon a bull prone on the ground. With one hand the god holds the creature by one horn while with the other he plunges a knife into its neck. As is usual with such symbolical representations, there are several interpretations. One is that Mithra represents the sun while the bull represents the earth, containing in its body the seeds of all fruitful things which the sun causes to spring forth. Another is that it represents the struggle of light with darkness, of good with evil. In most legendary accounts of the encounter the contest is placed in a cavern. In time the image became the most sacred object of a carefully organized cult, offering to its devotees a scheme of salvation backed by a long tradition, with its own priesthood, sacred books and ethical code. It appealed powerfully to men, especially to soldiers. Its place of assembly was called a mithreum.
The cult made its appearance in Italy in the first century before the Christian era, being carried thither by soldiers and itinerant merchants. It made rapid headway; in the course of time it attracted the most powerful and influential men of Rome, so that after Antoninus Pius most of the emperors became converts, with many famous philosophers, statesmen and literary men. With such prestige at the capital of the civilized world and with soldiers as evangelists, Mithraism soon spread to Northern Africa, made its way to England, Scotland, Germany and to the lands east of the Danube.
At the center of Mithraic theology stood a dual godhead similar to that on which Zoroastrianism was built. Ormazd was the chief deity on high; over the infernal regions reigned Ahriman, a Spirit of Evil. A divine trinity was created by the birth of Mithra, son of Ormazd, who in some versions was said to have been born of a mortal virgin. Ormazd and Mithra were represented as waging ceaseless warfare against the Spirit of Evil. The followers of Mithra were conceived of as a world army, led by the god, and military virtues were strongly emphasized in the moral teachings of the cult. A man entered this army by being initiated in a mithreum, usually a room built partly underground to represent the famous cave, scene of the god's struggle with the bull. There were usually seven grades of membership. A symbolical drama was performed at one stage of advancement and this represented death and resurrection, together with a baptism in the blood of a bull. Each local branch had its own officials, its own treasury and dispensed its own charity.
For a time Mithraism was a formidable opponent of Christianity, but it was gradually pounded to pieces by the missionary zeal of the Western Church. Internal discords weakened it still further, and it went into a decline. It was rescued from oblivion, however, by the followers of Mani, and underwent reincarnation as the cult of Manichaeism. Mani, according to Mohammedan tradition, was a Persian of Ecbatana, born in about the year 215 A.D. His theology revived the dualism which long had stood at the center of Mithraism, dividing the universe into light and darkness, good and evil, with a god of light on one hand and a god of darkness on the other. The cult, after gaining a foothold in Persia, passed on to Rome about the fourth century and there became a powerful rival of the Christian Church. There in due season it was demolished by Leo the Great, Valentinian III and Justinian.
Once more the scattered fragments of its loyal following were gathered together to reappear, with elements borrowed from gnosticism and Christianity, under the name of Paulicianism. This sect spread over Armenia and Asia Minor from the fifth century onward, taking its name, according to one of its traditions, from a certain Paul, a patriarch of the Christian Church at Antioch; another tradition asserts that a certain Constantine was founder. The first of its canons, according to F. C. Conybeare, was belief in the ancient divine dualism of the Iranians. Its adepts anathematized Mani, yet in substance adopted his dualistic theory, affirming that there is a heavenly father, who rules not this world but the world to come; and an evil demiurge, lord and god of this world, who made all flesh. In spite of violent persecutions - the Byzantine empress, Theodora, caused 100,000 to be slain - the cult profoundly affected Catholic theology, specially of the Eastern Church. It survived in the Balkans, particularly in Bulgaria, down to the thirteenth century. Five hundred years later it reappeared in Armenia and traces of it were found there early in the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile this strange compound of Catholicism, Manichxism, gnosticism and Zoroastrianism had sown the seeds of new religious cults in Europe. Among these were the Bogomiles, a Bulgarian sect, the Patarini of Italy and the various branches of the Cathari, which flourished in France from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. All of these retained a few traces of Manichaeism and its parent Mithraism, although in some instances they are not easily discovered. According to Albert Henry Newman, the Cathari rejected, after the manner of the Manichaecans, intercourse of the sexes. They asserted they held to nothing but the Scriptures, repudiated ceremonial marriage and the veneration of confessors, considered baptism, and especially the baptism of infants, useless, taught that a private room was as sacred as a consecrated place of worship and said altars were no better than other heaps of stones. They practiced austere self-denial and abounded in charitable deeds.
This heretical movement reached its flower in the sect of the Albigenses, who flourished to such power that Innocent III, taking alarm at their prosperity, organized a crusade against them. A large army under the fanatical papal legate, Arnold, hunted them to the death, sacking town after town, slaughtering and outraging the populations. The work of destruction went on for years. Some of the Albigenses fled to Spain were they were hunted down by the Inquisition. Others found asylum in the Netherlands.
It is a long and devious journey from nineteenth-century Armenia back to the Iranian cult of Mithra, or even from the French Cathari back to the same indistinct beginning. For him who would trace its course history sometimes offers but the frailest of clews. But it is a trip worth taking for the light it throws upon the intricate problem of cult inheritances. If it proves nothing else, it demonstrates that human societies may retain certain peculiarities through countless changes, and that these characteristics can be passed from group to group, although each successive heir may be utterly unconscious of the source from which they were derived.
Puritanism in England and in New England was in some respects a modern embodiment of the ancient dualistic theory; and the same general theory, to cite a cause nearer home, was mixed with all kinds of gnostic vagaries and built into the secret society known as the Order of the Illuminati. This system, which was allied with Freemasonry, was founded in Bavaria in the latter part of the eighteenth century by Adam Weishaupt. The Illuminati, along with other Masonic "higher grades" and pseudo-Masonic occultist societies which came into existence about the same time, undoubtedly derived their inspiration from a culture stream flowing from the Graeco-Roman period of a thousand years ago.
Other illustrations of this same tendency could be used. There was the stream of gnosticism; there was the stream of Jewish theosophic mysticism which culminated in the Kabbala; there was that other and better known stream, perpetuated by classic literature, the rediscovery of which gave rise to Europe's Renaissance; there was the stream of astrology, one branch of which took the form of alchemy and its attendant occultism; there was the subterranean stream of pagan belief which resulted in fairy cults and witchcraft cults and thoroughly saturated folk beliefs in England and Europe. Christianity, Catholic and Protestant alike, has not hesitated to give Christian interpretations to vague notions which awed the pagans of the past, and has even usurped and taken into its own service ancient rites and ceremonials, traces of which survive in the annual festivals of Christmas and Easter. In the spiritual confusion that was imperial Rome, when the old gods died and men sought new faiths in which to put their trust, eager minds were quick to grasp at every promise of hope, and society after society came into being, flourished and passed away, leaving always some essence of its philosophy or ritual to enrich or to complicate the thinking of posterity.
That Ancient Craft Masonry has in fact retained just such inheritances is clearly apparent from the extraordinary complexity of its symbolism. To cite a single instance, where many might be brought to attention, there may be found in its legends and ritual survivals of the Pythagorean philosophy of numbers and particularly of the number three, with its relation to the triangle. Both the equilateral and the right triangle have been venerated by the Craft from a day beyond which we possess no record. The oldest traditions mention Euclid and Pythagoras and the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid has long been regarded as a Masonic symbol of the first importance. But in spite of the attribution of Greek origin for this mathematical theorem, there is evidence to show it may have been known by the Egyptians long before Pythagoras. The Egyptians considered the base line as representing Osiris, the male principle; the vertical line as representing Isis, the female principle, and the hypothenuse as representing Horus, product of the two. Thus in the earliest times the problem had definite religious significance. It is not possible to say precisely how that idea was preserved and transmitted through many centuries until, in altered form and with its earlier meaning lost, it reappeared in the practices of medieval operative masons. The important thing to remember is that however the explanation of it had changed, it continued to be invested with mystical connotations. With the strange history of Mithraism in mind, the assumption must be that it was passed along from cult to cult until it reached an architectural association which from its calling was particularly likely to cherish it.
Pythagoras founded a cult in which there was an outer and an inner teaching, one for ordinary minds and the other for the truly intelligent. He made numbers into symbols for the divine mind. As all numbers rise from the number one, so he conceived all nature as rising from one Deity. Carrying the notion a step further, letting the Monad represent the active principle in nature, or God, the Duad represent the passive principle, union of the two produced the Triad, which represented the soul of the world, and the Quadrate or Square represented the perfection or completion of nature. Other combinations and elaborations of the same idea naturally afforded symbolical dress for the most abstruse metaphysical reflections.
The effect of such a doctrine upon an intellectual world already grown too wise to believe in the old gods was profound. It was based on the best science of the day, was plausible and intelligible. Best of all, it could be imparted only to minds competent to work out its subtle implications. Those who penetrated to its innermost arcana believed they had approached very near to the great objective of all religious cults, knowledge of the meaning and nature of God. Those who never quite reached that point had reason to feel they were on their way. As for less able or less curious minds, they were content with the belief that they were in the presence of secrets of incalculable potency, mere proximity to which gave them a decided advantage over their uninitiated neighbors.
Practically every one of these Pythagorean theories survives in some obscure form in modern Freemasonry. This has led incautious students to the conclusion that the Pythagorean cult was an early form of Freemasonry. Such an assumption is scarcely warranted by the facts. It is far more likely that in every important secret society of the Graeco-Roman world which attracted the adherence of learned men, Pythagoreanism had repercussions. Its teachings, often garbled and misunderstood, passed into the common stock of knowledge, theory and belief, which was worked over and over again into new legends and rituals.
It is of importance to remember, in this connection, that in the days of the emperors Rome was not only the military capital of the world but was also its chief center of intellectual energy. That section of the early Christian Church which established itself in the Eternal City rapidly became the most militant and most successful. Alexandria and Northern Africa, Antioch and Byzantium made priceless contributions to early Christian philosophy and literature, but Rome carried the banner of the Cross to the remotest confines of the known world and to the far-away islands of the seas. But Christianity, destined to become the greatest of Rome's religious systems, was not its only one. Indeed for centuries it was not the most important one from the standpoint of its popularity with the masses of Roman intellectuals.
With the break-up of the empire came a break-up of its social organizations. Such of the Ancient Mysteries as had continued to that time shared the common fate. The general culture they represented did not pass away with them, but persisted in many forms and through divers transmutations down into the Middle Ages and beyond. Somehow and at some undeterminable time Freemasonry emerged, bearing within itself traces of that culture. It is not unreasonable to suppose that data will at some future time be discovered, or other internal evidence will be found, to prove that certain specific rites in the Masonic system were definitely practiced at a time coincident with the Mysteries, or else with some of the private or local cults which in all essentials were at one with the Mysteries themselves.
If that should come to pass it may even turn out that the Legend of H.A. in its primitive form was a ceremony in some Ancient Mystery, perhaps in one of the colleges composed of workers in the building trades. The facts as now known are far from proving any such theory; but there may be some use - and certainly there can be little harm - in holding that possibility as a working hypothesis. It is impossible to believe that this legend could have been fabricated or first introduced during the Grand Lodge era in the early eighteenth century, when innovations of incalculably smaller moment were bitterly resented by operative Masons and in fact proved highly disruptive. Moreover it is difficult to believe that such a mystery - alien in its every aspect from the practical interests of medieval guilds - could have been fabricated by guild operative members. It would have been so much more natural for them to manufacture a legend out of materials nearer home.
In its essentials the Legend of H-A. bears a strange resemblance to rites of several cults of the greatest antiquity. It may well be that the guilds inherited it, along with many other ancient matters, from ancestors which flourished in the Graeco-Roman period and which in turn borrowed it from their ancestors.
At any rate it is plain that mystery cults of the classical period must not be regarded as something exceptional in that time, or as standing apart from general culture as Freemasonry today stands apart from other modern societies. If this be a true reading of the case, it explains the difficulties under which all those have labored who, from William Hutchinson and Dr. Oliver down, have tried to show that Freemasonry is the particular descendant of some particular Ancient Mystery. It is a hypothesis more easily defensible to suppose that in a sense it has descended from all of them, since all belong to one vast body of social experience.
AMERICANS who have not yet advanced far into the twilight of life are able to recall an epoch in the social history of the country that has now largely passed away. Children were born into homes in which their father had been born before them and his father, perhaps, before him. Grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins resided in the same neighborhood, not too far apart for frequent interchanges of visits. For an established family to remove from the neighborhood, or a new to enter it, was an incident sufficiently rare to flutter the dovecote of gossip. If one became ill or suffered from accident or failed in business or lost a job or encountered other misadventure, kinsfolk and neighbors were on hand to perform whatever ministrations of friendship the case seemed to demand. A cordon of benevolent protection was thrown about the conduct of each individual, for where his daily doings were so closely woven into the lives of others, the community necessarily exercised its influence for moral restraint or direction. The community might be parochial in outlook and narrow in limitations, but in return for individual support it accorded to each member a sense of security and stability that made for prosperity and peace. A man was strong with the strength of his neighborhood.
Slowly at first and afterwards at accelerated pace, changes came. Railways cut through quiet countrysides; life was stirred by the shrill outcry of the locomotive. Daily newspapers brought the clamor of the outside world into calm rounds of rural thought. The telegraph and the telephone were nerve fibers vibrating with strange sensations singularly disturbing to Village quiet. Highways with hard surfaces replaced the country roads. Swiftly moving motor cars annihilated distance. Factories replaced home industries, destroyed village occupations and lured young men and women into larger towns, which in turn grew into cities population began to pyramid in amazing fashion. Inashort time the center of gravity had shifted from the country to the city.
Social life underwent corresponding changes. Families were forced to move about, in response to shifting currents of employment. An influx of immigration tinctured the old rural American culture with new and sometimes disconcerting colors. The home began to disintegrate into a mere place to eat and sleep. Children were more often sent away from home to be educated the head of the house frequently found work miles away; the family washing was sent to laundries; homemade preserves, pickles, jellies, salted meats and even bread succumbed to the products of the cannery, the bakery and the delicatessen store; clothes were bought ready tailored; hired nurses were called in to attend the sick. Mounting rent and incidental inconveniences drove families from individual houses into apartments, flats and tenements, where neighbor was stranger to neighbor. In some cases the moral bond of family life became loosened or relaxed.
Isolated among strangers, the individual found himself bereft of the old-time supports. Few gave more than perfunctory notice if he became ill, disabled or bankrupt. Thus thrown largely upon his own private resources, he began to feel the tension of life as he had not felt it before. Loneliness beset him, worries increased, his temper became unsettled. If he had not already incurred the obligations of family life, he was inclined to shrink from incurring them, for fear the added strain might prove too great.
To escape from this feeling of helplessness men began organizing themselves into fraternities, benefit societies, insurance associations, clubs and innumerable other artificial groups, the grand purpose of them all being to supply one or many of the deficiencies left by the passing of the old home community. This development of fraternal life set a lamp at the heart of the modern world, revealing its misery and its unfulfilled social longings. Why this has received so little attention from professional sociologists remains a mystery, but such is the fact; the sociology of secret societies calls in vain for its Lester Ward and its Franklin Giddings.
The curve of the astounding growth of Freemasonry - cause of so much anxiety to thoughtful Masons - coincides so exactly with this transference of population from country to town that the relation of the two becomes apparent. The statistics are eloquent. In 1890 there were in all the United States only 641,410 Master Masons. By 1910, when the trend of population to the city had become marked, the number had grown to 1,369,760. In 1915 lodge rolls contained a total of 1,656,061, and by 1924 it had leaped to 2,971,662, a gain of 1,315,601 in nine years or an average yearly gain of 146,178. On January 1, 1927, the total had passed beyond 3,000,000. At the same time, and no doubt for the same reason, other fraternities, the Odd Fellows, Eastern Star, Knights of Columbus, Knights of Pythias, Woodmen and scores beside, recorded growths equally astonishing. Nowadays the man or woman who does not belong to some club, fraternity or other organized group, is so rare as almost to be considered a social deviate.
This modern development of fraternalism parallels to a remarkable degree the rise and growth of a similar movement in the Graeco-Roman world of twenty centuries ago. The redemptive rites of the Mysteries, as has already appeared in the course of this narrative, made an irresistible appeal to men in a state of moral or religious bankruptcy. Something needs now to be said about another system which flourished alongside the Mysteries, partly in response to the same need and to an extent duplicating their methods. It produced certain associations of workers employed in skilled crafts, which are commonly known as the Roman collegia.
In the period of the Roman republic, life was stable and secure, for most classes at least, and family ties were close - closer, perhaps than were our own a generation or so ago. The imperial regime brought changes which altered the whole structure of Roman society. The country man was uprooted from his native soil; an independent working class was altered into a proletariat or still further demoted into slavery. The native toiler was exposed to competition from aliens who arrived in great throngs. Farmsteads were merged into great estates. Villages were overshadowed by rapidly growing cities with slums and tenement districts.
This alteration penetrated to the marrow of individual life. A man came to live among strangers; nervous tension increased and there was an inevitable search for relief in gaudy shows or in exciting pastimes. The individual burdened by family responsibilities was thrown back upon his own unaided resources, with the consequences that
On that Hard Roman world, disgust
And silent loathing fell;
Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell.
"In the blank wilderness created by universal despotism," wrote Sir Samuel Dill, "the craving for sympathy and mutual succor inspired a great social movement, which legislation was powerless to check Probably no age, not even our own, ever felt a greater craving for some form of social life, wider than the family and narrower than the State."
That craving was satisfied to a large extent by the collegia, social organizations combining a little of the functions of a modern trade union with a little of the modern club, but with an element of religion and charity not found in either. Such clubs had previously grown up among the Greeks - the Hetaireiai. Usually they revolved about some local deity, although many of them were doubtless of political character resembling in this respect later societies which sprang up in eighteenth-century Europe. Egypt also had its peculiar type of club, records of which were found among the papyri in the Fayum, and there were collegia in North Africa and Asia Minor.
The collegia - collegia fabrorum - actually existed long before the imperial period of Roman history. Numa Pompilius, who ruled some 650 years before the Christian era, is said in certain legends not only to have founded them but also to have divided the various trades into distinct districts, each with its own independent society. Associations of masons, musicians, goldsmiths, potters, tanners, shoemakers, braziers and dyers, are mentioned by Plutarch, but there is an intimation of still others even at that early day. They were formally recognized by the state, had their own laws and were ruled by their own officials. From time to time new associations came into being, but as the centuries passed, official recognition became more difficult to obtain. Ultimately all associations of the kind were frowned upon by tyrants of the imperial period and membership in many of them rendered an individual liable to severe penalties.
That the collegia derived from still older societies there can be little doubt. Several learned attempts have been made to connect them with the Dionysiac Artificers of Asia Minor, but beyond showing general resemblances these efforts have been far from successful. It is probable, however, that in their earlier stages a majority were little more than burial clubs. His pagan theology taught the ancient Roman that if his memory was neglected after death his spirit would wander, lonely and homeless. Accordingly it was natural for men to band together in little groups - each with its own meeting place, its treasury and its officers - the principal function of which was to preserve the memory of the departed and to see that each member received sepulture according to his desire.
Afterwards almost every clique of persons having common interests organized its own college. Servants in some great house would have one; garbage collectors had one, and so it was with pig raisers, merchants, wine growers. Every legion carried with it collegia of masons, carpenters, road makers, bridge builders and what not. Subsequently the system crystallized into a regime of tyranny, with the emperor at its head, so that a man was compelled to carry on the trade his father had followed before him; in some cases men were forbidden to leave one community to go into another in search of work. Among craft organizations were collegia of men engaged in various branches of the building trade, but there is little evidence to show that these in any way occupied a peculiar place or received special attention. Indeed all collegia were taken so much for granted that literary men of the time did not give them special notice. Modern knowledge of them is obtained mainly through archaeology, although the silence of historians regarding these things now appears as strange as it would be for American historians to pass over in silence such important social factors as trade unionism, fraternalism and the public school system.
Although enthusiastic writers have tried to prove that the collegia employed a form of organization almost identical with that of the Masonic lodge, no strong case has been made out for that contention. Their members, or sodales, had the right of electing their officers and of balloting for new members. Admission was at first reserved to freemen, but the Code of Justinian permitted the admission of slaves with the consent of the masters of such slaves. Honorary memberships were occasionally created for patrons, as afterwards was done by operative Freemasons.
The typical college met in a building or hall, seldom owned by itself, called the schola, sometimes the curia. Presiding officers were known as proesides or magistri. Next to them in importance were the decuriones, the designation being held by some authorities to indicate there may have been one such supervisor or warden for every ten members. Different collegia appear to have had different subordinate officers - or at least different names for them - as factores and quoestores for the management of business affairs, haruspices or soothsayers, and secretaries of one kind and another. There was also a general division of the membership, apparently according to the mechanical proficiency of each craftsman. There were dues and fees and there was a constitution or set of by-laws. Being poor, collegia were usually glad to accept fees and legacies or to obtain the patronage of some person of high rank who might be depended on to use his influence to throw work in the way of the membership.
It will be seen at once that the college was little like a modern Masonic lodge, either in its purposes or in its organization. There is no closer analogy between its officers and the official staff of a lodge than there is between the lodge's staff and that of almost any other organized group. Every society which meets at stated periods needs a presiding officer, and he will require assistants. If records are to be kept there will be need for a secretary; if funds are to be handled there will be need for a treasurer. A good deal more has been made of such resemblances than the facts appear to justify.
Affording, as they did, unusual opportunities for secret assemblage, the collegia gradually fell under official suspicion in the troubled days of the empire. Julius Caesar and Augustus both issued edicts ordering the suppression of all of them, "except those which had been anciently instituted." The Justinian Code upheld this distinction. That even the most ancient and honored societies did not escape mistrust is apparent from a letter in which Trajan refused Pliny's request for permission to establish a collegium of builders at Nicomedia. "Whatever name we may give to them," the Emperor wrote, "bodies of men, however small in number, who are drawn together by the same design will become political societies."
Nevertheless, and in spite of the ever-present danger to tyrants which is inherent in such associations, collegia of the more intelligent classes of artisans were too useful to be destroyed. This was particularly true of those whose members practiced building trades. Roman legions on the march in hostile regions needed masons and carpenters in whose loyalty they could trust and bridge builders in whose work they could repose confidence. Workmen of this kind were to be found in the collegia; indeed, if they were found at all and thrown together they could be depended upon to organize their own collegia. This was especially the case among stone masons, since the nature of their work required them to journey from place to place and they were forced to make of a collegium a substitute for the homes from which they were so frequently compelled to wander.
For Freemasons this naturally raises the important question of what relationship, if any, existed between Roman collegia of this kind and the trade guilds of the Middle Ages. If a definite connection can be established, it also connects Freemasonry with the collegia, since beyond question Freemasonry emerged from operative mason guilds of medieval times. On this point there has been heated and, unfortunately, inconclusive debate. H.C. Coote in The Romans of Britain - extensively quoted first chapter of Gould's History - observes that Roman collegia spread throughout Britain in the Roman occupation; that they continued without molestation by the later Anglo-Saxon invaders, and survived as medieval guilds.
Coote makes note of the fact that Germanic conquerors of Gaul and Italy ruthlessly suppressed collegia in those lands, looking upon them as seminaries of free Roman thought, but he concludes that the Anglo-Saxons were lenient in Britain "either out of ignorance of their tendency or contempt of their effect." But Freeman in The History of the Norman Conquest and Haverfield in The Roman Occupation of Great Britain agree that Roman civilization was utterly destroyed in Britain by its Anglo-Saxon conquerors. They observe that the followers of Horsa and Hengist, unlike other Germanic tribes which overran other parts of the Roman empire, had no desire to acquire the culture of conquered peoples. Even town life was hateful to them. Whatever vestiges of Roman social life are to be found in England, these authors appear to think, are not remains of the civilization stamped out by the Anglo-Saxons but are survivals taken back to England in the Norman conquest. Haverfield even goes so far as to declare that no case is known where Saxons dwelt in a Roman villa.
It is difficult to believe that where all else was so completely destroyed the collegia alone survived. They depended almost entirely upon the existence of towns and upon craft activities. Even if they had escaped the natural suspicions of Anglo-Saxon overlords, their usefulness must have been destroyed through force of hostile economic pressure. It is clear that if there was a bridge between the collegia and the medieval guilds it must be sought elsewhere.
Gould turned aside for a moment to examine the possibility that such a bridge could be found at Byzantium, or, as it is now known, Constantinople. He referred to George F. Fort's The Early History and Antiquities of Freemasonry, a work published in the period midway between the older school of thought represented by Preston and Oliver and the modern school of which Gould himself was one of the founders. Fort argued that the collegia of builders did not pass out of existence under the impact of barbarian invasions but found asylum at Byzantium and remained intact behind the defenses of that city; that a new culture arose there, in which Oriental, Roman and Greek elements blended, with the Greek predominating; that in the building up of Gothic civilization trained artists and artisans emerged from their Byzantine refuge to perpetuate the traditions of classical culture.
In support of this theory Fort constructed an elaborate and brilliant thesis which occupies the most considerable portion of his ingenious and readable book. He described in some detail the general history of the collegia, told how Augustus began to look upon them with distrust, how Trajan crushed them under the grinding force of governmental power, how Alexander Severus endeavored to resuscitate them, how Constantine, by imperial rescript, transplanted the collegia of builders to Byzantium and there established them on a sound and enduring foundation. Theodosius in 438 confirmed the grants of Constantine.
Unfortunately for this contention, however, it appears that Fort confused the arts possessed by the collegia with the collegia themselves. He assumes that because the trades continued to flourish in Byzantium the old Roman trades organizations continued with them and became in time the guilds of the Middle Ages. On the contrary, there is stronger and better evidence that Byzantium developed a new culture of its own, preserving, of course, much that was borrowed from earlier Greece and Rome. If the collegia did survive in the Eastern city adequate proof thereof is wanting.
"When Constantine moved his capital to the shores of the Bosphorus," Arthur Kingsley Porter wrote in Medieval Architecture: Its Origins and Development, "he exerted every energy to make the new Rome as splendid in architecture as the old. The number and size of the buildings which, according to contemporary authors, he caused to be erected is well-nigh incredible. Executed with more than the usual Roman haste, these buildings were probably inferior to the really remarkable structures erected at this epoch elsewhere in the Empire. At least, the fact that of all the vast city of Constantine hardly a single monument has survived to our day, argues ill for the character of the workmanship. As to the general style of these edifices, we are left in no doubt, although no examples are extant - they could have been only Roman. Similarly the earliest churches of Constantinople must unquestionably have been basilicas of the usual Latin type.
"The Roman period in Byzantine architecture was doubtless succeeded by one of transition, during which the individual character of the Eastern style gradually took form. The monuments furnish us with actual knowledge of the progress of this development only after the middle of the V century, a time when the change had already been almost completed. However, by a study of the historical conditions of the time, and by comparison of the later monuments, it is possible to construct in broad outline the story of this growth."
The author then sketches in colorful phrase the story of how, when Rome was being pillaged by barbarian hordes, Byzantium was gradually freeing itself from Latin influence. The Latin tongue gave way to Greek, and Plato, Aristotle and Homer came once more into their own. Byzantines looked toward the Parthenon and discovered that Greek decoration was superior to Roman. From India, Persia and China came rugs, silks, fabrics and hangings in colors that were luminous and not harsh like the reds and yellows and blacks of Rome. Thus Byzantine architecture built upon Roman foundations, but looked to the old Hellenic monuments for its models of beauty and to the Orient for its richness of color.
Interesting as this undoubtedly is, it is rather conclusively against the theory that the Roman collegium passed into the guild of the later Gothic period by way of Byzantium. In the first place, the immunity granted by Constantine excusing certain workmen from obligations of public service extended to persons in other crafts than those of building and architecture. In the second place there is no evidence that the collegia could and did survive the general Hellenization of the Eastern city. In the third place, there is strong reason for believing that the medieval guild system was an autochthonous development out of general medieval culture, owing fully as much to Teutonic influences as to those of Byzantium and Rome. Indeed, almost any process of reasoning by analogy which would show essential relationship between the guilds and the collegia, could be used also to show essential relationship between the guilds and various ancient Scandinavian and Teutonic brotherhoods. Herbert Spencer traced the guild system to customs of paternal inheritance; and Maine, as A. E. Crawley observed in his treatise contributed to the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, traced it to primitive customs of adoption.
In other words, the specialists have not been able to agree among themselves as to the origin of the guild, and about the best hypothesis of the matter is that of Crawley that they were a growth from the crossing of Teutonic and Greco-Roman ideas and institutions. Fort's attempt to find the bridge at Byzantium must therefore be set down as having failed of approval in the courts of critical opinion.
Other bridges have been sought elsewhere, and notably in southern France and on Lake Como. The possibility that it is to be found among the Comacine Masters is a subject so large in itself that it must be discussed in a separate chapter. Moreover, differences between the collegia and the guilds are quite as marked as are their similarities.
The collegia were essentially social clubs, affected by religion, with little or no control over hours, laws, wages or conditions of labor; the medieval guilds, as will be shown hereafter, were trade organizations, one of their principal purposes being to direct their members in the proper conduct of their work. From this it is not to be understood that the guilds had many things in common with the modern trades union. On the contrary, as J. S. Reid has sagaciously observed, there is hardly a single true point of comparison. Medieval workers as organized into a society might obtain certain advantages which, scattered as individuals, they could not hope to get, but these societies did not attempt to control wages or prescribe the conditions under which alone their members would consent to work. They were maintained for the technical betterment of the craftsmen themselves, for social relaxation, for relief of the distressed, for preserving the operative secrets of their trade and, no doubt, for the moral improvement of the membership.
This does not mean, however, that even if the collegia did pass utterly away without leaving direct heirs they handed nothing down to the guilds and, by consequence, to Freemasonry. Their influence was felt in more than one part of Europe long after their history had been forgotten. It could scarcely be otherwise. The rude inhabitants of many a barbaric village in Africa, in Gaul, in Spain and in the far-away regions beyond the Danube must have marveled at the works and the working methods of these societies of Roman artisans, must have culled out and preserved whatever they could understand or use. Roman social organization could be extirpated root and branch while Roman intrenchments, Roman walls and Roman viaducts, roads and bridges defied "the unsparing ravages of barbarous force." Ideas are more indestructible than viaducts.
When the Dark Ages were at their darkest the germs of the great revival were lying dormant far under ground, needing but sunnier skies to spring up again into new and abundant life. There were numerous towns that had maintained unbroken connections with the past. In these, if nowhere else, memories and traditions lingered, handed down from fathers to sons, altered no doubt in the telling but still basically the same. Nowhere is there positive and incontrovertible evidence connecting Freemasonry, in a direct line through the guilds, with the Roman collegia. Neither is there positive and incontrovertible evidence denying such connection may actually have existed.
SOMEWHERE and somehow in the gloom of the Dark Ages, Operative Craft Masonry was developing the social form in which it was to emerge as the immediate ancestor of Speculative Freemasonry. Few periods of history are so obscure and mysterious as is that which comprehends the centuries of pillage and bloodshed when "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" had disappeared from sight, trodden down beneath the conquering footsteps of barbarian hordes. The Northern invaders were mighty in destruction but for long seemed impotent to rebuild where they had razed. Charlemagne indeed erected upon the ruins of Roman rule in Western Europe an ambitious political structure, but when the Carolingian empire in turn succumbed to the disintegrating influences of the times, the fairest lands relapsed into anarchy and barbarism.
Everywhere religion and superstition were in a death struggle for supremacy, the advantage going first one way and then the other. Philosophy was degraded from its once high estate, while witchcraft and demonology, bigotry and ignorance, vied with one another for hegemony of the human mind. Art languished, science perished and the learning of the ancients slumbered in parchments until a more propitious and a kindlier age should awaken it once more. The Saracen East alone gave shelter to intellectual refinements too subtle to attract the coarser genius of Europe. In a day when light and learning suffused the understanding of Persia and when Omar the Tentmaker was lifting his voice in song or, with educated contemporaries of the Near East, was discussing the complications of algebra, kings who could neither read nor write reigned in France, England and Germany.
Viewed in retrospect it is as if a malevolent fate had drawn a curtain of fog across the face of the earth from the Bosphorus and the strait of Gibraltar to the arctic circle. Now and then a stray breath of history lifts a corner of the veil to disclose marching armies and besieged cities. From behind it come the clang of sword upon shield, the twang of bow, the thud of battle-axe and the shrill clamor of martial trumpets. Then the mist begins slowly to clear away, lifting, not upon a scene of desolation, as might be expected, but upon a new and sturdy civilization which, in some seemin0v miraculous way, has come into being in the midst turmoil and confusion.
During that long period when the western mind, like a field that has lain fallow, had been storing up the energy which was to raise humanity to novel and unimagined heights, seeds of a new social and artistic order had germinated. Most striking of all the products of the Dark Ages was that style of building which is spoken of as Gothic architecture. Along with it developed the system of medieval operative guilds, of which that of the stone masons was at once the most interesting and most complex. Both the architecture and the guild system contained innumerable vestiges of earlier ancestry, but each was so distinctive in itself as to defy exact identification with anything that had gone before. When Gothic architecture is dispassionately measured by that of the Byzantine or of the Greco-Roman period, the contrasts appear to be greater than the resemblances. Similarly when the guild system is measured by the collegia or the Ancient Mysteries, the differences appear greater than the similarities. That Gothic architecture and the medieval guilds were codevelopments due to common causes appears to be established by an overwhelming preponderance of the historical evidence.
A list of theories that Freemasonry in approximately its present form has descended from the days of King Solomon has already passed in review. Among these was the theory that primitive man originated the Fraternity; the theory that it came from the Ancient Mysteries; the theory that it came from the collegia' with attendant hypotheses of transmission through Britain, Byzantium or Southern France; the Comacine theory, which will be examined hereafter in greater detail. Still other theories have been advanced from time to time, as that it originated among ancient Jewish theosophists and was transmitted through the Kabbalists; that it sprang from the Druses of Mount Lebanon; that it came from antiquity through the Dionysian Artificers; that it was originally a system of Egyptian mystery cults; that it was founded by the Druids of ancient Britain; that it was brought from the Orient by Crusaders; that the Knights of the Temple acquired it from the Society of the Assassins. It is necessary, however, for the champion of any such hypothesis to present evidence that Freemasonry has continued as one big fraternity from the beginning down to the present. Not only has this not been done, but the testimony of history is heavily against the supposition.
If, on the other hand, the attempt be only to show that Freemasonry contains survivals and inheritances of the cultural experiences of all past times, the undertaking is by no means difficult. Such an attempt naturally presupposes a hypothesis that the origins of the Fraternity as a separate institution are to be sought in a period which would be calculated to give it the peculiar and distinctive traits it has been known from its earliest provable history to possess. The nascency of Gothic architecture supplies precisely such a period. If the guilds of the Gothic builders did not give origin to Freemasonry, it is at least certain that Freemasonry first appears in a recognizable form among those guilds. To go behind the records which prove that, is to abandon the realm of history for that of speculation and fancy. It is therefore of importance to examine as carefully as may be the art and practices of the Gothic builders for what light they may throw upon the Masonic institution.
Of the men who worked out this style unfortunately little is known. There have been almost as many conflicting theories of its origin as there are of the origin of Freemasonry itself. A phenomenon of the Dark Ages was the rise in all parts of Europe of free and self-governing cities. These were essentially different in their political composition from the feudal governments existing all around them. They were ruled by their own councils of burgesses and these in turn were frequently composed of representatives of important subdivisions of the municipality. Craftsmen in the various mechanical trades were accustomed to gather into their own societies; when a society had sufficient numerical strength or prestige in business it demanded and received a voice in the affairs of the town. Its existence as a separate entity was recognized by some form of charter prescribing its duties and privileges and limiting its power of extending or diminishing its own membership. These societies, or guilds as they came to be known, exercised local monopoly in the practice of their respective trades and in return supplied competent workmen for whatever tasks were to be performed.
A passion for building had begun to sweep over Europe. It came so close upon the heels of the eleventh century as to lead many students to consider it a reaction from the gloomy misgivings with which Christian countries had awaited the coming of the year 1,000. The belief that this would be the end of the millennium after which the world was to come to an end had been widespread. But the world did not come to an end and popular thanksgiving was manifest in an almost universal desire to perform notable works of piety. Bishops and abbots expended the offerings of the faithful in erecting cathedrals, churches and monasteries. Feudal lords and ladies found admirable means of atoning for sundry misdeeds by setting aside sums for building or adorning temples. A knight hard pressed in battle might vow a gift of gold to the shrine of a favored saint; a general might promise a chapel for success in a minor campaign or a cathedral, if the campaign was to be hard and the issue doubtful. Occasionally some secular dignitary might desire a castle or palace befitting his dignity. The Crusades not only stimulated the movement still further, but they brought additional treasure and new ideas from the East and profoundly influenced the architectural science of the builders.
In the beginning there were no architects in the modern sense, but there were master builders, who designed the structures, supervised construction and worked with their own hands along with their operative brethren. The workers went by the generic name of masons, but in certain instances were called freemasons. The etymology and original definition of these terms remain, after many years of debate, undecided.
Of "Mason" The New English Dictionary prepared by the English Philological Society says, "The ulterior etymology is obscure; possibly the word is from the root of the Latin maceria (a wall)." The first quotation given to illustrate use of the word is dated at 1205. Lionel Vibert says: "Mason may not be German or Latin, but the ulterior origin is obscure. At all events, when we first find it, it is purely and simply a trade name, and has no esoteric meaning of a brother, or son of anything or of anybody."
As to the original meaning of "freemason" there have been many hypotheses. Edward Conder suggested that among masons in general a few were capable of working without plans, free handedly like painters, and were called "freemasons" in consequence. A more popular theory holds that masons were exempted by papal bulls from certain of the usual feudal restraints. Stieglitz looked with favor upon this notion in his History of Architecture. Leader Scott adopted it in behalf of the Comacine Masters, of whom she said, "They were Freemasons because they were builders of a privileged class, absolved from taxes and servitude, and free to travel about in times of feudal bondage." This theory has its attractions, but it must be laid aside until the papal bulls in question are discovered.
Early writers inclined strongly to the belief that a freemason was so designated because he worked in free stone, that is, stone already hewn from the quarry. Dr. Begemann gave credence to the notion and so did Chetwode Crawley. Still another belief derives the word from the idea of release from the restraints of apprenticeship, when a workman, being out of his indentures, was at liberty to travel about in search of employment. The New English Dictionary somewhat favors the supposition that certain workmen of especial skill were "given their freedom" and ascribes this to a medieval practice of emancipating the best artisans so that they might offer their services wherever a great building was in process of construction.
George W. Speth contributed to Ars Quatuor Coronatorum what he called a tentative inquiry in which he advanced the suggestion that there may have been two distinct masonic guilds in the Gothic period. One was stationary and all its members were bound to work within their local communities; the other was a society of traveling workmen, the members of which were free to move about. He believed that much of the work of cathedral building was so highly specialized that it required workmen of particular training and that it was from itinerant, rather than stationary, town guilds that modern Freemasonry is descended.
In addition to these theories, there is a throng of romantic hypotheses, such as are to be encountered by the student at almost every step of his incursions into Masonic lore. Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry enumerates some of the more fantastic ones. A writer in the European Magazine for February, 1792, who described himself as "George Drake, lieutenant of marines, " attempted to trace Freemasonry to the Druids and derived the word mason from "May's on," the first part being in reference to May-day and the second to the French impersonal pronoun, on. He argued that it originally meant "Men of May," but that was not original with him, since the same derivation was suggested in 1766 by Cleland in his essays, The Way to Things by Words, and The Real Secret of Freemasons. Hutchinson thought the word may have had a Greek origin, coming from mao soon meaning "I seek salvation, or from mystes, or is perhaps a corruption of mesouraneo, meaning "I am in the midst of heaven, or of Mazourouth, a constellation mentioned by Job, or of mysterion, a mystery." Lessing argued that masa in Anglo-Saxon signifies a table, and that Masonry is consequently a "society of the table." Nicola thought the root word was the low Latin noun masonia signifying an exclusive society or club. C. W Moore in the Boston Magazine of May, 1844, derived it from lithotomos, a stone-cutter, thereby prompting Mackey to the sage observation, "It surpasses our ingenuity to get Mason etymologically out of lithotomos."
The late William S. Rockwell, "who was accustomed," Mackey observes, "to find all his Masonry in the Egyptian mysteries," derived the word from mai, signifying to love, and son, which means a brother. "But all of these fanciful etymologies," the learned commentator wittily adds, "which would have terrified Bopp, Grimm or Muller, or any other student of linguistic relations, forcibly remind us of the French epigrammatist, who admitted that alphina came from equus, but that, in so coming, it had very considerably changed its route."
Non-Masonic lexicographers have had no great difficulty with the word. They trace it back through French into various Latin forms and in every case its verbal ancestors referred to workers in stone or mortar. This simple and reasonable explanation ought to suffice for all practical purposes and does suffice for all except gratification of the peculiar vanity to which Masonic literature has been so susceptible, a vanity of finding hidden and mysterious meanings in things that really are obvious. A mason in the medieval period was therefore one who worked in stone or mortar and he became a "free" mason either because he worked in "free" stone or because he was free of his guild or was otherwise emancipated from restrictions which applied to apprentices, serfs and villeins.
When bishop, abbot, prince or baron of the Gothic age got ready to put up a notable building, his first and most important care was to select the master builder. He was - as Arthur Kingsley Porter noted in Medieval Architecture, a work herein extensively quoted - a man of profession who often traveled great distances to obtain important commissions. William of Sens in 1174 journeyed from France to England to apply for the work of rebuilding the cathedral of Canterbury, which had been destroyed by fire. Villard de Honnecourt, a master builder of the last half of the thirteenth century, went to Hungary to supervise the erection of a church, and his album of sketches contains drawings made by him upon visits to Laon, Reims, Chartres and Lausanne. In a note on the margin of one drawing he remarked he had traveled far and had seen many towers but none like those of Reims. Window traceries he examined at Reims so impressed him that he confided in another note his intention of reproducing them in the cathedral of Cambrai.
"Thus it is evident, Porter remarks "that the master builders moved about freely from place to place for education as well as for business, and readily undertook every long journey to obtain commissions. When a new construction had been determined upon, the bishop or chapter or abbot, as the case might be, let the fact be known. Usually several applicants for the position of master builder would present themselves. From these was selected the one who made the most favorable impression, either as promising to carry out the work more economically or as being best qualified by previous training and experience. Other considerations, such as the pay demanded, or how much of the old edifice the various applicants promised to preserve, also influenced the selection. After the successful candidate had been chosen, he entered into agreement with the ecclesiastical powers, and for a definite wage undertook to carry out the stipulated construction. Only in exceptional cases was there anything approaching a contract; as a general rule in the XIII century the master builder was paid a regular salary, just as were the men who worked under him."
His first job was to make the necessary drawings, for, contrary to an impression long held in later times, the Gothic building was planned in considerable detail before the first stone was laid. Some of these drawings have come down to modern times, notably one of the ground plans of the monastery of St. Gallo, dating from the ninth century, and the sketches of Villard de Honnecourt. They were, as Porter observed, plain, straightforward line drawings, made for use and not for display, sufficiently accurate for practical service yet not overburdened with detail. It is probable that master builders also constructed models, since that practice was common among their predecessors of classical times and their successors of the Renaissance period. Indeed what appears to have been just such a model was discovered not long ago in Rouen. Since the master builder's profession required his personal supervision of every step of the construction, he took up his abode near the scene of labor and remained there until his task was finished, or he died or was dismissed, as sometimes happened when his employers became dissatisfied with his work. An instance of the fate which befell an unfaithful master workman is revealed in the Chronicle of Bec, quoted in Medieval Architecture:
"Therefore, when the foundations had been laid deep," the ancient recorder wrote, "the abbot himself, surrounded by his monks, laid the first stone of the foundations on the first day of Lent; and Ingebram, master builder of Notre Dame of Rouen, directed and aided in the construction. And to his superintendence the abbot entrusted the beginning and care of that work, and for the first year Ingebram worked hard at the building, and constructed it with great success, altering the facade and increasing the length of the nave and wonderfully adorning it with two broad towers; but after a year and a half he commenced to absent himself occasionally, neglecting the work and not finishing it as he had promised. When the abbot saw and understood this, he took wise council, and, when now a year and eight months had passed, he removed Ingebram from the sacred place, and handed the work over to the master builder Walter of Melun, who finished it in the third year."
Alas for poor Ingebram! Cathedrals must go on and naves must be lengthened and towers must continue to mount, and when the Ingebrams grow slack in their work, there is always a Walter of Melun waiting just around the corner to be called in to finish the job. Yet it is apparent from the narrative that the abbot was by no means rash or testy regarding the misconduct of his master builder. It was his business to keep an eye on the work, and he had every right to feel aggrieved when the man he most trusted in this, the most important work of the abbot's life, began to fail him. It is more than likely that he and Ingebram had been on excellent personal terms during that first year. For at least two months after Ingebram's defection had become too apparent to be overlooked, his Superior officer hesitated to take action. But when the crisis came there was no question of which held paramount authority.
"The responsibility of the abbot or bishop did not end when the master builder was engaged," says Porter. "On the contrary he watched carefully every detail, saw to providing building materials and frequently interfered even in purely architectural and artistic matters. At St. Denis, Suger, the abbot, directed where and how work should be begun, decided from what quarries stone should be taken, devised how to procure suitable columns, and hunted in the forests for timber. He even superintended the details of the design of the stained-glass windows.
"This strict control exercised by the ecclesiastical authorities explains the eminently scholastic character of the Gothic church. The master builder and the clerk walked hand in hand. The function of the former was not to dictate, to impose his artistic conception on the priest; he was simply an expert, a man with practical experience called in to execute the desired work in the best manner possible, to oversee the workmen, and to undertake those matters for which the bishop or abbot lacked the requisite technical knowledge. How close this union of client and master builder was, the thoroughly ecclesiastic character of the cathedral itself is the best witness. That disagreements, disputes and misunderstandings of various kinds should arise was only natural, but in all such altercations the ecclesiastical authorities always retained the upper hand. It is amusing to read in Gervase what infinite tact William of Sens was forced to employ (at Canterbury) to persuade the reluctant monks that it was necessary to destroy the charred fragments of the glorious choir of Conrad.
"Also the relationship of the master builder to the men under him was far closer than that existing between the modern architect and the laborers. The medieval master builder not only superintended everything connected with the building - the quarrying of the stone, the stereotomy, the construction of scaffolds and centerings - but he seems also to have labored much with his own hands. William of Sens, called from France to direct the construction of the cathedral of Canterbury, was seriously injured by falling from the scaffold; and the entire tone of Gervase's account of the activities of this master builder gives the impression that he performed with his own hands much manual labor."
There were, however, and especially in the later centuries, master builders who merely directed the work performed by others. Porter mentions a passage in a sermon of Nicolas of Berne in which the preacher used this illustration of a point he desired to make: "The master builders, with rule and compass in hand, say to others, 'Cut this here for me,' and do not work themselves and yet they receive higher pay, like many modern prelates." Another passage quoted in the same work, was as follows: "Some work by word alone. For take notice. In great buildings there is usually a single master builder who directs the construction by word alone, and seldom or never does manual labor, but nevertheless he receives higher pay than the others. So there are many in the Church who possess fat benefices, but God knows what good they do; they work by their tongue alone, saying, 'Thus you ought to do, but themselves do not so at all."
This last illustration was taken from a sermon preached in the fourteenth century and by that time many changes had taken place in the office of the master builder, which appears to have increased in prestige since the day when William of Sens tumbled from his scaffold. William was evidently looked upon as little more than a first-rate artisan. In the next century Villard de Honnecourt was an educated man who could afford the luxury of leisurely travel. By the fourteenth the master builder was distinctly a professional - an architect he would be called today.
How wide the gulf was which separated the master from his workman is not clear, but the indications are that it was narrow in the beginning and widened toward the latter days. The assumption has been that most of the skilled and semi-skilled labor came from guilds. It is known that the masons were organized in such societies, as were most workers at mechanical trades, but records of their activities are meager. It is not certain whether or not they were divided into different grades, beginning with those employed for the ruder kinds of work and progressing to the most expert of craftsmen. There is not even satisfactory evidence showing it was a practice for them to move about from place to place, although the supposition is that the nature of the work itself must have necessitated mobility, since especially proficient workmen would naturally gravitate to places where employment was plentiful and the pay good.
The formation of artisan guilds in towns proceeded in much the same manner in all parts of Europe. Men engaged in the same kind of work would band together, agree upon basic qualifications for membership, choose one or more chief officers, as occasion seemed to demand, and establish a code of ethics. In due season the society would obtain a charter or writ of incorporation from the local authorities. In many instances additional membership was limited to the sons of those who already belonged, and not even these might be admitted until they had served long periods of apprenticeship. All members of the guild usually resided in the same quarter of the town or in the same street, and its authority not infrequently extended to regulation of the public and social conduct of the fellowship.
Most antiquarians are convinced, however, that the mason guilds could not have conformed strictly to this plan. Porter expresses the general idea when he indicates that this guild was known as "free," which meant, among other things, that no fee was demanded of those who entered the trade. "But with the exception of the legitimate sons of masters," he continues, "each novice had to serve an apprenticeship of six years, and no master was allowed to have more than one apprentice. The great number of skilled workmen required to construct a cathedral could hardly have found sufficient work to support them in the city when works on the church were not in progress. It is therefore probable that, like the master builders, they moved about from place to place, probably with their wives and families. But did they move in mass, in great bands? The fact of the corporation seems to imply it, for it is difficult to see how a guild could exist if the members were constantly shifting from one city to another. And in what relationship could the master builder have stood to these corporations? Was he merely the chief man of the band, elected by his fellows? What is known of the master builders seems to contradict such an hypothesis."
This is a frank admission on the part of Mr. Porter that he is but guessing. Many of the older historians of Freemasonry, and a few of the present day, have lacked this modesty. They have boldly jumped to the conclusion that because Gothic buildings everywhere exhibit certain unities, therefore the builders must have belonged to some great fraternity, spread over Britain and a large part of continental Europe; that this fraternity must have had some center, perhaps at York, from which it was governed much after the fashion in which modern Freemasonry is governed by Grand Lodges; that it was in possession of a set of secrets, derived nobody knows whence, thereby accounting for the knowledge of Gothic art possessed in widely separated places.
That the builders of Gothic cathedrals may have comprised a class apart from other builders, enjoying certain privileges and immunities and free - as members of other guilds were not - to move about from one community to another, is a reasonable hypothesis, although as yet it can be regarded only as a hypothesis. But that these roving bands of workmen were organized into one big fraternity there is no evidence to prove; such evidence as there is points to a contrary conclusion.
The one big fraternity would have needed an international organization and a hierarchy of officers, and the silence of history is eloquently persuasive that there was no such organization, no such hierarchy. It would have included in its membership nobles, prelates and others bearing the most illustrious names of three centuries. its influence would have been so great as to make it conspicuous, as the Knights Templar and the Hanseatic League were conspicuous. It is inconceivable that such an organization, doing business with both church and state, would have left behind it no records, no memorials, no documents; or that its existence would not have been mentioned in at least some of the writings of contemporary literature; or that it would not have been noticed in the official records of the countries in which it must have existed. Such a society must have had millions of members. Gothic art was not confined to cathedrals and churches; its principals of construction and its methods of ornamentation were used in building bridges, fortifications, civic structures, and even in the making of clothing, pottery and tools. If these principles were the secrets of one big fraternity, those employing them must have been members of that fraternity. It is natural to doubt that a society of such magnitude could have existed for more than 300 years without leaving definitive records of itself. No such records have been found.
What, then, is the conclusion to which these considerations incontrovertibly point? It is that the mason guilds, like Gothic architecture itself, underwent a gradual course of development, gaining in strength, form and beauty as they advanced.
The Gothic buildings of each land exhibited altogether too many local peculiarities to admit of the supposition of outside control by some central power. Each nation had to make its own experiments in the development of the peculiarities of its own style, yet surely, if a body of Gothic "secrets" had been in the possession of a single international fraternity, this would not have been necessary. Whence then did Gothic architecture derive its essential unity? Why did it everywhere possess those general features by which it is identified? The answer is not far to seek. That unity followed necessarily upon its technique. A pointed arch is a pointed arch, whether it exists in Scotland or in Spain; the builder who employed a flying buttress in France and the one who employed it in England had to use it in the same general manner. Once a master builder had triumphantly solved a problem of construction, he had shown the way to all succeeding builders. A similar tendency is observed in modern times where men are engaged in similar tasks although widely separated in geography. The chief difference is that news of scientific and technical discoveries nowadays is disseminated more rapidly than it could be in the Gothic period.
IN the Arabian Nights there is a tale of a city in which every living thing had been changed instantaneously into stone. Generations of readers have been thrilled by the romantic possibilities latent in that theme. In such a city a wanderer might pass through street and market place, through palace and hovel, into hall and chamber, seeking from each immobile form to reconstruct the history of the life which once animated it. Caught and unalterably fixed as he was at the moment of doom, each separate person would have summed up in one frozen posture all he had been, nay, all he might hope to be, unless some necromancer with a word of power should restore to him the vitality which once was his.
Like that fancied wanderer, the archaeologist walks among the ruins of lost civilizations and reconstructs much of their former grandeur. Wherever it can find structures built by human hands archaeology is particularly capable of doing so. The Gothic builders left few and fragmentary records of themselves, but, fortunately for posterity, they left in their cathedrals, churches, monasteries, palaces, aqueducts and bridges memorials more eloquent than words. As the eye of science scans these remains, many of them yet retaining their original beauty, it is able to read therein the old, familiar story with which it has come to associate all other forms of human progress - the story of development through evolution.
The best refutation of a once popular belief that Gothic architecture was the product - and its technique the peculiar possession - of a single great association or fraternity of architects is to be found in reading aright the story which the cathedrals have preserved in their own walls of stone. Examined in a proper serial order, these buildings rehearse a drama of trial and error, of adventure and achievement, of disappointment and triumph, of trimming here and expanding there to meet the exactions of local taste or the limitations of local skill. They can be divided into species and classes, speaking French or German or Spanish or English as unmistakably as if they were capable of human speech.
The origin of the word Gothic, as applied specifically to architecture, is somewhat in doubt. Artists of the Renaissance period used the word as a contemptuous epithet which they applied to all the art of the Middle Ages. De Caumont and his brother architects in the nineteenth century began using it in its modern technical sense as referring to a distinct era of architectural development, placed roughly between the Romanesque and the Renaissance periods. Romanesque is a broad general term including all the various phases of the round-arch style of architecture intervening between the Gothic and the ancient Roman schools. For convenience it has become a practice to differentiate between the Roman and the Romanesque by the fact that Romanesque employed rounded arches to replace the flat lintels of the preceding period; to discriminate between Romanesque and Gothic by the fact that Gothic, in turn, supplanted the rounded arch with a pointed one. That usage is extremely loose, however, and is by no means to be regarded as a complete, or even measurably accurate, definition.
The Goths, after whom the medieval style is named, were members of Teutonic tribes which, in about the first century of the Christian era, lived in the vast area stretching from the basin of the Vistula river westward perhaps as far as Scandinavia. They have been roughly classified in two major divisions, known to history as the Western Goths and the Eastern Goths. The Eastern Goths, for a long period of time, stayed north of the Danube, but the Western Goths crossed the Danube in 376, entering the Roman provinces as peaceful settlers. This is not the place to recount the story of subsequent Gothic migrations; it is sufficient to say that in various streams these Teutonic peoples flowed in upon Europe, overrunning Italy, Gaul and Spain until, by the year 586, they were at the peak of their power and influence in European affairs. They had long passed the height of their affluence before the first of the buildings now existing and known as Gothic had been erected.
Distinctive features of Gothic architecture are best understood by contrasting them with styles of construction which went before. In the ancient Roman scheme of building, a structure, large or small, consisted of four walls, like the sides of a box, with a roof to cover it. When it became necessary to enlarge the structure, it was also necessary to strengthen its walls; the larger and higher it was, the thicker its walls had to be. Windows, that they might not weaken it, were made as few and as small as possible. For these reasons Roman buildings tended to be low and squat, dark and gloomy. The art of internal decoration naturally languished, since there was little use lavishing care upon adornments which could not be seen, or at best could be seen but imperfectly.
In later times the Romans learned how to avoid many of these difficulties. What must have been a triumph of art for them was the Basilica Julia, which was erected on the Forum. This was a rectangular building, with a central hall 255 feet long by 6o feet wide, surrounded by a double aisle of arches, carried on piers, with groined vaults. Afterwards, in the Basilica Julia, erected in the time of Trajan, piers were replaced by monolithic columns ornamented with Corinthian capitals.
When Constantine transferred the capital of the empire to Byzantium in the year 330, he took Roman builders with him and began the erection of buildings in the Roman style. But Roman art underwent, in the eastern city, marked transitions and modifications. Arches began more and more to take the places of lintels; daring and more daring the arch became in itself. By the year 532, when construction began upon the church of St. Sophia, the Roman school had given way completely to the Byzantine, itself an early stage of the Romanesque. The architects of that famous temple, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, laid out plans for a structure which was to be 260 feet from east to west and 238 feet from north to south, to carry a dome 107 feet in diameter, the apex of which should be 175 feet above the ground. This dome was to be supported upon four round arches.
The completion of St. Sophia was a marvelous accomplishment. The use of broad, sweeping arches gave to its interior an appearance of spaciousness such a no Roman basilica could boast. Although the first dome fell, it was rebuilt and the temple exists today in substantially its original form to remind the world of the intellectual splendor and material resourcefulness of an age which could design and execute a work so vast. The round arch was destined to distinguish a general type of architecture which in time became known in Italy as Byzantine and Lombard Romanesque; in Germany as Rhenish; in France as Romane and Norman; in England as Saxon and Norman.
By a slow process of experiment, the Gothic builders worked out many and astonishing changes from this Byzantine superstructure erected on a Roman foundation. For the pier-like walls of the original basilica they substituted an organized system of ribs, with flying buttresses and pointed arches, arranged to constitute a self-contained organization, so that the framework could stand without any walls at all, since the weight and outward thrust of the roof were taken up by the buttresses. In such a building the roof could be carried to a great height; as many windows could be used as the areas between pillars and ribs would accommodate. Each member of the structure could be employed as an element in the decorative scheme of the whole. Columns, piers and pillars could be carved in a great variety of shapes, could stand on ornamented bases and might terminate in graceful capitals.
Each rib could be twisted and fashioned into whatever form fancy suggested. Each arch could be made to flower into intricate patterns, like a blossoming shrub; floors and panels could be overlaid with rich and colorful mosaics, the subtlest shades of which could be distinguished in the abundance of light streaming in from numerous windows; the windows themselves could be as glamorous in coloring as any painting by a master artist. C. H. Moore, whose book on Gothic architecture has become something of a classic, summed these characteristics into this definition:
"In fine, then, Gothic architecture may be shortly defined as a system of construction in which vaulting on an independent system of ribs is sustained by piers and buttresses whose equilibrium is maintained by the opposing action of thrust and counter thrust. This system is adorned by sculptures whose motives are drawn from organic nature, conventionalized in obedience to architectural conditions, and governed by the appropriate forms established by the ancient art, supplemented by color designs on opaque ground and more largely in glass. It is a popular church architecture - the product of secular craftsmen working under the stimulus of national and municipal aspiration and inspired by religious faith."
How the style was perfected and how it originated still remain something of a mystery, with almost no two historians agreeing among themselves. That it proceeded to its culmination through a long series of experiments is plain enough, yet even so its full accomplishment continues a theme for never ending wonder. Moore, as is apparent from the quotation, saw the flying buttress as its chief characteristic. Others have seen it in the pointed arch, or in the rib vault, or in the use of stained-glass windows or in stone vaulting; still others have found the secret to lie in the manner in which all these peculiarities were united into an indivisible whole. Where and when any of them was originally developed, invented or discovered remains a riddle to which an astonishing variety of answers has been proposed. Earlier writers made ingenious guesses ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again; most modern historians have taken the ground that each distinctive trait developed little by little from an earlier form.
English historians of the style have claimed for their own land the glory of its discovery, urging that its advent was at Durham in the year 1100. The preponderance of authoritative opinion seems to incline, however, toward the view of French writers, who place the emergence of the style at the construction of the abbey church of St. Denis. Whether it did in fact originate, as enthusiastic Frenchmen sometimes assert, in the region known as Ile de France in the second quarter of the twelfth century, is a matter of conjecture; it certainly flourished there with early luxuriance and has left in that district some of its finest masterpieces.
Work began on the abbey church of St. Denis in 1137. In rapid order construction of cathedrals at Noyon, Senlis and Sens followed. By that time French taste for buildings of slenderer and more energetic types than those of the earlier churches had become pronounced. Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was be gun in 1163. Some few years later construction started on the cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres, in which the flying buttress was brought to triumphant artistic culmination.
By examining one after another these ancient cathedrals it is possible to trace the working out of important details of construction. In imperishable stone the hand of medieval architecture wrote a stirring tale of adventure and achievement. Between the abbey church of St. Denis and the cathedral at Chartres stretch almost a hundred years of time, marked by milestones of progress. The edifice at Chartres was destroyed by fire almost as soon as it was completed, but clergy and people with undiminished courage at once set about rebuilding and soon a new structure had been reared. Its main portion, with the two famous towers - one of which was not completed, however, until the sixteenth century - stands today; within recent months this cathedral was accepted as the model upon which one of the costliest of American churches should be patterned. Chartres cathedral and the one at Rouen are usually considered as having marked the close of the first great period of Gothic architecture.
While the ashes were being cleared away at Chartres, newer and more daring ideas were taking shape in the plans for building the cathedral at Reims. This marvelous structure, which is regarded as having instituted the second great phase of Gothic development, was started in 1211. Its most striking characteristic, aside from the perfection of tower which so delighted Villard. de Honnecourt, was the use of ornamental stonework to form divisions between the lights of windows which, radiating from a center, suggest the unfolding petals of a flower.
The great rose window of that cathedral is too famous to require description here. It has awakened the wonder and admiration of centuries; it has inspired poets, painters, architects. It gave to the fine lines of a Gothic interior a crown of glory. The traceries at Reims gave new inspiration to French architecture. In 1220 a still larger cathedral was begun at Amiens; in 1247 one still more vast was begun at Beauvais. A novel perfection in aisle vaulting marked a still further architectural advance in the building of the cathedral at Le Mans. With the completion of Sainte Chapelle - begun at Paris in 1244 - Gothic architecture, as a learned writer has said, reached complete maturity. Here large tracery windows were brought to perfection, and moreover the structure was so organized into a series of wide window spaces, only divided by strong, far-projecting buttress piers, "that the stained glass ideal found full expression and the building became a lantern for its display."
In England as in France during all these years Gothic Architecture also had been undergoing an evolutionary process, the details of which differed from those in France as their purposes were modified by climatic and other local requirements. Edmund Sharpe has divided it into six distinct stages, beginning with the Norman, which he assigns to the years from 1066 to 1145, and following with the Transitional, which lasted for about half a century; with the Lancet, which endured for a similar period; with the Geometrical, which prevailed from 1245 to 1315; with the Curvilinear, which lasted until about 1360 and ending with the Rectilinear, lasting from the middle of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth.
That similar processes of development took place in other countries the facts abundantly testify. Goodyear in Roman and Medieval Art sums the matter up in a paragraph when, after commenting upon certain designations of main periods as being "early," "middle" and "late," he observes: "It must be understood that there are no definite limits between these periods. Speaking generally, the late twelfth century was the time of Gothic beginnings in France, and it is rarely found in other countries before the thirteenth century; the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are both periods of great perfection, and the fifteenth century is the time of relative decadence. Both in Germany and in England the thirteenth century was the time of the introduction of Gothic. In Italy it was never fully or generally accepted. Within the field of the Gothic proper (i.e., excluding Italy) England is the country where local and national modifications are most obvious, many showing that the style was practiced more or less at second hand. In picturesque beauty and general attractiveness, the English cathedrals may be compared with any, but preference must be given to the French in the study of the evolution of the style." These statements are somewhat didactic, but while the conclusions of Goodyear in some respects have been open to challenge, there must be substantial agreement with his chief contention, which is that the so-called periods shaded into one another by a natural and evolutionary process.
If this is so, many fanciful attempts to discover the origin of Gothic architecture have succeeded no better than have the fanciful attempts to discover the origin of Freemasonry. Here, as in so many other fields of investigation, the lineally minded historian has pursued his old fallacy of believing that every given thing should be retraced to some antecedent point in space or time. Lascelles decided that the pointed arch was originally suggested by the timbering of Noah's ark. Stukely and Warburton fancied that the Gothic builders were trying to imitate the groves in which Druidic priests conducted their mystic rites. Sir Christopher Wren believed they borrowed it from the Saracens. Findel and Fort say they got it from Germany; Leader Scott says they derived it from the Germans but learned it through the Masters of Lake Como. Hayter Lewis concludes it was so united and homogeneous in all its parts that it must have come from the brain of a single genius. He nominates Suger, counsellor of Louis le Gros and of Louis VII, as a plausible candidate for that honor. And of course there is the tradition of the one big fraternity which has bulked so large in Masonic thought.
Weighing against all of these theories is the story in stone which is to be read in the cathedrals themselves. It declares that Gothic architecture did not come into being full-blown, but evolved slowly from antecedent styles, accepting here and rejecting there. It asserts that the flying buttress, so essential in every phase of the style, was not given to the world as a single donative, but came into use through experimentation, many of the earliest Gothic builders having failed to make use of it, either because they did no know of it or did not approve of it. This tale in imperishable marble further proclaims the evolution of the pointed arch from the rounded arch, and says it was adopted in many buildings under the compulsion of necessity.
Something of this for a long time has been understood. Gilbert Scott enunciated the theory and Robert Freke Gould quoted Scott's remarks with strong approval in his History of Freemasonry. Gould in an exceedingly lucid discussion of the subject remarked that Gothic buildings of different lands exhibit altogether too many local peculiarities to admit of the supposition that their architecture was subject to central control. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that if the body of "secrets" of Gothic architecture had been in the possession of a single fraternity, subsequent experiments which resulted in local modifications would have been unlikely, if not impossible. "I have shown," wrote Gould in his most positive manner, "that the idea of a universal body of men working with one impulse and after one set fashion, at the instigation of a cosmopolitan body acting under a certain direction . . . is a myth."
In spite of all this, however, the idea survives in certain forms of Masonic writing. It serves the necessities of those who support the hypothesis that Freemasonry has been in continuous organized existence from the days of Adam until now, since they are required by the nature of their dogma to be able at any given period in history, to point to some particular set of men and say these constituted Freemasonry as it was in that day. If they cannot do that, the chain is broken; a broken chain means that the whole theory must fall to pieces. Clearly, if the Fraternity was in existence in the Middle Ages, the logical place to look f or it is among the builders of Gothic cathedrals. In point of fact, when it does appear as a distinct body of workers in stone, it appears first among the guilds which grew up with the Gothic system. But to suppose on that account that all the guilds and the Gothic architects themselves were united in a single society, or even in a general confederation of societies, is merely to believe what one wishes to believe notwithstanding the preponderance of weighty reasons against it.
Both the Gothic system and Freemasonry were social evolutions, and both appear to have been affected by the same major currents of medieval culture. Evolution presupposes orderly growth from a lower state to a higher. Biological evolution may begin with a single living cell, which develops, expands, divides, subdivides, acts upon its environment and is strongly reacted upon in return. Social evolutions follow similar processes. They, too, must have their beginning in at east one vital principle and must contain within themselves the power of reproduction and expansion. Civil government begins with the household, passes from household to clan, from clan to tribe, from tribe to state and from state to empire. It starts with an imperative need for mutual protection and with capability for reducing social arrangements to some rude order. It is modified by its surroundings, by considerations of soil and climate, shelter, fuel and food, by the forces of nature to be overcome or to be harnessed to do man's bidding, by the salubrity or the unhealthfulness of mountain, forest, morass or plain. In a fertile, well-watered and well-wooded land it possesses assets of inestimable value with which it may develop more rapidly than it can in arctic or antarctic regions or in the arid deserts of Arabia and the Sahara. Whether it does so develop remains a question of the inner spirit or genius of the people who form it.
To say, therefore, of a highly organized social structure that it has risen through evolution is to say with equal force that it developed from something. Whatever else it may be in its present form, it is at least a growth from previous forms and a development of them, else it is a new creation. It is moreover a growth which has been animated by forces resident within it and inherent in its very nature. From time to time it may gain new forces through the operation of old ones upon their environment, but always the primary, elemental force abides and replenishes itself by what it feeds upon. Sometimes it happens that two separate processes come into contact for the first time and profoundly affect one another. Here, for instance, is a plant which has borne nothing but yellow flowers, as its ancestors have borne them for countless generations. On the other side of the valley is another with an ancestral inheritance of blue flowers. One day a chance current of wind carries pollen from one to the other. From this union, all other conditions being favorable, may spring up a third plant which bears flowers of a color scheme different from that of either of its parents.
Cross pollination is not a miracle of botany alone. It can take place - indeed, is extremely likely to take place - in all fields of the mind where ideas bud and burgeon. The Middle Ages, in which Gothic architecture and Operative Masonry grew up side by side, saw the common man, after long, bleak centuries of despair, everywhere standing erect and peering upward through the gloom in search of light. Everywhere minds were thirsty for illumination. They eagerly drank from every stream of culture which trickled down to them out of the past. Men turned instinctively to the promises of religion and because religion fed this craving of their souls, they lavished upon their temples the utmost they could conceive of beauty and of grandeur. Gothic architecture was a splendid expression of that emotion; one more splendid the world has rarely known.
How useless it is to label that triumphant art as a new creation, formed in the brain of a single man or in the collective intelligence of a particular society! It was nothing of the sort. In response to creative impulse, peoples began to build, starting with what they already knew and incessantly trying to find further enlightenment by means of experiments. They were frequently unsuccessful, but often they were rewarded beyond their fondest dreams. In England, in France, in Germany, in Lombardy, in Spain, builders were at work, and on a thousand winds of thought the pollen of ideas was carried from one to another. Armies carried it, missionaries carried it, the Crusaders carried it, traveling artisans carried it, merchants, mendicants, minstrels, pilgrims, sailors, noble lords and ladies, journeying for business or pleasure, all bore it with them.
But it was not alone in architecture or in formal religion that cross pollination took place. The stirrings of medieval unrest took many forms. The world for so long had been drenched in blood and deafened by the clangor of war, so long had been conscripted by tyrannical force and marshaled into footsore armies, that it experienced insatiable longings for, peace and the pursuits of peace. For some the halls of monastery or convent offered asylum; others sought a measure of liberty and security within the stout walls of free cities or within the enfolding arms of strong secular brotherhoods. What happened earlier in the waning civilization of Rome and what, to a certain extent, is happening in the twentieth century, was taking place all over Europe at that time. Those who could flocked to the towns, and those who lived in the towns began uniting themselves into societies of various kinds. Skilled workmen banded themselves together into guilds, gaining emancipation from serfdom as time went on. Out of this grew craft industries. But industries cannot thrive without marketing and the exchange of commodities, so a new system of merchandising began to develop. The merchants formed themselves into guilds, organized fairs and perfected means of transportation, so that surplus commodities of one town or country might be taken to another for barter or sale.
The Crusades reopened to Europe commerce with the East. Returning warriors brought rich and soft fabrics, objects of art and luxury. The poor Knights of the Temple, whose original function was to protect travelers to the Holy Land, became common carriers of treasure; they waxed so wealthy that they drew upon themselves the covetous eyes of lords temporal and spiritual and ultimately paid at the stake or on the rack for their presumptuous prosperity. The feudal system, under which each baron had been a petty king in his own right, holding over his vassals the high justice, the middle and the low, and rendering to his king indifferent and grudging service, had begun to break down under the pressure of a new spirit of nationalism. The first glimmer of dawn for the common man had begun to steal over the horizon.
The common man early realized, however, that for everything he would get he must fight. As an individual he could no more hope successfully to compete with the social forces arrayed against him than he could hope, naked and armed with a club, to compete successfully on the field of battle with a warrior encased in linked mail and bearing battle-axe, shield and spear. But if he could not wage successful struggle in open warfare, he could associate himself with his fellows and in economic strife hope to prosper through organized weight of numbers. Every guild, whether of merchants or of laborers, was consciously or unconsciously a weapon with which that kind of contest could be undertaken.
The guild itself was no more a new creation than Gothic architecture was; it was simply a new phase of an old process. It, like that art, simply began to build upon foundations that were already laid, starting with familiar forms and always experimenting with new ones. It was inevitable, of course, that societies of men engaged in the various branches of technical construction should tend to identify themselves with the buildings they helped to erect. Here again cross pollination was to take place, until in time it was practically impossible to differentiate between the worker and his work. To erect Gothic temples it was essential to employ men particularly skilled in certain mechanical tasks; in time these men were compelled to depend upon the building of temples for employment. As the art of temple-building waxed, their prosperity waxed with it; as that art waned, their art waned with it.
Of all these architectural guilds, those of the stone masons were most important. Theirs was an industry which tended to become highly specialized. In their own eyes this invested them with peculiar dignity. They were aristocrats of the building trades. Their organization was precious to them. They cherished its traditions, preserved its operative secrets, maintained its discipline and decorum. They watched with anxious eyes the progress of their novices and apprentices and jealously guarded the approaches to mastership. Most important of all, they preserved a warm faith in the antiquity of their institution, which set it apart from all other societies of the kind even if only half what they believed about it was true.
Were they mistaken in that belief? It is possible to say that in a very true sense they were not. If their society was really a product of evolution, they could not have been altogether mistaken. Their guild had its ancestors, must have had them, although it is not feasible, out of the multitude of possible progenitors, to say of this or that one that it was sire or grandfather. Of all the groups immediately preceding the medieval emergence of the masonic guilds, however, there is none for which this honor has been more persistently and plausibly urged than f or that curious Lombard band known as the Comacine Masters. Further discussion of that claim must be reserved for another chapter.
THE theory that the Comacine Masters of Lombardy constituted the Freemasonry of their day has been popular because it appears to explain so many things that want explaining. If true, it would supply a bridge between Operative Masonry of the Middle Ages and the Roman collegia; would throw light upon the ancient belief of Craftsmen that the institution entered Europe from Palestine by way of Greece; would provide an ancestral society analogous in many ways to the modern Fraternity, and explain that curious blend of metaphysical lore and architectural practice which in some mysterious way has come from the past into the present system of ritual and symbols. It would be invaluable also in establishing Masonic continuity, since it proclaims the existence, in the midst of the confusion of the dark centuries, of an asylum in which an esoteric and philosophical cult was able to maintain itself as a thing apart, securely and serenely pursuing an uninterrupted intellectual course and preserving a stream of culture which otherwise must have been diverted into a thousand channels.
Small wonder that this hypothesis has been urged so passionately by certain Masonic writers! Yet, however fascinating and useful a theory may be, it must be judged before the bar of history solely on the basis of truth. This one is still on trial; as yet, notwithstanding that it has received the benefit of every reasonable doubt and the support of persuasive argument, the case for it has by no means been proved. On the contrary, dispassionate examination discloses serious weaknesses in it - so serious, indeed, that evidence as yet undiscovered must be presented before it can be accepted as something of more substance than mere speculation. To borrow Dr. Newton's phrase, the utmost that can now be said for it is that the associations of the Comacine Masters were prophecies of Freemasonry, although Dr. Newton accepted them as having a more definite connection with the institution, making that belief an important part of his argument in The Builders.
These Comacine Masters were united into a guild, or perhaps several guilds, of stone masons dwelling in the Lombard State of Northern Italy. The Lombards, or Longobardi, when Roman writers first made their acquaintance, were a Germanic race dwelling in the lower basin of the Elbe. Etymologically their name is taken to mean Long-beards, and it is commonly supposed they were so designated by the people of Italy because the men wore long and heavy beards. One of their own legends, however, gave another explanation. This was that they got the name from the god, Wotan, because of an artifice practiced upon him when women of the tribe passed themselves off as men by draping their long hair across their faces in imitation of manly beards.
Before the end of the fifth century they had migrated southward into what is now Lower Austria. The emperor Justinian invited them into Noricum and Pannonia to assist him in his wars with other barbarous peoples. They appear to have kept their part of the bargain in several important battles, but when occasion served they were not disinclined to make terms with the foes of the Byzantine empire. They engaged in a protracted struggle with the Gepidae, another Teutonic race, and in a final battle their king, Alboin, crushed the Gepidae, slew their king, Cunimund, caused a chalice to be fashioned out of his skull and compelled the slain monarch's daughter, Rosamund, to drink the conqueror's health from that gruesome cup. He then forced Rosamund to become his wife, but this amiable damsel is said to have obtained full revenge by bringing about the assassination of Alboin some years later.
Uniting his own followers with the surviving Gepidae, Alboin in 568 swept down through the mountain passes upon the Italian plain at the head of the Adriatic. Northern Italy was then in a condition of political chaos. Once before it had been overrun by Goths, but the Gothic tribes had become depleted by wars and famines. These made what resistance they could, but the newcomers were not to be denied. To hold the lands they won, the Longobardi adopted a system which was destined to exert profound influence upon the later history of Italy. They established, or occupied when they could find them already established, fortified cities at all important strategic points. Each became the seat of a local chieftain or duke, of whom there were about thirty-five. The capital was at Pavia, although for a long period it was capital in name only, since each truculent duke was a law to himself, yielding but a show of fealty to his overlord. In this manner the invaders settled down into the region about Lake Como and Lake Maggiori, occupied the fertile upland valleys and seized some of the choicest lands of Northern Italy.
Surrounded by hostile forces and controlling a subject population which despised them for their barbaric rudeness, the Longobardi soon found their ducal system unwieldy. Accordingly in 584 they chose Authari, grandson of Alboin, as king. The monarchy thus established lasted almost two hundred years, or until King Desiderius in 774 was overthrown by the iron hand of Charlemagne.
As was characteristic of Germanic invaders, the Longobardi rapidly absorbed the culture of those they had conquered. They adopted the Latin tongue, embraced the Roman Catholic religion, took Latin names, imitated Roman and Greek fashions in dress, amusements and architecture. They maintained desultory intercourse with Byzantium, although the Byzantines appear to have had no more affection for the Longobardi than did their other neighbors.
By the time of King Rothari, who died in 652, the Longobardi - or Lombards as they may henceforth be called - had made remarkable progress in the arts of peace. But they were in constant danger from Frankish tribes to the west of them and from Slavs and Huns to the east. Although King Liutprand, who died in 744, promoted many works of piety, including the erection of a church at Pavia, the Popes were always hostile to the invaders and continually sought means of dislodging them, or at least of reducing their power. Finally Pope Adrian I invited the Frankish monarch, Charlemagne, to enter Lombardy and possess it. This request Charlemagne was not unwilling to accept. He smashed the Lombard power, took King Desiderius prisoner and received the crown of Lombardy at the hands of Adrian. Thus ended Lombard reign over Northern Italy, which had endured for two and a third centuries.
If Lombard political supremacy was speedily swallowed up by the Carolingian empire, however, Lombard social influence was destined to survive for many another day. The city system continued, because the cities themselves remained. Under the new regime they soon passed into the control of bishops, but they never found the episcopal yoke agreeable and always struggled more or less actively for independence. In due course they actually became free, self-governing entities, fostering the arts and commerce. "Islands in a sea of turbulence," Dean R. W. Church has described them. Later they were to send out missionaries to bear their own culture over Europe. To quote again from Dean Church:
"In England, at least, the enterprising traders and bankers who found their way to the West, from the 13th to the 16th centuries, though they did not all come from Lombardy, bore the name of Lombards. In the next place, the Lombards or the Italian builders whom they employed or followed, the 'Masters of Como,' of whom so much is said in the early Lombard laws, introduced a manner of building, stately, solemn and elastic, to which their name has been attached, and which gave a character of its own to some of the most interesting churches of Italy."
The earliest of those "early Lombard laws" to which the Dean refers, and of which there is now record, appeared in the reign of King Rothari. They are of such Masonic importance as to deserve repetition, the translation herewith given being that of Ossian Lang, Grand Historian, in a report contained in the Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of New York in 1925:
Section 144. Of the Comacine Master - If a Comacine Master with his associates (colligantes) shall undertake to restore or build the house of any person whatsoever, after an agreement shall have been closed as to payment, and it chances that someone should be killed, by reason of the house, through the falling of either material or stone, no claim shall be lodged against the owner of the house, in case the Comacine Master or those working with him (consortibus) shall fall to settle for the death or the damage done; because who after having contracted to do work f or his own advantage, must assume, not undeservedly, the damage done.
Section 145. Of masters called or brought in. - If any person shall call or bring in Comacine Masters one or several - to design a work or to daily assist his retainers (servi) at the building of his house (domun aut casa), and it should happen that, by reason of this house (casa), one of the Comacines is killed, the owner of the house (casa) shall not be held responsible. On the other hand, if falling timber or stone should kill an outsider or cause injury to anyone, the fault shall not be imputed to the Masters, but to him who called them in, and he shall be responsible for the damage.
Later, under King Liutprand, additional legislation confirmed to the Comacine Masters the privileges of freemen in the Lombard State, and fixed the prices they were to charge for various kinds of construction. Manifestly these regulations concerned a group of persons who designed, built and repaired buildings, the major part of their work being the erection of the domun or dwelling house, and the casa or cabin. Unlike many other workers, they were freemen and not slaves; they could go about over the country; they could enter into contracts within certain prescribed limits as to fees; they could sue and be sued for civil damages rising from the nature of their work. That they were one corporation, or society, or fraternity, is not conclusively shown by these early records. By analogy, however, it is possible to infer that they probably formed themselves into a guild, or guilds, as other groups of special workers did in other cities. Certainly there can be no ground for doubting they had much to do with the development of what is known as the Lombard style of architecture as practiced in Italy, parts of Germany and parts of France.
Their name itself indicates that they were identified either with the ancient city of Como or Comum, or with Lake Como, in Italy some thirty odd miles north of Milan. It has been suggested that they got the name from an island in Lake Como, a theory to be examined hereafter. The many fine quarries in that region afforded sufficient reason for the development there of groups of artisans especially concerned with stone work. Ricci in his History of Italian Architecture observes that - their guilds were made free of all feudal restraints and the members were suffered to go about at will, but no records substantiating that statement have as yet been found in papal bulls or in the Carolingian laws, although search for them has been thoroughly prosecuted.
Gregory II gave to Boniface permission to take with him to Germany a following of monks skilled in the arts of building, and lay brethren who were also architects. Italian chroniclers have been quoted as saying that similar permission was accorded by Gregory I to Augustine when in 597-8 he went as a missionary to Britain. If anything is to be inferred from these facts, it is that workmen were not free to travel at will outside their own countries, or, at least, that Catholic missionaries were not at liberty to take them without papal authorization.
Whatever may have been the nature of their constitution, the societies of Comacine Masters were lost sight of for many centuries, although modern historians have glanced at them with more than passing interest. To Giuseppe Merzario, an Italian, must go the principal credit for the prominent place they have come to occupy at the present time, although Muratori, the Italian historian, called attention to the important part they played in the development of the architectural societies, which came to be known by the generic name of Magistri Comacini, or Comacine Masters. Merzario pursued the subject through all the manuscripts he could find, and although he made more of it than his predecessor had done, he still agreed with Muratori that the name was a generic one for builders in a large part of Northern Italy, and quotes with approval an older authority which held that the name was derived from the bishopric of Como.
In the early 1890's, however, the Masonic world Was excited by a book which had recently appeared from the hand of Mrs. Lucy Baxter, who wrote under the pen name of Leader Scott. It was entitled The Cathedral Builders: The Story of a Great Masonic Guild. This astonishing work, as appears from internal evidence, was based largely on Merzario's studies of the Comacine Masters and, indeed, first made that work generally known to the English-speaking public. As it has since been the principal basis for the Comacine theory of Freemasonry, the major conclusions of Mrs. Baxter's book may be summarized as follows:
That after Italy was overrun by barbarians, Roman collegia were suppressed, but the college of architects at Rome escaped the general doom and removed to the republic of Comum;
That this college survived in a medieval Masonic guild known as the Society of Comacine Masters, educating young men in the arts and sciences and sending them out to all parts of the world as missionaries of culture;
That many monks were Masons affiliated with this Society, thereby qualifying themselves for architectural pursuits;
That Italian chroniclists testify architects and masons accompanied Augustine to England, and from the Venerable Bede's account of the settlement of Augustine's mission in England it seems evident that he took Masonic architects to that country with him;
That Gregory probably chose these from the Comacine Order, as likelier to hold fast to the old Roman traditions of building than would be the case with a Byzantine guild, and that the works they did in Britain proved he was right in this surmise;
That early Saxon carvings represented fabulous monsters an d symbolical creatures which evidently were of Latin origin;
That words and phrases in the edicts of Rothari and Liutprand are to be met in the writings of Bede and Richard, Prior of Hagustald, indicating that these writers were familiar with terms of art used by the Comacine Masters.
The argument upon which these conclusions is based long and interesting, recapitulating many of Merzario's theories besides containing much new material resulting from Leader Scott's own investigations and those of her brother, the Rev. W. Miles Barnes, who contributed to The Cathedral Builders a chapter on "The Origin of Saxon Architecture." But the author goes further than Merzario did in many respects. For instance, Merzario thinks their name a generic one, applied to builders in many parts of Northern Italy, whereas Leader Scott restricts them within the narrow bonds of a single esoteric society. She supposes also that when the Roman college of architects fled to the region of Lake Como they found refuge on a small but strongly fortified islet known as Comacina. There, safely locked within stout walls, she believes they kept alive for centuries the traditions of classic art, and developed various styles of Italian architecture which subsequently they scattered through France, Spain, Germany and England.
The effect of The Cathedral Builders upon Masonic thought for the next quarter of a century was prodigious. Already earlier writers had suspected that Freemasonry must look to the Lombard guilds for its origin, and Leader Scott's work gave strong confirmation to the notion; confirmation that was the stronger because Mrs. Baxter was not herself friendly to modern Freemasonry. Her own conclusions she summed up in the sentence: "Though there is no certain proof that the Comacines were the veritable stock from which the pseudo-Freemasonry of the present day sprang, we may at least admit that they were a link between the classic collegia and all other art and trade guilds of the Middle Ages."
Adopting this conclusion in its general form, W. Ravenscroft went to Italy in 1906 and spent many years investigating and confirming as best he could its major implications. Subsequently Dr. Newton took it up and, made much of it in The Builders. In fact, Ravenscroft's The Comacines and Newton's Builders remain today among the most widely read of Masonic books, and justly so, for their almost religious loyalty to Freemasonry and the excellence of their literary construction.
Within the last decade or so, however, the Comacine theory has been seriously attacked until now it is very much on the defensive. Gould in his Concise History was among the first to point out that even if the existence of the Comacine guild, with all that is claimed for it, could be established, there would still be the necessity of clearing up the mystery involved in innumerable variations in the different schools of medieval architecture - variations which could not have been so extensive if one society had controlled the whole. A.L. Frothingham, in the Dictionary of Architecture and Building, went so far as to deny that a Comacine fraternity ever existed. In justice to Leader Scott it should be noted that she did not claim for the Comacines that they founded Gothic architecture, or that all medieval architectural styles could be traced to them. Conclusions to that extent are to be attributed in the main to those who have accepted her doctrines and enlarged upon them.
In a report on the matter to the Grand Lodge of New York, Ossian Lang made a frontal assault upon he entire position taken by Mrs. Baxter, Ravenscroft and Dr. Newton. He attacked it at its weakest point - the alleged connection between the Comacines and the builders' guilds of England. Nothing can be clearer than that Speculative Masonry is an offshoot of English Operative Masonry; hence if the Comacines cannot be connected with Operative Masonry, they cannot be connected with Speculative Masonry, and the whole theory fails of historic dependability.
From the writings of the Venerable Bede the author of Cathedra Builders and her collaborator endeavored to show that several early British churches were built of stone and that, on this account, it was necessary to import masons skilled in the use of that material. The theory is that the masons thus imported were partisans of the Comacine cult, which they carried with them and introduced into England. But Bede - historian of the English churches of the early eighth century - expressly states that one of these buildings, at Lindisfarne, was built of hewn oak and covered with reeds "after the manner of the Scots."
Nor does Bede substantiate further statements that British ecclesiastical authorities made frequent demands upon Rome for skillful workmen. He does speak of passings back and forth between Britain and Gaul, but the Gaul of that day was more Frankish than Roman. He reports that Benedict Biscop, founder of the monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, crossed into Gaul in 675 and engaged masons to build for him a church in the Roman style, but to infer that these masons were Comacines, or even Italians, is pure guesswork. They may or may not have been, but this thread is far to slender to support the heavy weight imposed upon it by the Comacine theory. The next reliable record of importations of foreign builders into England comes down into the Norman period, when Gothic architecture was beginning to take form. Thus it will be seen that so far as authentic written evidence of connection between the Comacines and the early English builders is concerned, there is none.
Ravenscroft has made an earnest effort to supply the connection through details of sculpture and ornamentation. He quotes W.S. Calverley as suggesting that scrolls and interlacings on early scriptured crosses in Carlisle are decorated with patterns then in vogue in Lombardy. He remarks that the plan of Canterbury cathedral, as it existed before 1076, "carried out the Comacine idea, even to the two apses, one at each end and the campanili flanking the aisles north and south." There is more of similar purport in his argument, but what he suggests in regard to the Comacine theory might be suggested with equal force in support of a contrary theory - that the peculiarities noticed are only those which belonged to the general Christian culture of the times, as based upon and adapted from the general Roman culture of preceding times. Latin bishops in the West continued for a long period to prefer churches built in cruciform varieties of the basilica; it is natural to suppose also that they favored methods of ornamentation with which they were familiar. It is, of course, possible that Ravenscroft is right in his conclusions, although secular historians of architecture apparently fail to agree with them; but so long as it is also possible he may be mistaken, the historian can accept them only as opinions and not as proofs.
At the other end of the chain, connection between the Comacines and the Roman collegia is likewise weak. The statement that a Roman college of architects found asylum on the islet of Comacina appears to be without corroboration. That it could have maintained itself there is a romantic guess contrary to what is known about the Longobardi. Those warlike invaders thoroughly and mercilessly subdued the part of Northern Italy they made their own. Lenient to conquered peoples who made full submission, they crushed resistance and punished it with the utmost ferocity. It is unlikely that the savage Alboin, who made a king's daughter drink to him from her father's skull, would have tolerated at the heart of his realm a stronghold of local reaction and rebellion from which nothing could conceivably radiate save hostility to Longobardi rule, contempt for Longobardi knowledge and conspiracy against Longobardi security. Elsewhere throughout Italy and Gaul Germanic conquerors ruthlessly exterminated Roman collegia, fearing them as seminaries of free Roman thought. There is nothing to indicate the Longobardi did otherwise.
In such early records of individual Comacine Masters as have come down, names are not preponderantly Roman but are Teutonic. If the Masters were a Roman college, that circumstance would be most strange. Where the conquerors were so eager to Romanize their names it is scarcely to be supposed that private citizens with honest titles to. Latin patronymics would exchange them for new ones which to Latin ears must have seemed harsh and barbaric.
A preponderance of evidence is to the effect that the Lombard builders were much more strongly influenced by Byzantine than by Latin culture. Even in the most important of their churches, at Milan and Pavia, it is apparent they were wrestling with the old Byzantine problem of adapting a basilican groundwork. to the support of spacious vaultings, and there is marked progress, in a Byzantine way, in the architectural skill shown in the construction at Pavia over that shown in the erection of its most recent predecessor at Milan. Their later schools, both in Lombardy and on the Rhine, as recently as the beginning of the eleventh century, were still engaged, as a writer in the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "in the task of covering with vaults large churches of Basilican plan - the typical problem of the period."
It is not essential to an understanding of the rise of the Lombard guilds to depend upon a romantic story such as that of Roman architects marooned on an island in Lake Como. The explanation is far simpler than that. What happened in Lombardy in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries was precisely what has happened in the development of all other urban civilizations of the Middle Ages. The Germanic invaders came upon an old and decadent civilization which moreover stood at the crossroads between East and West, North and South. Here they entrenched their power in strongly fortified cities. The chief economic asset of their new domain was an abundance of building stone of all kinds. It was characteristic of their genius that they should make the best use of what they found. They had a passion for the culture of all peoples whose social and ethical advancement they regarded as better than their own. They welcomed every missionary of beauty, no matter whence he came.
Into these cities flocked artisans, architects, builders, sculptors, carvers in wood, workers in gold and silver, dyers and weavers. They came for the simple and obvious reason that there was employment for them. The Longobardi were the newly rich of the hour, hot upon expending the profits of war and conquest for things of comfort and luxury. When they became converted to Catholicism they displayed the usual zeal of the proselyte and sought to express their piety in the building of handsome churches. A subject population which in its heart despised them was not disinclined to profit by opportunities, then so abundant, of catering to whims, for the gratification of which the barbarians were willing to pay and to pay well. It should be remembered that the Lombard State existed in a condition of relative strength and security for almost a hundred years longer than the United States of America have existed as a separate political entity, and that, like Americans of the present times, the Lombards were virile, energetic, progressive, ambitious and covetous of spiritual as well as of material gain. Like modern Americans, also, they did not hesitate to borrow useful ideas wherever they might find them and, turning them into the hopper of their own peculiar genius, to grind out of the mixture a culture which was distinctively their own.
It was inevitable that workers at various trades should sooner or later form themselves into guilds. It was equally inevitable, since the quarries about Lake Como gave to that region its richest material assets, that the mason guilds there should attain to considerable importance. That these societies were colored by the culture of their times goes without saying. It is by no means impossible that when the Lombards arrived they found vestiges of Roman collegia; it is even credible that they absorbed these collegia into their own system just as they absorbed many other things Roman. It may be considered likely that, along with other accretions from Byzantine sources, they incorporated Eastern cult practices into their local societies. But regardless of whether all or any of these surmises are correct, the fact is that no positive affirmative evidence showing them to be correct has as yet been discovered.
As to the exact organization of the Lombard guilds, little is really known. From the edicts of Rothari and Liutprand, Ravenscroft, following the ideas of Leader Scott, argues that the Comacine Masters were at that time a "compact and powerful guild, capable of asserting their rights, and that the guild was properly organized, having degrees of different ranks and Magistri" at their head. That interpretation reads more into the edicts, however, than dispassionate criticism can accept. In the first place, the statute of Rothari does not speak of a guild but of certain Masters, with associates (colligantes) and co-workers (consortes). That those Masters belonged to a guild is to be inferred rather from the usual customs of those days than from the wording of the edict. Furthermore it is clear that the decree was intended to fix the responsibilities not of a guild but of individual contractors and of their employers. The regulation of fees by Liutprand would seem to indicate that their capability of "asserting their rights" was in fact sharply limited. Whether the words magistri, colligantes and consortes refer to successive grades or degrees comparable to those of a Masonic lodge is pure speculation. They may mean that or they may mean only that master workmen, authorized to make contracts for building and repairing houses, took along their own employees and assistants; it is clear from Section 145 of Rothari's edict that the Masters did not refuse to do work alongside the bondsmen of their employers.
Much has been made of the fact that the Comacines met in a place which they called a loggia, and that they called their chiefs magistri or masters. The evidential value of this as tending to show Masonic connections is inconsiderable. The word loggia is a derivative from the same Latin word from which the English word lodge is derived, but a loggia was simply a covered gallery where workmen placed their benches, or whatever else they used, so they could be sheltered from sun and rain. Blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers and men of other crafts also worked in a loggia. The title magister was a common one, used f or master musicians, master painters, master professionals of all kinds. To say that because a Comacine contractor was called Master he must have been master of a Masonic lodge would be as sensible as to say that because a man is nowadays addressed by the title of Doctor he must be a practitioner of medicine.
Undoubtedly the Comacine builders attained such proficiency that their services were in demand outside their own country as well as within it. They were more than builders, for they were skilled in wood carving, painting, sculpture and mosaic work. It is not improbable they cherished literature and music. Rivoira in Lombardic Architecture asserts that after the fall of the Lombardic kingdom they re-formed themselves, as did other artisan guilds, in the days of the free Italian cities. Merzario believes they maintained their separate identity and were responsible for the greater part of all works of art between the years 800 and 1000. Agostino Segredio is convinced they were a guild of Freemasons, the theory held by Mrs. Baxter and subsequent writers of that school.
Were they indeed Freemasons? In spite of the fact that connections at both ends are broken, can the Comacine Masters be regarded as a bridge between Operative Masonry and some Roman college of artificers binding them into one continuous society? The answer must depend largely upon individual predilection. The theory is attractive to those who desire simplicity and continuity, for it tends to establish what many would like to believe. But the writers of the present work have been forced to the reluctant conclusion that evidence supporting it is fatally defective in several important particulars. Perhaps the wisdom of future ages may supply the deficiencies; perhaps in the stone of some forgotten work the necessary confirmation may yet be found. Meanwhile the Comacine Masters may safely be regarded as an important part of the general cult system of the Dark Ages, a system which had developed from earlier forms and which in turn gave way to the later development through which modern Freemasonry came into being.
SCIENTIFIC approach to what may be described as the authentic historical period of Freemasonry must be made by way of the curious documents which are known variously as the Old Charges, the Ancient Constitutions, the Ancient Manuscripts, the Gothic Manuscripts and the Legend of the Craft. This does not mean that these venerable scriptures, abounding in quaint conceits and naive legends, are to be accepted as giving correct and dependable accounts of the origins of the institution. To assume they did so would be as absurd as to suppose that the Iliad of Homer gives a reliable historical narrative of the siege of Troy. But if the modern reader knew nothing of the ancient Greeks save what that immortal poem tells of them, he would still have an excellent idea of their racial characteristics and ideals. In like manner the Old Charges illuminate the state of the Masonic Craft as it was in the operative days, revealing what the ancient brethren believed about their Fraternity, illustrating their customs and practices and showing forth something of the purposes which animated them.
To the historian they are of the utmost importance. The critic's microscope finds in them innumerable hidden implications. The turn of a phrase or the peculiar use of a word may prove far more important for fixing a date than anything related in a manuscript itself. Indeed, there are few branches of knowledge more interesting than that which bears upon the use of words. It is almost as difficult for a man to forge another's finger prints as for an author to conceal the era in which he writes. Even when he attempts with the greatest skill and patience to imitate the literary style of a previous age, he will be certain to make some error that will betray the deception.
Living languages are forever changing. The same word may mean one thing in one century and something entirely different in a later century. The English of the original King James version of the Holy Bible has undergone so many alterations that a large part of it would be confusing, if not actually unintelligible, if presented to an unschooled reader of the twentieth century. The word conversation, for instance, was formerly employed to denote conduct or deportment, whereas it now has a different meaning. If a modern were attempting to pass his own compositions off as of the time of James and if he used such words as mob, dynamite, lynching, self-conscious, egoism and thousands of others, it would be proof positive, to the critic of discernment, that the pretension of antiquity was wholly fraudulent. The Ephraimites, who could not correctly pronounce the word shibboleth, labored under no greater disadvantage than does the author of one age who seeks to employ the phraseology of an antecedent one. Every science, art, trade and profession contributes to the whole language a jargon of its own; in time many cant words acquire popular acceptance and become imbedded in literature as well as in the vernacular. What fossil remains are to one branch of science, word forms are to another; they enable the interpreter to fix with reasonable certainty the approximate time in which they were commonly employed.
For this reason the ancient Masonic manuscripts have come to a new importance in recent years. They have been studied more diligently than ever before; constant search for additional information has brought to light many that had been forgotten. It is interesting to observe that, after exhaustive search, William James Hughan in 1872 was able to catalogue only thirty-two of them. Seventeen years later, Gould listed sixty-two and by 1895 Hughan succeeded in stretching his original list to sixty-six. In 1918 R.H. Baxter had increased the number to ninety-eight. One of the most important of all, the Regius poem, as the reader has already noticed, was discovered in the late 1830's by a non-Masonic investigator.
These ancient writings supply the basis for what Freemasons ordinarily term the Landmarks of the Fraternity. Few words are more often used and less commonly understood than is this word Landmarks. It greets the Freemason at every turn. Very early in hi Masonic career he hears of the Landmarks as something too sacred and inviolate ever to be subject to modification or change. They are at the foundation of Masonic jurisprudence, as unalterable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. Very few active Masons have more than a vague general notion of what they are, yet they affect every Mason in his relationships with the Craft as a whole. Learned writers have attempted at one time or other to reduce them to some definite code of rules and practices, but most of the learned writers do not agree with one another. Various lists give enumerations of Landmarks running all the way up from three to fifty.
The truth is that the Landmarks partake somewhat of the principle of English common law and somewhat of that of the unwritten British Constitution. They are like the common law in that they relate to customs used by the Craft at a time to which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. They are like the British Constitution in that although they are the fundamental law of the Craft they do not constitute a definite set of formularies which can be divided off into articles, sections and clauses. It will perhaps serve the present purpose to describe the Landmarks as a body of Masonic precedents derived from immemorial usage. To ascertain whether a given doctrine is a Landmark it is therefore necessary to ascertain whether it was in accordance with Masonic practice at the earliest time of which there is record. The several lists enumerate those customs which the compilers consider important. It is clear that any article in any list is invalid if it can be shown to be contrary to immemorial usage; conversely there is a measure of validity for every article in every list which cannot be shown to be contrary to immemorial usage.
By this test, if it can be shown that the ancient brethren insisted upon belief in a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, then that doctrine must be accepted as a Landmark; by the same token, if our ancient brethren refused membership to all who were not freeborn men of lawful age, hale in body and mind, that also may be accepted as a Landmark. This background of basic law is therefore the constitution of the Fraternity, which no Masonic legislative power can amend or repeal. Provided it does not infringe upon the provisions of that constitution, a Masonic legislature - a Grand Lodge, for instance, - can make whatever laws, rules and edicts may be advisable for the government of the Craft.
In actual practice, every Grand Lodge does that very thing and so, to a lesser degree, does every constituent Lodge. But whenever complaint is raised that legislation has violated the Landmarks, it becomes a subject or prompt judicial determination when, if violation can be demonstrated, it becomes null and void; no regular Mason is bound longer to observe it, but every regular Mason may be bound to cease Masonic intercourse with all who continue to observe it. It may happen, of course, that the courts of different sovereign Grand Jurisdictions will disagree as to whether there has been violation; in that case, the individual Mason is obligated to follow the interpretation of his own governing body. If it breaks off Masonic intercourse with another Grand jurisdiction, he is required, under pain of incurring that most disagreeable of Masonic penalties, the stigma of clandestinism, to break off Masonic intercourse with the members yielding allegiance to that Grand jurisdiction.
It should be obvious that the term immemorial usage applies in the main to usage which antedated the formation of the first English Grand Lodge in 1717-1723. Few practices which may have come into use since that time can be called "immemorial," since they have been either ordered or sanctioned by legislative or judicial authority, and of this there is, or ought to be, authentic record. These new customs therefore do not belong to the Landmarks, although they may be wholly legal within themselves, since they have been found to be not inconsistent with the Landmarks. Thus, it will be readily apparent, that, since the Ancient Manuscripts furnish almost the sole account of Masonic laws and customs prior to the organization of the Grand Lodge, these documents are of vital importance to Masonic jurisprudence as well as to Masonic history.
It is with their historical import, however, that the present work is chiefly concerned; although in the last analysis there is probably no way to separate the purely historical from the purely legal phase. In their language, in their legends, in their doctrines and dogmas and above all in their customs, these ancient records bear weighty attestation to the medieval influences which held sway over the minds of operative Craftsmen. Some of them are in the form of manuscript rolls of parchment or paper, occasionally written in the calligraphy of Gothic script. Others are written by hand on sheets stitched together in book form; a few later ones were printed in books from movable type. The oldest - the Regius poem - is a copy dating from about the year 1390; the most recent of them belong to the year 1725, or after the creation of the first Grand Lodge.
The most striking thing about the older ones is the way in which they differ from one another in their versions of the Legend of the Craft. To historians of the lineal mind these variations have caused no small amount of perplexity. They indicate that there was not one basic tradition but that there were several, and that these were in conflict in certain important particulars. It would be difficult to understand how this could be so if there had been one continuous, self- conscious Fraternity, projected into the Middle Ages from the remotest past. The difficulty disappears, however, when it is noticed that all these versions can be related to a central theme. They differ from one another precisely as certain folk tales differ from one another; that is, they contain the germ of a common idea which, in different countries, has sprouted and grown in slightly different ways.
The Regius poem alone contains at least two, and perhaps three, variations. The central narrative gives what has come to be regarded as the general English version. But in one place somebody has interpolated an allusion to the Four Crowned Martyrs, which does not appear in any other English version. Now the legend of the Four Crowned Martyrs, although it is ignored in other English accounts, played an important part in the lore of the German Steinmetzen of the Middle Ages. Its appearance in an English manuscript therefore becomes a theme for legitimate curiosity.
According to this legend, four sculptors, Claudius, Castorius, Semphorianus and Nicostratus, were employed among others by the Roman Emperor Dioclein building a temple to AEsculapius, god of health. They were devout Christians and their constant prayers to the Saviour had brought them remarkable skill at their work. An unskilled competitor, Simplicius, upon learning the secret of their power, embraced the Christian religion, whereupon he, too, immediately became proficient. The fame of this conversion reached the ears of the pagan authorities, who demanded that the Christians abjure their faith. Although subjected to barbarous scourgings, they refused to recant, and in punishment were placed in leaden coffins which were thrown into the Tiber. Later the bodies were recovered and placed at rest in the catacombs.
Some months later four Christian soldiers, who were masons by trade, were also tortured to death for refusing to do homage to AEsculapius. All nine bodies ultimately came to rest under a Christian basilica. The names of the soldiers were unknown until the ninth century when it was said to have been learned that they were Severus, Severianus, Carpoferus and Victorianus. Meanwhile they had been known as the Four Crowned Martyrs, they having received the "crown" of martyrdom. There has been dispute whether the distinction belonged to the soldiers or to the four original sculptors, but, at any rate, all were regarded as distinguished masons who had been immortalized by their fidelity. In time the Four Crowned Ones became patron saints of German Masons and probably of other medieval guilds.
The allusion to them in the Regius poem, in addition to the fact that an early English church was dedicated to them, has been urged as showing direct connection between the mason guilds of England and Germany. It is rather a slender circumstance upon which to place so much responsibility. A more plausible supposition is that the legend had its origin in the general. Catholic martyrology of the times; that the compiler of the Regius narrative, coming across a German legend, incorporated it into the body of his tale. Its non- appearance in other English manuscripts may be taken as an indication that their writers were not familiar with it. It was rejected in the later mythology of the Craft, an almost certain indication that it had come to be considered apocryphal.
It is not until the Regius poem passes from the realm of legend and reaches that of practical affairs that it throws real light upon the state of Masonry in the England of its day. It contains a set of "articles" and one of "points," which are of interest not only as being the oldest extant code of Masonic laws, but also as indicating the strictly utilitarian character of teachings in the operative days. The following transcription from the Regius verse is that of Silas H. Shepherd in The Landmarks of Freemasonry:
1. The Master Mason must be steadfast, trusty and true and render perfect justice to both his workmen and his employer.
2. The Master Mason shall be punctual in his attendance at the general congregation or Assembly.
3. The Master must take no apprentice for less than seven years.
4. The Master must take no apprentices who are bondsmen but only such as are free and well born.
5. The Master shall not employ a thief or maimed man for an apprentice but only those who are physically fit.
6. The Master must not take craftsmen's wages for apprentices' labor.
7. The Master shall not employ a thief or immoral person.
8. The Master must maintain a standard of efficiency by not permitting incompetent workmen to be employed.
9. The Master must not undertake to do work which he cannot complete.
10. No Master shall supplant another in the work undertaken.
11. The Master shall not require Masons to work at night except in the pursuit of knowledge. 12. No Mason shall speak evil of his fellows' work.
13. The Master must instruct his apprentices in everything they are capable of learning.
14. The Master shall take no apprentice for whom he has not sufficient labor.
15. The Master is not to make false representations nor compromise any sins of his fellows.
And the following are the "points":
1. Those who would be Masons and practice the Masonic art are required to love God and his Holy Church, the Master for whom they labor and their Masonic brethren, for this is the true spirit of Masonry.
2. The Mason must work diligently in working hours that he may lawfully refresh himself in the hours of rest.
3. The Mason must keep the secrets of his Master, his brethren and the Lodge, faithfully.
4. No Mason shall be false to the Craft but maintain all its rules and regulations.
5. The Mason shall not murmur at fair compensation.
6. The Mason shall not turn a working day into a holiday.
7. The Mason shall restrain his lust.
8. The Mason must be just and true to his brethren in every way.
9. The Mason shall treat his brethren with equity and in the spirit of brotherly love.
10. Contention and strife shall not exist among the brethren.
11. The Mason should caution his brother kindly about any error into which he may be about to fall.
12. The Mason must maintain every ordinance of the Assembly.
13. The Mason must not steal nor protect one who does.
14. The Mason must be true to the laws of Masonry and to the laws of his country.
15. The Mason must submit to the lawful penalty for any offense he may commit.
No exercise of the imagination is required to understand that these "articles" and "points" refer to the everyday management of the business of a society, the primary function of which is the performance of work under contract or for hire. Read in connection with the rest of the manuscript, they disclose, however, that the author was laboring under a sense of obligation which even today the conscientious Masonic instructor must feel - the obligation of relating the practical affairs of the moment to the legendary history of an ethical cult. In addition to the legend and this practical advice, .there is much moralizing upon the duties of a man to God and the Church, with allusions to the seven deadly sins, the Virgin Mary and to holy water. Whether at that early day the operative guild was in the habit of "accepting" non-working members is in much dispute. On that point, Gould, in his Commentary on the Regius Manuscript, says:
"These rules of decorum read very curiously in the present age, but their inapplicability to the circumstances of the working Masons of the fourteenth century will be at once apparent. They were intended for the gentlemen of those days, and the instruction for behaviour in the presence of a Lord - at table and in the society of ladies - would have all been equally out of place in a code of manners drawn up for the use o a guild or craft of artisans."
A suggestion as ingenious as it is unsusceptible of proof. Most Masonic scholars are agreed that this version of the Old Charges was used strictly for the government of an operative body.
Next to the Regius in point of antiquity is the Cooke Manuscript, so-called because it was edited for publication in 1861 by Matthew Cooke. From internal evidence this document, or a copy of it, was in the possession of George Payne, when in 1720, as Grand Master, he compiled the "General Regulations," which were later included in Anderson's Constitutions. Its composition has been ascribed to the middle of the fifteenth century, or some sixty years later than that of the Regius. Its traditional account of Freemasonry follows the usual narrative of a beginning before the flood and a persistence through the time of Solomon, with an introduction into England by way of France in the time of Charles Martel. It is apparently a revision of older documents, but its version of the Old Charges mentions nine "articles" and nine "points."
Mackey's History of Freemasonry observes that the author of the Cooke Manuscript was probably familiar with the Regius poem but that he revised his details of the legendary narrative in the light of John of Trevisals translation of Ranulph Higdon's Universal History, which was published by Caxton in 1482. It is clear, however, that he made a sort of carry-all of his story, taking in a little of all the versions then current in manuscript form. He was in turn followed by the author of the Dowland Manuscript and he by the writer or compiler of the still later one, which is commonly described as York Roll No. 1. Since this last is of especial interest as showing the development through which the Old Charges had passed, it is perhaps worth somewhat extensive attention.
At the time the first Grand Lodge was formed, there were many old operative lodges in England. Of these one of the oldest - if not the oldest in fact - was working at York. It will be recalled that York was the scene of the famous legendary assembly in King Athelstan's time at which, the old tradition ran, the Fraternity was constituted under the leadership of Prince Edwin. Some months after the Grand Lodge was formed, the "time immemorial" Lodge at York proclaimed itself the "Grand Lodge of All England." The story of that venture belongs to another part of this narrative, but it is sufficient to say that when an inventory of this body was made in 1779 six copies of the Old Charges were listed. Of these one, numbered No. 1, was a manuscript on parchment in the form of a roll which was five inches wide and about seven feet long. It became misplaced in some manner but was discovered later at Freemason's Hall in London and restored to the York brethren in 1877 by W. J. Hughan. It is believed to have been written in about the year 1600.
The document begins with a few lines of doggerel the first letters of which spell the word "Masonrie, and which are as follows:
Much might be said of the o noble Artt
A Craft thats worth estieming in each part
Sundry Nations Noobles & their Kings also
Oh how they sought its worth to know
Nimrod & Solomon the wisest of all men
Reason saw to love this Science then
Ile say no moe lest by my shallow verses I
Endeavouring to praise should blemish Masonrie.
The manuscript proper begins with the pious invocation: "The might of the Father of heaven with wisdom of the blessed Son through the grace of God and goodness of the Holy Ghost that be three persons in one godhead be with us at our beginning and give us grace so to govern us here in this life that we may come to His blessing that never shall have ending." The purpose is declared to be that of telling "good brethren and fellows" how Masonry was begun and preserved and adds: "And also to them that be here we will declare the charges that belong to every Free Mason to keep the governor of the work, Master, during the time that they work with him and other moe charges that is too long here to tell, and to all these charges he made them to swear a great Oath that men used in that time."
The narrative then proceeds to say that "that worthy Master Euclid was the first that gave it the name of Geomatrie, the which is now called Masonrie throughout all this nation." Then ensues the now familiar story of its transmission, after the building of Solomon)s Temple, to France, then to England, and so to the great assembly at York. Prince Edwin is said to have issued a proclamation, in response to which all who possessed old "writeings" were called upon to produce them. Some of these were found to be in French, some in Greek, some in English and some in other languages. Edwin caused a digest of these to be made and gave command that "it should be read or told when that any Masons should be made & to give them the charge." And from that day to this, the story runs, that custom has been followed. The manner of giving the charge is described in Latin: "Then one of the elders shall take the book and he or they shall place the hands upon the book and shall give the law."
"Every man that is a Mason," the Charge continues, "take right good heed to these Charges & if any man find himself guilty in any of the charges that he amend himself before God and particularly ye that are to be charged take good heed that ye keep these charges right well, for it is sure in good faith. And therefore take good heed hereto it is well worthy to be kept well for that the Science is ancient for there be vii liberall Sciences of the which it is one & the names of the seven Sciences be these:
"First Grammer which teacheth a man to speak truly & write truly. And the second is Rhetoricke and teacheth a man to speak fair and plain in subtile terms & the third is Dielectick or Lodgick & that teacheth a man to discern truth from falsehood. And the fourth is Arithmetick & that teacheth a man to reckon and accompt all manner of numbers. And the fifth is called Geomatrie & teacheth all measure of grounds & of all other things, of the which Science is grounded Masonrie; & the sixth Science is called Musicke & that teacheth a man the Science of Song & violl of tongue & organ harp trumpett. And the seventh Science is called Astronomie and that teacheth a man to know the course of the Sonne, Moone & Starrs. These be the vii liberall Sciences the which Seven be all grounded by one that is to say Geomatrie for by this may a man prove the Essence of work as founded by Geomatrie so Geomatrie teacheth meat, measure, ponderation & Weight of all manner of things on earth for there is no man that worketh any Science but he worketh by some measure or weight & all this is Geomatrie & Marchants & all crafts men & all other of the vii Sciences & especially the plower & tiller of all manner of graines & feeds planters of vinyeards setters of fruits, for in Grammer retorick nor astronomie nor in any of all the other liberall Sciences can any man find meat or measure without Geomatrie, & me thinks that this Science Geomatrie is most worthy and foundeth all others."
The manuscript then returns to the tale of Lamech, his sons and daughter and brings Masonry down to "this worthy Clark Euclid," who is said to have consented to become a teacher of the children of the King and his Nobles on condition that he be granted a commission to rule them "after the manner the Sciences ought to be ruled." Euclid is said to have taken to himself the sons of the nobility and taught them "the Science of Geomatrie & practice to worke in Stones all manner of worthy work that belongeth to building Churches Temples Castles Tours mannors & all manner of buildding & gave them in Charge on this mannor:
"First that they should be true to the King & to the Lord that they serve & that they should love well one another & that they should call each other his Fellow or his Brother & not his Servant or Knave or other foule name & that they should truly deserve their pay of their Lord or the Master that they serve & that they should ordaine the wisest of them to be the Master of the worke & neither to chuse for Love nor efection nor great nor riches to sett any that hath not suficient Knowledge and cunning in the worke to be Master of the worke whereby the Master should be evill served & they disgraced or ashamed & also that they should call perillous & great danger for a man to forsweare himself upon the holy Scripture.
"The First Charge is that he or thou be true man to god & the holy church & that ye use neither erour nor heresie according to your own understanding or discreet and wise mens teaching & also that he shall be true lege man & bear true Alegiance to the King of England without any treason or any other falshood & if they know of any treason or treachery that you amend it privily if ye may or else warne the King or his counsell of it by declareing it to the Magistrates. And also you shall be true one to another that is to say every Mason of the Craft of Magonrie that be allowed Masons you shall doe to them as you would they should doe to you. And that you keep truely all the counsell of Lodge & chamber & all other counsell that ought to be kept by way of Masonrie & also that you use no theeverie but keep yourselves true."
Then followed the other items of the Charge which in modern English may be summarized thus:
2. That you shall be true to your Lord or Master and truly see his profit and advantage furthered;
3. That you shall not call any of your brother Masons by a foul name;
4. That you shall not wrong your brother's wife, daughter or servant;
5. That you shall pay honestly for your own meat and drink and do nothing which may bring shame or discredit on the Craft.
Here end the "Charges in generall that belongeth every Mason to keep, both Masters & Fellows." They are followed by these "certaine of the Charges singularly for Masters and Fellows":
1. That no Master take any work unless he knows he has the skill to complete it;
2. That no Master take work at unreasonable charge, but that he charge a fair price so he can pay his workmen fair wages;
3. That no Master or fellow be supplanted by another in his work unless it be apparent he has not the skill to perform it;
4. That no Master take an apprentice for less than seven years or one that is not sound in body and limb, of good, free birth, no alien but descended of honest kindred and not a bondman;
5. That no Mason take an apprentice unless he have sufficient work to give employment to two or three fellows at least;
6. That no Master or fellow "put any to take any Lord's work that was wont to work journey work";
7. That fellows shall be paid according to the work they actually and honestly perform;
8. That none shall slander another behind his back so as to cause him loss in goods or esteem and that none shall reprove another in Lodge or outside of it without cause;
9. That every Mason shall render due honor to his elder brother;
10. That no Mason shall be a common gamester at dice or cards, but that every fellow going into an adjoining town shall be accompanied by another to bear witness he was in honest place and civil company;
11. That every Mason shall attend assemblies if held within a mile of him and he have due notice thereof;
12. That Masons shall submit their disputes to the arbitration of their brethren before going to law;
13. That no Master or fellow "make any mould rule or square for any Layer nor set any Layer within the Lodge or without to hew any mould stones";
14. That every Mason shall supply work for visiting craftsmen from other countries or, if he cannot, will supply them with means of getting to the next Lodge;
15. That every Mason shall truly perform and finish the work he has undertaken, whether by contract for the job or by daily labor, provided the person employing him keeps his own agreements.
"These Charges," the manuscript concludes, "that we have now rehearsed to you and to all others here present which belongeth to Masons you shall well & truly keep to your power, so help you God & by the contents of that booke - Amen."
Thus it will be seen that from the Regius Manuscript to York Roll No. 1, the Old Charges perform a dual function. On the one hand they preserve the legends and traditions of a society with moral, mystical, ethical and esoteric doctrines; on the other they provide for the practical government of a particular class of mechanics. They differ from one another in details but they agree in essentials of spirit and purpose. Neither differences nor resemblances are hard to account for once the mind of the investigator is disabused of the notion that Operative Masonry was a single, closely knit fraternity in the sense that modern Speculative Freemasonry is.
The situation of Operative Masonry is more easily understood if it is compared to the various bar associations and ethical medical societies of modern times. The comparison is necessarily loose, for these modern associations are strictly professional and not also, as Operative Masonry obviously was, semi-mystical cults. But for practical purposes their methods of working may be regarded as somewhat similar. If a doctor or a lawyer has been duly licensed and admitted to his association in Missouri, no difficulty is made in receiving him by the corresponding association in any other state or country. The doctor is presumed to have subscribed to some form of the Hippocratic oath, to have undergone a satisfactory apprenticeship, to have demonstrated his fitness to be licensed as a physician. He may be called upon, if there is question of his probity or good standing, to produce his credentials. The customs of his own association may vary in numerous small particulars from those of a similar society, say, in New York. Fundamentally, however, the purposes and practices of the two societies are the same.
Studied together, the various writings of the Old Charges show precisely such variations as might be expected from the ordinary course of social life at each period. It is possible to determine of one that it was written at a certain time and in a given part of England; of another that it was written at another time and in a different county. They are peculiarly English; no such documents have been found in Ireland, and Scottish manuscripts are now believed to have been of English origin. With the single exceptions of the allusion in the Regius poem to the Four Crowned Martyrs, they have no definite points of contact with continental documents of the same period.
When they first appear, they are in the possess of an operative body which had developed out of the guild system of the Middle Ages. How were the Operative Mason guilds of England related to the other guilds of that system? Surely it is to that guild system itself that the historian must look for the only reliable answer.
IN some form or other the guild, like the poor, has been always with us - always, at least, since human society became somewhat more complex than it was when all men of a tribe were engaged in a single common pursuit, as in hunting or farming. Stripped to its essentials, a guild is an association entered into voluntarily by its members for mutual support and assistance in a particular enterprise or set of enterprises: In ordinary speech the guild is distinguished from the cult in that it is formed for utilitarian purposes, whereas the cult is intended to promote exercises of religion and worship. Yet there is no sharp line of cleavage between the two, since their objectives frequently shade into one another. Medieval Operative Masonry partook of both characteristics, so intertwined that it would be a hopeless task to undertake to separate them. This was not unusual or peculiar to Masonry, but was so frequent in the Middle Ages as to be regarded as commonplace.
In the simplest forms of society the principal tie between individuals is the bond of blood relationship. If a man is prosperous, he shares his prosperity with needy kinsmen; if he is in distress, they succor him; if he is slain, they avenge him; if he is subject to fine or pecuniary liability, they ransom him. But, as clans grow large and their interests multiply, individuals are necessarily thrown into new alignments. Some of them become hunters, some farmers, some soldiers, some fishers, some artisans, some merchants. Those engaged in a particular calling discover they have common interests which they alone can promote as against all the rest of the community. Unless they can unite and formulate certain principles for the conduct of their business, they will suffer from ruinous competition among themselves, to say nothing of that which may be offered by casual poachers upon premises they would like to regard as their own.
The economic thrust and pressure which draw them together in the first place continue afterwards to force them into closer association. The mere fact of their segregation in an especial unit serves to divide them further and further from other units. The bonds of consanguinity become weakened, but the guild bond becomes stronger and ever stronger until at last the guild itself has taken over most of the protective obligations which once belonged to the clan. Generally speaking, this process tends to become retarded in rural communities and accelerated in cities. The reasons .therefore are not far to seek. The relative simplicity and homogeneity of agricultural life naturally preserve the sense of family responsibility, but the complexity of urban and industrial life tends to break it down, thus forcing the individual to seek something else in its place. Guilds may be expected to become more numerous and more important in proportion as urban development assumes a larger place in the affairs of nation or people.
A characteristic phenomenon of European civilization in the Middle Ages was the development of the city. The feudal system which rose upon the ruins of the Roman empire was essentially rural. The land was parceled out among military chieftains, each of which established his castle where conditions served and then made it as impregnable to assault as he could. The land and all the people round about belonged to him. Tenants of the various holdings were his vassals, obliged to perform prescribed services for their tenures, to furnish him with fighting men, to enroll themselves under his banner when he sounded a call to arms. Over the common people he possessed the absolute power of life, torture and death. Serfs and villeins had to swink and sweat that he and his might possess whatever luxuries their fancies craved; they could be put to death for leaving their abodes without his permission. He in turn acknowledged allegiance to his king, performing homage for his holdings and rendering military service, except when, as often happened, he felt himself strong enough to resist the king on the field of battle.
The development of cities gave to this system its death blow. The basis of prosperity in the city was not tenure of the land but industry and commerce. Great aggregations of men became impatient of feudal restraints and constantly struggled for the right of local self-government. Originally under the government of dukes or bishops, they fought for and ultimately obtained their freedom, with government in the hands of their own Councils and Boards of Aldermen. Ambitious monarchs found in these free cities means for resisting the arrogance of rural barons. In return for successive grants of immunity they submitted to taxation, and, as they had more resources with which to meet levies of men and money, it paid the ruler to do business with them upon reasonably moderate terms. By a natural process of political evolution this everywhere gave rise to a sense of nationalism, which had been impossible under the narrow parochial restraints of the feudal system, and against that nationalism the feudal system pounded itself into destruction.
In the upbuilding of those cities, the guild system played a leading part, and continued to play it until, by its own arrogance and prosperity, it in turn became a brake upon progress and had to be cast aside. Its own beginnings were humble - so humble, in fact, that it is now impossible to trace them with exactitude. It is not even possible to determine the exact origin of the word, guild, itself. Blackstone in his Commentaries said that a gild - the alternative spelling frequently used and perhaps etymologically more correct than the modern form - signified among the Anglo-Saxons a fraternity which derived its name from a verb meaning "to pay," since every member was expected to pay his share of the common expense. Others derive it from a Scandinavian word, gilde, a festival in honor of the god, Odin; others from the Breton word gouil, meaning a holiday or feast; others from the Welsh word gmylad, also meaning a festival.
By whatever name it was called, whether guild, company, corporation or mystery in England, gild in North Germany, metier in France or arte in Italy, it was an association of persons engaged in the same art, trade or commercial pursuit. There are those who believe it first appeared in Italy as a logical successor to the Roman collegium. This hypothesis is not implausible, yet it ought not to be trusted too far, since such societies are a wholly spontaneous development springing from economic, social or political necessity. The guild in all human probability arose simultaneously in more than one country. The Lombard cities of Northern Italy offered a highly favorable opportunity and in them guilds undoubtedly did enjoy greater prosperity than in any other part of the Europe of that day. But they were common in France at the time of Charlemagne in the eighth century; they had appeared in England in the seventh, something of the kind was known in Scandinavia in the sixth century and by the time of the Norman conquest of Britain they were scattered over all of Northern and Western Europe.
The first allusion to them in England is found in the laws of Ine, a West Saxon monarch who died in the year 726. From the context it is apparent that they were then developments of the frith - from an AngloSaxon word meaning peace - guild previously established by the Vikings as organizations to suppress piracy. English frith guilds were associations of neighboring householders who gave security to one another for the preservation of the peace. That is, they were voluntary alliances formed by responsible citizens, for mutual support and protection in a country which was wild and lawless, much as Vigilance Committees were later formed in the American Far West. Indeed the famous Texas Rangers of our own Southwest came into being in much the same manner and for much the same purpose.
All that has ever been necessary in order to form a society of this kind has been the existence of a general need and the presence of a few like-minded persons. For that matter, the need may be in itself negligible. Human beings are naturally imitative. In modern times, if a merchant hits upon a novel means of advertising, his wares, almost instantly a dozen variants and adaptations of the idea will appear. If a song writer attains popular success with a ditty about blackbirds, there will a deluge of songs about redbirds, blue-birds, and birds of every other hue and description. A secret society like Freemasonry, once it becomes generally admired, presages the formation of innumerable societies modeled on the same general plan.
So it was with the guilds of the medieval period. The only test required of such a system was that it work. Once convinced of that, men could be expected form themselves into all sorts of similar societies land for every conceivable purpose. Such was in fact the case. There were guilds of masons, of carpenters, of tailors, of weavers; guilds of householders, of merchants, of mechanics, of priests; there were political guilds, professional guilds, religious guilds, convivial guilds, burial guilds, guilds for social, ethical, moral, religious, and philosophical instruction.
Most important of all, in their influence upon the history of their times, were the merchant guilds. These organizations became in time not only the bulwarks of trade in their respective communities but also the common carriers, the bankers, the promoters of industry and commerce for all of Europe. In a time of general unrest and turbulence, they exercised a steadying influence, and in their portage of articles of luxury as well as of necessity they became useful agents in the development of culture and civilization.
It should be remembered that in the towns sharp social distinctions were drawn between bondsmen and freemen. None was admitted to these guilds who was not free. For convenience, men in the same branch of trade had their places of business - and usually their homes - in the same quarter of the city. It was necessary that they have some voice in the government of that section. They had a common meeting place, usually called a guildhall, to which they repaired for social relaxation as well as for business. They watched strictly over the conduct of their workmen and apprentices.
The principal merchant guilds developed somewhat after the fashion of what in modern times is called a "vertical trust." That is, they enjoyed a monopoly of trade in their local territories and this carried with it the control of all its incidental branches, from the production of raw material to the sale or exchange of the finished product. They could say how much of a given commodity could be thrown upon the market, how much must be withheld; they supervised importations and exportations, not infrequently using their own ships. They established standards of quality, arbitrarily fixed prices and wages, and strictly controlled trade practices. They might even say what kind of clothing it was suitable for the various grades of employees to wear and, if necessary, procure legislation to enforce such sumptuary decrees. The members enjoyed peculiar privileges and immunities; the societies had their respective coats of arms and appropriate places
in the official life of the municipality. In time they ceased to become known as guilds and were called corporations and companies. It is not unjustifiably extravagant to say that these associations and their successors, the great trading companies of England, laid the foundation upon which the commercial supremacy of the British Empire was erected; that to their influence more than to any other was due that zeal in exploration and adventure which ultimately enabled Britain to boast of being Mistress of the Seas and which certainly made her mistress of colonies and plantations in every continent and upon a thousand islands.
In itself, however, the vertical trust arrangement had fatal weaknesses and was not destined to perpetuation. The merchant guild, in its quest of monopoly, proceeded upon the theory that a whole industry should be brought under single control. Weavers, dyers, tinkers shipwrights smiths in gold and silver, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths and workers at numerous other crafts soon found their own interests seriously compromised by such a scheme. Now these workmen had their own guilds, some of them older than those of the merchants; where they did not, they hastened to create them. The concern of each little society was not an industry but the immediate sub-division of that industry which constituted its own industrial province. The tendency of the merchant guild was toward unification; that of the craft guild was divisive. The merchant guild might, for instance, look upon the leather trade as one business, but the workers became specialists as they increased in skill, tanners, harness makers, saddle makers, bridle makers, shoemakers, boot makers, and each of these separate branches supplied justification for the organization of a separate society.
Economic conflict between these two organizational systems was natural and inevitable. No person well read in English history could have much doubt which of the two would ultimately triumph. The Briton is naturally jealous for his personal rights and is remarkably obstinate and persistent in his defense of them. His home is his castle, his private affairs are nobody else's concern, and his business is his own, to be administered by himself or the agents he may appoint. To this day British industry has resisted that tendency to centralization which is so distinctive of American industrial development, and remains divided up among relatively small manufacturing establishments which in the United States ordinarily would be amalgamated into unified concerns.
By uniting themselves into small groups, the workers were able to preserve craft identity. They exercised the sharpest supervision over the admission of new members, taking care that accessions of competent workmen should not be so numerous as to lessen the chances of remunerative employment for those already belonging. By limiting the number of apprentices a master workman could engage, they not only insured a somewhat fixed membership, proportionally based upon the available work, but they also guaranteed to the apprentice himself closer personal attention than he could hope to receive if there were too many beginners to share the master's time. His term of service was a long one - usually running for about seven years. During that time he was fed, bedded and clothed at the master's expense and often in the master's household. In his private conduct he was subject to the master's discipline, and this sometimes extended even to chastening with the rod. In return, the master undertook to teach him his trade so that, at the expiration of his apprenticeship, he would be able as a journeyman to earn his livelihood. If he then continued to improve in skill, he might hope to become a master workman, with the right to take contracts, hire journeymen and enroll his own apprentices.
This system brought about the closest imaginable relations among members of the same craft guild. The guild was itself a kind of family affair - so much so, indeed, that in many societies only the sons of men engaged in the craft could become apprentices. Its members dwelt in proximity to one another; in their social enjoyments they played together and ate together in a close and exclusive intercourse. They not infrequently dressed alike, at least to the extent of wearing some peculiar and distinctive article of apparel by which they could be identified. They were pledged to assist one another in sickness or distress an to succor one another in danger. Some of the guilds maintained schools for the instruction of the children of the members; remnants of such schools exist in England to this very day, Corpus Christi at Cambridge being a conspicuous example. They thus stood separate and apart from the rest of the community.
In a very real sense, the craft guild came to stand as custodian of the personal welfare of its members. It is a mistake not infrequently made to confuse these bodies with the trade unions of today. For one thing, the trade union is an organization of employees formed to enable them to bargain collectively with their employers and to resist employer encroachments upon employee rights and privileges. The craft guild included both employers and employees. It was frequently governed not by the employees but by the master workmen who were also, and incidentally, employers. These were known commonly as wardens and there were usually two and sometimes four of them. In some cases they were selected at annual assemblies of the craft to serve for a year. In others they were appointed by the municipal authorities. It was their business to approve or reject work turned out by the members, to see that labor was honestly and satisfactorily performed, that the craftsmen received their proper pay and that the personal conduct of the members did not violate that salutary discipline which was intended to maintain the craft in good repute with the world at large.
Methods of formal induction into membership varied greatly. In some cases it was by oath administered in some form of ceremonial initiation. In others it was merely by placing the name on the society's rolls. Some of the guilds possessed secret and semi-religious rites; almost all of them were religious in so far as they acknowledged allegiance to Church, adopted particular saints as their patrons, and made a practice of attending divine services on designated days. Some of them admitted women and some did not. Although there were distinctions of apprentices from journeymen, or fellows of the craft, and distinctions of fellows from masters, these as a rule applied only to the personal consequence of each individual among his brethren.
Among the mason guilds there actually were but two classes - on the one side apprentices and on the other Fellows and Masters - since a Fellow might at any time become a Master by the simple process of taking a contract to perform a given work and hiring other Fellows to help him perform it. He might take apprentices provided he could furnish sufficient employment for a required number of enrolled workmen. In voting at assemblies, the ballot of the Fellow ordinarily counted for as much as did that of the Master. In general it may be said that an apprentice might become a Fellow upon the completion of his indentured term of service and upon proper evidence of his skill as a workman, presented to the wardens of the guild and by them accepted as satisfactory. In trades requiring a high degree of manual dexterity, as in carving, painting, or engraving, he might be required to submit a masterpiece. In France and Germany it was often required of an apprentice that, after his freedom from indentures, he spend a year or more traveling among the guilds of communities remote from his home, earning a living by his art and improving in knowledge and experience.
In addition to the merchant and craft guilds there were innumerable religious and social guilds of all kinds. Some were powerful institutions in their own right and some were mere auxiliary bodies. Nearly every large church of the Middle Ages had many such auxiliaries, each dedicated to the service of a particular saint and consecrated to the performance of some special task. Some of these were purely mystical and devoted to exercises of meditation and prayer; others were practical and looked after the management of parish houses and schools, the support of indigent priests, the maintenance of church property, the collection of funds for charitable and missionary purposes. Some became separate and semi-ecclesiastical entities, with their own chapels and chaplains, colleges, asylums. A few became identified with the production of religious dramas and mystery plays. The mystery play, of course, had nothing to do with a "mystery" in the modern sense. The word mystery as thus used was derived from the Middle English word misterie, meaning a trade or employment, which in turn was derived through the French from the Latin word ministerium. A mystery play was therefore a play which illustrated some practice or doctrine of a given trade. Many medieval guilds performed them and it is not at all improbable that the Drama of the Third Degree of modern Freemasonry is a survival of this custom.
It is evident that with so many societies flourishing thus side by side the guilds must have been profoundly, influenced by contact with one another. Although; each might preserve its separate identity, a considerable cross pollination of ideas must have taken place. Indeed this is not a matter of mere inference. There are records of great pageants in England which were managed much after the fashion of the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, the Veiled Prophet parade in St. Louis, the Priests of Pallas parade in Kansas City and kindred affairs in modern America. Places in the line of march were assigned to various important craft guilds. Each prepared a tableau which was staged upon a cart or "float" and which usually represented some episode from Biblical literature. This arrangement in itself discloses a degree of common understanding and purpose. Moreover it shows that the craft guild and the strictly religious guild sometimes overlapped in their functions, a matter of no little significance.
In England the guild system reached its peak in the reign of Edward III, or toward the close of the fourteenth century, when some 40,000 religious and trade societies were listed. They ranged in size from a handful of men to the 15,000 members of the Corpus Christi guild at York. But the system contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Trade and merchant guilds came first into conflict with one another and then with the economic changes which ushered in the modern era of trade and commerce. Religious guilds came into conflict with modern theories of government. But the principal trouble with the guild system was that it could not stand prosperity. Originally poor and humble and with ideals of service, it became rich and arrogant and lustful of power. Then it awoke one morning to find it had outlived its usefulness; awoke as the spoiled favorite of an Eastern potentate sometimes awakes, to find one standing at her bedside with a bowstring.
How the system and municipal government complemented each other has already been indicated. The more important guilds were corporations with definite privileges, prerogatives and responsibilities. They contained the germ of the municipal borough of more modern times, but care should be taken to differentiate between their constitution as private societies and the public functions which those societies occasionally performed. Theoretically, at least, the function of the guild in public affairs was to represent the interests of its particular trade or set of trades. In return for this privilege it agreed that the management of its business should be conducted in the public interest. If the municipality might not infringe upon the prerogatives of the guild, neither might the guild or its members use those prerogatives to the disadvantage of the public at large. Since the society represented its trade, it had a right to say what individuals might belong to that trade; individuals who belonged to no trade therefore had no representation and were likely to find themselves without citizenship. Not least important of the guild's privileges was a local monopoly of its peculiar business; membership in it was obligatory upon all persons who would practice that business in that community. Since it had the right of saying who should be admitted, excluding all others, its power was tremendous. Sometimes it did not hesitate to admit persons who were not in the trade at all - honorary members they might be called. This custom of "accepting" outsiders for their general standing in the community brought into the guilds some of the outstanding persons of medieval English history, including King Edward III, King Henry IV, King Henry VI and King Henry VIII, but it also introduced an element of discontent, as practical workers observed the waxing power of these illustrious patrons. It was probably in accordance with this custom that the operative masons first began to "accept" non-masons.
As the larger societies gained in wealth and prestige, they steadily usurped authority. They had helped to break down the feudal system and strengthen the monarchy, but in time they resisted and even challenged the authority of the monarch himself. In so doing they were but bringing their destruction nearer. Meanwhile their power was being steadily undermined at home. In their increasing arrogance they tended to break down the old democratic relationship which bound all members, from apprentice to master, into one society of friends and brothers. The masters developed into an employing class and the fellows into a class of workers by the day. As the gulf widened, the masters used the machinery at hand for their own aggrandizement. To resist them, the journeymen, forced into a new class consciousness, began organizing guilds of their own. This was bitterly opposed by the masters, who invoked the civil law to stop the practice, but without effect. On the one hand there was constant effort to encroach upon the rights of the individual worker; on the other determined resistance to the tyrannical methods of the employer. The struggle endured for centuries, but the guild system, thus disunited, gradually broke up and disappeared.
Long before this came to pass, however, a royal sword had been unsheathed against the great religious guilds of England. These bodies had become immensely rich and powerful in the time of the Crusades and they possessed many of the most desirable holdings. In the long and bitter struggle between Henry VIII and the papacy, they were almost unanimously on the side of the Church. Convinced that he could not carry on his work of reformation until this opposition had been destroyed, Henry struck with characteristic vigor and effectiveness. He despoiled the religious guilds of their temporal property, which he declared forfeit to the Crown. He forbade other guilds to make gifts of money to churches and finally, in 1547, the religious societies were formally suppressed.
A system so extensive could not be wholly eradicated. It was bound to leave many survivors which, under other names and in other forms, continued to function. The religious guild in modified guise has continued to the present day in both the Roman Catholic and the Anglican churches. The merchant guild left its influence upon the later trading companies of England. It is possible that trade unions and friendly societies of the present owe something to the craft guilds, although this possibility is more easily exaggerated than demonstrated. But there is one conspicuous survival out of the guild system, and that one is the institution of modern Freemasonry.
IF the date assigned by scholarship is correct, the oldest existing Masonic manuscript, the Regius poem, was penned in the year 1390. In that year King Richard II was on the throne of England; the battle of Agincourt had not yet been fought; the War of the Roses as yet in the future and the first voyage of Columbus to the New World was not to begin for more than another century. Almost three-quarters of a century were to pass before Martin Luther's birth. All over Europe men were still building cathedrals in the Gothic style, although that school of architecture had entered upon its final phases of decline. The guild system was in its heyday in England and on the continent. It had not yet become fashionable - in England at least - to burn heretics at the stake. Legal issues might still be decided in trial by combat.
The Regius manuscript contains a set of rules and regulations for the government of what was obviously a guild of craftsmen; in the light of modern research it is possible to ascertain that the society was organized upon much the same general plan as were the majority of operative guilds of that day. But the Regius poem is of far greater importance than that. It was a patent attempt to account to the English members of an English institution for an antiquity of that institution in which they already believed. Presumably it was to be read to men whose fathers and grandfathers and probably great grandfathers had belonged. It gave naive credence to a tradition that the society had been in continuous existence on English soil since the days of Athelstan - which was to say since before the Norman conquest. It is clear from the rhymed narrative itself that its author had no real sense of the passage of time. What he did know, however, was that the society was very old - or at least so old that the traditions and memories of persons then living did not run back to a time when it did not exist.
In some manner this particular manuscript was lost to sight, to remain lost for some 450 years. At any rate when the first Grand Lodge was formed, about 325 years after it was penned, and diligent search was made for all the writings having to do with Operative Masonry, this one for the time escaped attention. There were other and later ones, however, and these contained substantially the same material, thus indicating the persistence of the Regius tradition. At least six of these were in possession of the old "immemorial" Lodge at York - a lodge which held itself out to be the direct lineal descendant of the masonry of Athelstan's day. Not a few such lodges were scattered about England and Scotland at that time, unmistakable survivors of the guild system of the Middle Ages. One of the first tasks the new Grand Lodge set for itself was to gather, digest and publish in literary form all that could be learned of the operative guilds and particularly their legends, customs, laws and regulations. More than a century after that had been done, the Regius manuscript was rediscovered, to bear eloquent testimony to the fact that there had been no great alteration in the practices and beliefs of the operative masons between the reign of Richard II and the reign of George I, a period of more than three centuries.
Taking the year 1400 as a point of departure from which to measure English Masonic history both forward and backward, it is therefore clear: (1) that before that time, and probably for a considerable period before it, operative masonic guilds were in existence in England; that they had a substantial literary tradition and customs established by immemorial usage; (2) that they continued to exist for another 300 years with relatively little change in either customs or traditions; and (3) that surviving units or "lodges" of them participated in the eighteenth-century movement which centered on the formation of the first Grand Lodge, from which Speculative Freemasonry dates its present form of existence.
For purposes of discussion it may be assumed that even if there had been no operative societies coming down from a remoter antiquity, the guild system itself would have produced them. When artisans of all other classes and callings were uniting themselves into such groups, it would have been strange indeed if the stone masons had not done so also. If not a single record of their medieval existence could be found, it still would be safe to infer they did exist. As a matter of fact there are records of Masonic guilds both in England and on the continent. The term Freemason occurs in the fabric rolls of Exeter Cathedral in the year 1396. The guild at London in 1537 called its members Freemasons; at Norwich in 1375 masons appear to have been attached to the guild of carpenters; whether that was a purely local or a general arrangement at the time there is no way of knowing.
It is interesting to observe, however, that in the year 1350 two separate classes of masons were recognized. A statute of that period describes a mestre mason de franche pere - a master mason of free stone - as being different from other masons and entitled to higher pay. That distinction is maintained in a statute of 1360 except that in the later one the preferred workman is called a "chief mestre" of masons. The common mason appears to have been classified generally with "carpenters, tilers, thatchers, daubers and all other labourers." As late as 1604 an incorporation at Oxford included freemasons, carpenters, joiners and slaters. It is evident from the records of smaller towns that mason guilds were not numerous or particularly important, a fact which in itself is illuminating. It marks one great respect in which these bodies differed from all other craft organizations, for they were essentially local institutions, made up of workmen who remained in one town and usually in one quarter of the town, whereas the skilled masons who worked in the building of the Gothic cathedrals had from the nature of their calling to be more or less itinerant, moving about from place to place as work was to be found.
In an enumeration of the guilds entitled to representation in the Common Council of London in 1370, a Company of Freemasons was listed and a Company of Masons, standing respectively as No. 17 and No. 34 on a roll of forty-eight. The Company of Masons appears to have been of greater numerical strength than the Company of Freemasons, since it had four representatives as against two for the other. Whether, as Mackey's History of Freemasonry suggests, this indicates that the Freemasons formed a smaller and more select society, is pure speculation, since no proof one way or the other has been found, but as a guess it is decidedly plausible. In any event, the list establishes the existence of two separate guilds. Ultimately they were merged, taking a coat of arms which displayed three white castles with black doors and windows on a black field, together with a silver or scalloped chevron and on it a pair of black compasses.
It is therefore possible to be reasonably sure of the following facts pertaining to the general situation of Operative Masonry at the time the Regius manuscript was presumably written, that is, in the year 1390:
I. That it was occasionally divided into two general classes respectively mentioned as Freemasons and as Masons;
II. That town guilds of masons were small and relatively unimportant as compared with town guilds of other kinds;
III. That town mason guilds frequently united with, or formed parts of, guilds of other workers employed in the building trades;
IV. That it is probable no wide gulf separated the two classes of Masons, since separate guilds of them in London found no insuperable obstacle in the way of union and particularly since the Old Charges mention their common art as Masonry, without drawing invidious distinctions between Masons and Freemasons;
V. That the rules laid down for practical guidance of members of the Craft corresponded in the main with similar rules laid down in other craft guilds of that period.
But when the Regius poem was drafted, the active period of Gothic architecture was already drawing to a close. That period for centuries had given to the stone masons of Northern and Western Europe their principal occupation. Its work required a high degree of skill, which for the most part could not be acquired except by actual practice in the labor of building just such edifices as the great churches themselves. The stonework of successive cathedrals discloses that as fast as problems of construction were solved, the solutions were passed along to succeeding builders. From quarry to the finished task every stone had its separate purpose, and preparation of every stone involved conscious and more or less skilled direction at the hands of every workman through whose hands it must pass.
When the curtain first rises on the stage of organize Operative Masonry, it discloses a society proudly an profoundly self- conscious. It is a society of aristocrat among workmen, boasting of an ancestry of incredible age and distinction. It has noble traditions, and it has dignity of a high order to maintain. Moreover, it has secrets which at all costs must be preserved, and a esoteric philosophy which is rooted in the lore of the past. True, it is a guild and in many respects like all the other guilds which then flourished as such societies had not flourished before and as they have not flourished since. But it is more than a guild; it is also a cult, for it practices mystical rites which are now known to have been survivals of magic rites and religious observances, coming down from a past which was indefinitely remote.
The Old Charges bear abundant witness to all these things. Most of them prescribe the ritualistic manner in which oaths of secrecy must be administered. One reveals that the candidate was compelled to swear, "in the presence of Almighty God and my Fellows and Brethren here present" that he would not by any act or under any circumstance, "publish, discover, reveal or make known any of the secrets, privileges or counseIs of the fraternity or fellowship of Free Masonry." (Harleian MSS.) Those secrets were indeed well kept; so well, in fact, that the modern Freemason is much in doubt as to what many of them were and can only suppose that they had to do with the mechanical science of the operative calling. As Operative Masonry fell into disuse, some of them undoubtedly became imbedded in the symbolism and allegory of rite and ritual, where they remain to this day. Of their origin, practical use, and indeed of their scope, the present day knows almost nothing. It is by no means unlikely that as cathedral building masons merged with the guild masons of the towns, they saw no reason to impart to their less skilled companions more of their own secret art than was necessary to give it symbolical or emblematical preservation; and as "accepted," or non-operative, masons came in time to outnumber them both, the value of purely mechanical secrets naturally tended diminish and ultimately to disappear.
The modern student must bear in mind also that from their very nature it was unlawful for these things to be written, carved or engraved upon any movable or immovable thing, in such fashion that they might become legible or intelligible to a "cowan," or outsider. The Old Charges must therefore be studied for what they may suggest "between the lines" as well as for what they openly say. In actual practice Masons appear always to have been singularly tenacious of their secret ritualistic "work." Although no particular care appears to have been taken to keep the Old Manuscripts from public inspection, secretaries of many immemorial lodges burned their records rather than have them fall into the hands of historians appointed by the first Grand Lodge. Even today conservative brethren, fearing improper disclosures will be made, look askance upon public discussions of esoteric matters, and although various Monitors have been published officially for guidance in the ritualistic labors of the Craft, by far the greater part of modern ritual may not be lawfully written even in cipher; Masons who compose ciphers for that purpose or make use of them are subject to the severest penalties. The only legal method of passing these secret things from man to man and from generation to generation is that of mouth-to-ear communication. It is truly astonishing how accurate and uniform these oral transmissions have been, and this accuracy is in itself the best justification of a jealous zeal which forbids oral alteration or other innovation upon the fundamentals of Craft Masonry.
In the operative days it is clear that mason guilds arose in towns where there was enough work to support resident craftsmen. Medieval cities for the most part, however, were built not of stone but of wood. In such places carpenters were far more in demand, and it is not surprising to find that carpenter guilds were more numerous and more important in local affairs than were those of the workers in stone. Indeed, the stone worker was likely to be only an auxiliary to the carpenter, performing incidental tasks in laying foundations for houses, shoring up banks, lining the walls of excavations, and here and there constructing a small bridge or culvert. Sometimes there were not enough of them in a town to conduct their own mystery plays in connection with great pageants. At Exeter the masons shared a play with the goldsmiths; at York with the hatmakers.
But when great churches, monasteries, castles or manor houses were toward, it was a different story. Here the stone worker came into his own; the carpenter, tiler, slater, glazier, sank into subordinate positions. Resident mason guilds were neither numerous enough nor possessed the necessary skill to conduct enterprises of such magnitude. From afar off, perhaps from foreign countries, would come the master builder to take the work in hand. In many instances he brought with him a few especially skilled assistants who possessed his confidence and who knew how to do important parts of the work as he liked to have them done. The bishop, abbot or lord might have in mind a few especially skilled craftsmen of his own and these of course would be employed. Masons hearing of the undertaking would begin to drift in from all directions. They came afoot, making their way from town to town, visiting local lodges by the way, sure of refreshment and hospitality and even of financial assistance if they required it.
The gathering of so many strangers in one place would naturally bring to local authorities unwonted burdens of housing and policing. In those days, when serfs were tied to their soil and a considerable proportion of the population of every country was made up of bondsmen, the masterless man was everywhere suspect. He might be locked up or even be put to death if he couldn't give a satisfactory account of himself. An apprentice not yet free of his indentures was in most respects a bondsman; only master workmen and fellows, free of their guild, might travel about in safety, and it was essential that these have with them the means of proving their identity. It could be assumed, even if there were no traditions to support the theory, that these traveling craftsmen possessed methods of making themselves known to local craftsmen who would vouch for them to the civil authorities. As few could either read or write, and as written certificates, even if they existed, might be lost or stolen, they would need to know a method of proving themselves free craftsmen which would be independent of articles to be concealed in the clothing or carried about the person. The method would have to be more or less secret to prevent its use by impostors.
Common laborers and other classes of workmen would be recruited from the neighborhood and would be under the direction of their own masters. The masons, on the other hand, would have to be subject to other arrangements. But this was an old experience to them; they knew precisely what ought to be done in such an emergency.
Their first care was to set up a "lodge." Nearly every craft guild had its building or other place of work, where the men sometimes slept or gathered for social intercourse as well as for labor, but the masons appear to have been alone in applying the term "lodge" to the organization or assemblage itself as well as to the place of assembly. In town guilds, as at Aberdeen, where resident brethren were sufficiently numerous, lodges were housed in permanent structures. On the site of construction, however, it was usually sheltered in a temporary shed or lean-to. Here it was a custom for the craftsmen to take counsel on all matters pertaining to their general welfare. Here also, apprentices were placed under strict obligation to preserve the secrets of the logge; to hele, or conceal, the counsel of their brethren.
Whether initiatory ceremonies were performed in those rooms is not altogether clear. Survivals in the ritual make it most certain that at some time lodge meetings were held in the open air, the roof being nothing lower than the clouded or star-decked canopy of the heavens. If this was the case, such congregations must have been in secure places away from the general body of the work, perhaps on the tops of hills or in deep valleys where sentinels might observe the approach of "cowans" - that is, non-organized workers or "scabs" as they are now termed in labor parlance - and eavesdroppers. Some arrangement of the kind would at least seem reasonable, since the working hut was usually situated at the heart of a busy camp surrounded by those of other crafts. Some of the ceremonials which have come down to modern times manifestly had their origin in magical practices - practices maintained because they were supposed to bring "good luck," long after their primitive function of appeasing the divinities of nature had been forgotten. Such exercises would serve to impress the novice with the solemnity and inviolability of his undertakings in addition to providing him with means of identifying himself should he afterwards become a sojourner among stranger masons. They naturally would be screened with the greatest care from the eyes of the profane.
The principal function of a lodge at the scene of labor was to bring the masons under a central government, responsible to the general overseer or superintendent of the work, who might be the master builder, his agents, the ecclesiastical authorities, the civil authorities or a committee of laymen. The lodge chose its own presiding officer, sometimes known as a master, sometimes as a warden, sometimes, and especially in Scotland, as a deacon. A box master, or treasurer, was chosen to take care of the common fund. There were bookkeepers or rolls keepers, whose duty it was to keep track of the workers and the pay due them or received by them. In general the officers were as few as might be. Local conditions sometimes dictated increasing or diminishing the number. There are no records showing the employment of tylers at that early day, although it is apparent that some method must have been employed to keep the lodge free from intrusion when it was engaged upon its private business. Some of these officers disappeared entirely in later days, hen the need for them no longer existed; other officers were created as circumstance might decree.
The Old Charges furnish indications of the kind of rules and regulations to which the members were subject. From another source, the Fabric Rolls of York Cathedral, comes a sidelight upon the working conditions of that period. It is a decree establishing "Orders for the Masons and workmen," and reads as follows:
"The first and second Masons, who are called masters of the same, and the carpenters, shall take oath that they cause the ancient customs underwritten to be faithfully observed. In summer they are to begin to work immediately after sunrise until the ringing of the bell of the Virgin Mary; then to breakfast in the fabric room (logium fabricae), then one of the masters shall knock upon the door of the lodge, and forthwith all are to return to work until noon. Between April and August, after dinner, they shall sleep in the lodge, then work until the first bell for vespers; then sit to drink till the end of the third bell, and return to work so long as they can see by daylight. In winter they are to begin work at daybreak, and to continue as before till noon, dine and return to work till daylight is over. On Vigils and on Saturdays they are to work until noon."
Masons of the lodge kept themselves strictly apart from unskilled workers in stone, who were known as rough setters, wallers, plasterers, layers, cowans and masons without the word." Apparently there was free intercourse among members of the cathedral builders' lodges and those of the local mason guilds, but no master might lay out plans or display trade sets in the presence of workers of the cowan class. As certain amount of intercourse between the craftsmen and the directors of the work was essential, it was a custom to give the "freedom of the lodge" to the more notable of these, as a bishop, an architect or a man skilled in the mechanical sciences. In Scotland persons so distinguished came to be known as Geomatic Masons and Gentlemen Masons. This appears to have been one of the earliest plans for "accepting" non- operatives. There can be little doubt that these honorary members, coming thus in contact with the esoteric practices of the society, were vastly interested by them, and it may be that some of these learned brethren were able to explain to the less erudite mechanics certain meanings of their quaint ceremonials which had long since been forgotten.
Occasions for this must have been numerous. These working masons were constantly surrounded by symbols and other reminders of the past. The cathedrals which they built, from "turret to foundation stone," were full of symbolism. The arches, the windows, the gargoyles, were luminous with it. Strange and secret markings were chiseled into the stones; a master mason himself might employ a mark which had been used by his father before him, the original significance of which he had perhaps lost. Stained glass, mural decorations, altar cloths, priestly vestments, were employed to teach to an illiterate populace the most treasured doctrines of Church and Bible. The ceremonial of the Mass was symbolical in every detail, with every gesture and intonation carefully prescribed so as to bear its proper place in this great drama of the Passion of the Blessed Saviour. To wits skilled in the reading of such things there was scarcely an object upon which the eye could rest which did not have its own esoteric significance. Even to-day the Gothic cathedral is an open book to those who know how to read it rightly.
Operative lodges did not employ the system of degrees in use in modern Freemasonry. They recognized three classes of workmen, apprentices, journeymen or Fellows, and Masters, but the distinction between the Fellow and the Master was not that which now differentiates the Fellowcraft from the Master Mason. Apprentices were precisely what the name implies. They were learners, bound over for a term of years to serve their masters, in return for which service they were to receive food, lodging and clothing and to receive instruction which would enable them afterwards to earn their own livelihood at the trade. They began as mere boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age and usually they served for seven years. Their relation to the lodge appears to have varied in different localities; perhaps also as the lodge to which they were attached was one of cathedral builders or merely a town guild and therefore stationary. In at least one instance it is known that apprentices were present at the making of a master, but whether that means they witnessed the induction of a master into his new rights or participated in some investment with the secrets of the lodge is in doubt, the probabilities strongly favoring the former suggestion.
What ceremonies of initiation apprentices were required to undergo, beyond taking oath in due form in the presence of the brethren, the present age has no way of knowing; nor is it known whether initiatory rites were commonly observed. Immediately after his Admission the newly made Fellow could begin work as a journeyman, since in England he was not expected to undertake a travel tour. On the contrary, this practice was forbidden by laws passed in the fourteenth century. Wages as a rule were also fixed by law, the wage scale sometimes requiring an employer to provide his men with lodging and board and with aprons, gloves and tunics.
The lodges were self-constituting bodies. In spite of efforts which have been made to show that Operative Masonry was one big fraternity, as modern Freemasonry is, the evidence weighs overwhelmingly against that theory. All that seems to have been necessary for forming a lodge was the presence of a number of Masters and Fellows. These no doubt had satisfactory means of proving one another. In later years lodges which had existed from time immemorial came to feel they had exclusive jurisdiction over their respective communities, and at least one of them, acting upon that theory, proclaimed itself a Grand Lodge with the power to issue warrants for constituting subordinate bodies.
The Old Charges make it plain that, from time to time, general assemblies may have been held, but there is nothing in this connection to support a belief that these were central governing bodies in the sense that a Grand Lodge is. They appear to have been district conventions called by officers of the Craft and sometimes by sheriffs. There is doubt that even these were exclusively Masonic and not rather general meetings of all the crafts, masons among the rest. At most they were - if exception be made of the legendary assembly at York, spoken of in the Regius poem - county, provincial or municipal affairs, called to take counsel on matters pertaining to the welfare or government of the craftsmen. There are allusions in the Old Manuscripts to such gatherings at York and to one or two held elsewhere, but nowhere, with the exception noticed, is there record of one for the masons of the entire country.
Each Master was under moral obligation to attend these assemblies when they were held within a reasonable distance of his place of abode. Some of the ancient documents fix the distance at fifty miles, and those of most recent date put it at five miles. On this matter the Regius poem says:
That every Mayster that ys a mason
Must ben at the generale congregacyon,
So that he hyt reasonably y-tolde
Where that the semble schal be holde;
And to that semble he most nede gon
But he have a resenabul skwsacyon.
That assemblies were sometimes summoned for disciplinary purposes is indicated in the Cooke Manuscript, which sets forth that while lesser excuses might serve for other Masters unable to attend, "those who have been disobedient at such congregations, or been false to their employers, or had acted so as to deserve reproof by the Craft, should be excused only by extreme sickness, of which notice was to be given to the Master is principal of the assembly." What power the assembly may have had to enforce its decrees and to administer punishment is not revealed. Since these were district affairs, however, it is reasonable to suppose that the Masters who did attend were neighbors of those who did not and that by combining against an intransigent brother or lodge they could exercise something more than moral suasion. Moreover, as the, lodges were also guilds, with certain responsibilities to the civil authorities, it is safe to assume that the decrees of an assembly might expect support from the secular arm. It was probably to the interest of the Masters to rule themselves through their own congregations, as it is certain that the congregations themselves might, on some matter of public policy, speak to greater effect than could the separate lodges.
Dependable accounts of the operative days are unfortunately too scant to enable the historian to do more than glance at certain general principles. A good deal of guesswork must necessarily enter into every attempt to trace Masonry through this tortuous period, uncertain in its beginning and extended over almost half of the entire Christian era. There seems reason to believe, however, that itinerant, cathedral building guilds of masons came into frequent contact with stationary local guilds and that these ultimately became amalgamated. The itinerant guilds appear to have been ma up of men of superior knowledge and wider experience moreover they had innumerable points of contact with the world outside of the British Isles. It is therefore to them that the present age attributes most of the legends, symbolism and cult practices which so evidently have descended from remote antiquity. Even so, this is only a guess - perhaps an intelligent one, certainly plausible, and at least more credible than the wild and fanciful romances in which gullible and not over critical writers have sometimes put their trust.
CENTURIES were required to bring the guild system of the Middle Ages to the prosperity it enjoyed when it was at the summit of its opulence, and centuries more were called upon to witness its decline and decay. As part of that system, Operative Masonry shared the common doom. It was indeed all but extinct when a more modern age found its machinery adaptable to new purposes and rescued it from the oblivion toward which it was drifting. Its salvation can be attributed in all reasonableness to its possession of cultural dynamics which in themselves were eternal. If it had relied alone upon its structure as a society for the promotion of a handicraft, it must have gone the way of other craft guilds. But it had more than this; it had an internal quality which was ethical, moral and spiritual, responsive to indestructible demands of human nature and so constituted as to be peculiarly fitted to meet them.
Although it is customary to regard the formation of the first Grand Lodge as marking a revolutionary process by which Speculative Freemasonry replaced Operative Masonry, this is true only in a limited sense. The new organization abruptly altered the course of English Freemasonry, but that alteration long had been foreshadowed in the course of history. An old institution was not uprooted to make place for a new one; rather the new one sprouted from the roots of the old, aided thereto by energetic assistance at the hands of intelligent gardeners. Speculative Freemasonry is therefore the result of an operation by which eighteenth century philosophy was grafted upon the hardy stock of immemorial Operative Masonry, to the great improvement and advantage of both.
Yet it would be contrary to reason and information to suppose the speculative element a novelty of the eighteenth century. Something of the kind appears to have existed from the earliest times. The old traditions offer proof of this, since they bear testimony to early efforts at developing a moral philosophy , which had nothing to do with the carving and placing of stones. And the fact that each subsequent version of the Old Charges is an improvement upon its predecessors is a clear intimation that this philosophy under-went steady development in its progress through the centuries. The great change of 1717-1723 did not take place until all things had been made ready for it.
It is said of a man that as soon as he begins to live, that soon he begins to die. Of Operative Masonry it may at least be said that when it was in its prime the germs of impending dissolution were already planted within it. At the moment when the Regius manuscript was penned, two causes wholly external to the Craft and beyond its control were beginning to work for its ultimate undoing. One was the decline of Gothic architecture; the other was the decline of the guild system. Gothic architecture supplied it with nourishment, the guild system with the means of social existence.
Some years before the date assigned to the Regius, Europe had been swept by an appalling visitation of the Black Death. The plague was no respecter of persons, but it fell heaviest upon the working classes. It not only took their lives, but it paralyzed industry, stopped the plough in the field, kept ships tied to their wharves, forced the mechanic to lay aside his working tools. When its first effects had passed, the survivors had natural reason to expect they might be able to profit by a general shortage of labor and a resultant increase in pay. Those in England were doomed to disappointment through enactment of the notorious Statute of Laborers, which made it unlawful for a worker to ask or receive more than the most miserly pittance which would serve to keep body and soul together. As amended in 1350, for instance, the law fixed the pay of a master mason in free stone at four pence for a day which began at dawn and lasted until nightfall. Such a scale was bound to drive many a man out of the trade, if he could find something else at which to earn a living, or, if he could not, to reduce him to a state of despair.
Many craft guilds offered violent protest and in this the masons appear to have joined. In so doing they replaying into the hands of enemies already alarmed by the growing power of the guilds and their airs of superiority and arrogance. A new wage scale was published in 1360 and along with it went a decree dissolving all associations of masons, carpenters, congregations, chapters and ordinances and absolving all persons from every oath they had taken binding them to such associations. To add to the burdens of the poor, an oppressive poll tax was levied in the year 1380. This was a signal for that popular uprising of workers and peasants known in history as Wat Tyler's Rebellion, a disturbance so grave that for a time it seriously threatened to overturn the government. What part craft guilds may have played in this affair cannot be stated with certainty, but the occasion served to provide a pretext for one of a series of statutes forbidding secret assemblies and unlawful associations. Each new enactment weighed more heavily upon the craftsmen until the trend of adverse legislation culminated in 1425 in a law which, among other things, decreed:
"Whereas by the yearly Congregations and Confederacies made by the Masons in their general Chapiters assembled the good course and effect of the Statute of Labourers be openly, violated and broken in subversion of the law, and to the great damage of all the Commons: our said Lord the King, willing in this case to provide Remedy, by the advice an consent aforesaid, and at the special Request of the said Commons, hath ordained and established that such Chapiters and Congregations shall not be hereafter holden; and if any such be made, that they cause such Chapiters and Congregations to be holden, if they be thereof convict, shall be judged for felons; and that all the other Masons that come to such Chapiters and Congregations be punished by Imprisonment of their Bodies, and make Fine and Ransom at the King's Will."
Thus it became a crime, punishable by death, to summon the Craft to an annual assembly and a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment, to attend one when so summoned. The obvious purpose was to prevent working men engaged in the mechanical trades from meeting in conventions at which grievances might be aired and steps might be taken to procure a betterment in wages. It apparently did not interfere with local and independent lodges in their ordinary concerns, but it effectively acted to hinder systematic co-operation of the various lodges through their duly accredited representatives; to hinder it, moreover, at a time when the need for federation was most imperative. It was a blow aimed at the whole guild system and the fact that masons were singled out is fair evidence that the civil authorities regarded the workers in the mason handicrafts as particularly likely, from the nature of their work, to be drawn together into a compact and powerful organization.
Meanwhile other hostile forces were at work. The period at which the Craft then had arrived was one of economic instability. For almost half a century Europe had been plunged into the desperate but desultory series of military adventures which is known as the Hundred Years' War. Nation after nation was drawn into the struggle and at one time or other almost every country had been bled white to provide fighting men for the armies, or had been plundered, harassed and ravaged by invading bands. When the countries were not fighting each other, they were fighting among themselves. The death of a king was usually the pretext for a dynastic struggle; often ambitious pretenders did not wait for a royal death before essaying to win a crown by the edge of the sword. England and Scotland did not escape the dreadful turmoil; when the re not recruiting soldiers for foreign fields they were impressing simple artisans and peasants into additional battalions to carry on the national passion for internecine strife.
The religious ardor which had once set men to building churches and abbeys had begun to find a new and less gentle outlet. The inevitable reaction which led to the Protestant Reformation was already in full swing. Bold individuals everywhere were questioning the credentials of a Church which pretended to temporal as well as to spiritual supremacy over the universe; which had erected upon the simple teachings of the Nazarene an ecclesiastical system that demanded surrender to its control of the national will as well of the individual conscience, and assumed with equal arrogance to grant or withhold Paradise, in the case of a particular sinner, and to grant or withhold a crown, in the case of a claimant to a throne. The Church responded to every challenge of its authority with the arguments of material force, with steel, fire and fagot with slaughter, persecution and confiscation. Albigenses in France, Lollards in England, questioners everywhere, were hunted to the death; it was regarded as a deed of merit to plunge a sword into the heart of a heretic, though he might be but a babbling old man, whose offense had been to doubt the infallible truth of some dogma.
Small wonder that the building of churches languished! By this time Gothic architecture had entered its final stages, in England reaching the phase sometimes known as the Perpendicular. The great time for building private homes of stone and brick had not yet come. Such ecclesiastical building as was still under way was in the hands of the principal religious guilds. Although these were constant employers of operative masons - who, in the earlier centuries, were stanch Catholics to a man - and worked with them in the greatest harmony, their own days of affluence were numbered. When the English orders lined up with the Papacy in its quarrels with Henry VIII, they signed their own death warrant, so far as England was concerned.
Henry, with one imperial gesture, closed abbeys and monasteries, confiscating their wealth and declaring their lands forfeit to the Crown. This served a double purpose, for it not only removed a dangerous enemy, but it also replenished a royal treasury sorely in need of funds. Later all fraternities, brotherhoods and religious guilds were placed under a ban of outlawry.
The Muse of History may have enjoyed many a sardonic smile in contemplating the fact that the Reformation gave to Freemasonry a blow which came near being the death of it. Coming as it did upon other ills of a period of decline, that great moral revolution deprived Operative Masonry of its last important source of material nutriment; although it lingered on, it was condemned to steady deterioration. Not only were its chief employers impoverished, but its chief art also fell into disrepute. It had thrived by building great and beautiful temples and lavishing upon them all the adornments the ingenuity of man could devise. But these temples stood in the minds of reforming zealots as representative of all they most feared and hated. Stained glass, marble carvings, statues, vaulted arches, choirs, altar decorations and the vestments of priests and acolytes were anathematized as so many survivals of Romish "Idolatry."
Artisans are peculiarly susceptible to changes popular tastes. The fashion of bobbed hair in recent months has meant loss of employment to numerous makers of hair nets in China; the discovery of substitute fuels has brought problems of the utmost gravity to the coal industry of the world. So it was with the operative masons. With a major field of labor close to them, they could expect to gain a livelihood on through the requirements of local communities an these were not extensive enough to support a considerable number of toilers. In consequence there was a rapid defection of active workers. To this the growing unpopularity of the guild system and the danger of associating with a society which was under the suspicion of the authorities no doubt contributed.
Yet there was still a remnant which did not bow unto Baal. In many a town and borough and hamlet of England and Scotland the brethren continued to keep their lodges going; continued to cherish their ancient customs and to ponder over their ancient manuscripts. There was something in Masonry which could not die, and therefore it did not die. To comprehend this phenomenon it is necessary to recall once more that it was more than a mere guild of craftsmen; it was also a cult with a mystical background and a moral program. Both background and program had been conceived in the spirit and preserved in the language of a mechanic art, but they were universal none the less. As the practical advantages of association waned, it was natural to expect the philosophical ones to increase, fostered as they were by the machinery which the lodge itself afforded for social intercourse. An important factor in this development was the practice of admitting non-operatives to membership, a practice which increased more and more in the later centuries.
That it began, in the prosperous times of the guilds, by the admission of clerics, mathematicians and others especially interested in the craft has already appeared. Its expansion in later days is disclosed by the few fugitive records and minutes that have been preserved. Of these the minutes of Scottish lodges are oldest and it is of importance to notice that the oldest Scottish minutes record the practice as a matter of course. Murray Lyon in his History of the Lodge of Edinburgh remarks that in 1598, William Schaw, who in all probability was a non-operative, was described as Master of the Work and Warden of the Masons. That lodge was then made up in the main of operatives, and the Scotch Constitutions prepared by Schaw were obviously intended for the government of operatives. Furthermore, it is indicated that Schaw's own predecessor was a nobleman; the wardenship over Masons in Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine was held by another non- operative, the Laird of Udaught. From these accounts it appears that distinguished patrons not only were accepted as members of the Craft but also that they were chosen for administrative posts of the highest importance.
These outsiders were sometimes known as "Gentlemen Masons," sometimes as "Theoretical Masons," sometimes as "Geomatic Masons," and sometimes by other titles. In July of 1634 the Lodge of Edinburgh admitted as Fellowcrafts three gentlemen, Lord Alexander, Viscount Canada, his brother, Sir Anthony Alexander, and Sir Alexander Strachan. Subsequent records indicate that these afterwards assisted at the "making" of other Masons. In 1637 David Ramsay, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, was admitted and in the following year admission was granted to Henry Alexander, son of the Earl of Stirling. In 1640 General Alexander Hamilton was accepted and in 1667 Sir Patrick Hume received the same honor. In 1670 the Right Honorable William Murray and two members of the Bar, Walter Pringle and Sir John Harper were admitted.
In England the same custom was followed by some of the lodges, if not by all. An obscure note in the records of the Mason's Company of London suggests that it may have been a practice of that body for a considerable length of time, although the matter is by no means certain. That organization was incorporated in the years 1410-1411 and received a coat of arms in 1472 or 1473, but records of the city show that as an unincorporated guild it was in existence as early as the year 1356, when rules were formed for its guidance. In 1530 its name was changed to "The Company of Freemasons." Associated with it was an organization known as "The Accepcon," or "The Acception," which, met in the same hall and seems to have been subordinate to the Company. Edward Conder in his Hole Crafte and Fellowship of Masons remarks that an account book of The Acception shows that in 1619 payments made by newly made Masons were paid into the funds of the Company, and that in case of deficits in banquet expenses of The Acception, the money to meet them was paid out of the Company's treasury.
If this is correct it indicates: (1) that The Acception collected money from newly made Masons; (2) that it gave banquets to newly made Masons; (3) that its financial affairs were strictly supervised by the Mason's Company. Now the Mason's Company was an operative organization, and surely there is nothing far- fetched in supposing - especially in view of the significant title of the subordinate body - that The Acception was made up of a group of non-operative, or honorary, members. Moreover, that hypothesis is strongly ported by the testimony of the first distinguished non- operative known to have been accepted by an operative English lodge.
This was none other than Elias Ashmole, one of the most eminent of the scientists, philosophers and antiquarians of his day. Ashmole was a man of prodigious energy and catholic interests. He appears to have dipped into most of the activities of the strenuous times which he lived. He was born in 1617 at Lichfield and was educated for the practice of law. When the Great Rebellion came along, he took up arms, with the of Captain. He was a student of botany, chemistry and what passed for physics in those times, with a string leaning toward occultism and especially the cults of alchemy and astrology. He was an inveterate collector of curious objects of antiquarian interest, and his collection is preserved at Oxford University, where is known as the Ashmolean Museum. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, received the degree of Doctor of Medicine and was made a Windsor Herald. His diary was published in 1717 and from it certain important extracts relating to Freemasonry have been culled. The following entry appeared in the diary for 1646:
Oct. 16th - 4:30 p.m. - I was made a Free Mason a Warrington in Lancashire, with Coll: Henry Mainwaring of Kanincham in Cheshire. The names of those that were of the Lodge; Mr. Rich Penket Warden Jr., James Collier, Mr. Rich Sankey, Henry Littler, John Ellam, Rich; Ellam and Hugh Brewer."
In the diary for March, 1682, or thirty-six years later, appeared the following entry:
10th - About 5 p.m. I recd. a Sumons to appe. at a Lodge to be held the next day at Mason's Hall London.
11th - Accordingly I went, and about Noone were admitted into the Fellowship of Free Masons.
Sr. William Wilson Knight, Capt. Rich; Borthwick, M Will: Woodman, Mr. Win. Grey, Mr. Samuel Taylour, and Mr. William Wise.
I was the Senior Fellow among them (it being 35 years since I was admitted). There were present beside my se the Fellows after named.
Mr. Tho: Wise Mr of the Masons Company this present yeare. Mr Thomas Shorthose, Mr. Thomas Shadbolt Waindsford Esqr., Mr. Nich: Young, Mr. John Shorthose Mr. William Hamon, Mr. John Thompson, and Mr. Will Stanton.
Wee all dyned at the halfe moone Taverne in Cheapside at a Noble Dinner, prepaired at the Charge of the New accepted Masons."
In endeavoring to arrive at a conclusion as to whether the acceptance of non-operatives was a general practice the operative bodies, it is important by way of recapitulation to bear certain dates in mind. It is clear that at the time to which the oldest Scottish minutes can be traced) a non-operative was a Master of the Work and Warden of the lodge at Edinburgh and that his predecessor also had been a non-operative. It is clear also that non-operatives were made Masons in various Scottish lodges down to the beginning of the of the first Grand Lodge. It is furthermore clear at the London Company had a subordinate society known as The Acception in 1619; and that sixty-three years later, non-operatives were made Masons in the halI of that Company with its Master in attendance.
But the custom was not confined to London and Edinburgh. Ashmole was made a Mason in Lancashire. And there is additional testimony to the same effect, this time from a non-Mason who was not friendly to the institution. In his Natural History of a Staffordshire (1686) Dr. Robert Plot wrote:
To these add the Customs relating to the County, whereof they have one, of admitting Men into the Society of Freemasons, that in the moorelands of this County seems to be of greater request, than anywhere else, though I find the Custom spread more or less all over the Nation; for here I found persons of the most eminent quality, that did not disdain to be of this Fellowship. Nor indeed need they, were it of that Antiquity and honor, that is pretended in a large parchment volum they have amongst them, containing the History and Rules of the craft of masonry.
Into which Society when they are admitted, they call a meeting (or Lodge as they term it in some places), which must consist of at lest 5 or 6 of the Ancients of the Order, when the candidate present with gloves, and so likewise to their wives, and entertain with a collation according to the Custom of the place: This ended, they proceed to the admission of them, which chiefly consists in the communication of certain secret signes, whereby they are known to one another all over the Nation, by which means they have maintenance whither ever they travel: for if any man appear though altoger unknown that can show any of these signes to a Fellow of the Society, whom they otherwise call an accepted mason, he is obliged promptly to come to him, from what company or place soever he be in, nay, tho' from the top of a Steeple (what hazard or inconvenience soever he run) to know his pleasure and assist him; viz., if he want work he is bound to find him some; or if he cannot doe that, to give him mony or otherwise support him till work can be had; which is one of their Articles.
The society of which Dr. Plot was writing was undoubtedly an association of operative masons, but it was one to which "persons of the most eminent quality" did not disdain to belong. Ashmole was certainly eminent, as was also his friend and father-in-law, Sir William Dugdale, who was likewise an antiquarian, and Sir Christopher Wren, the architect. That Dugdale was a Mason is not established, but he undoubtedly had intimate knowledge of the institution and is known to have discussed its practices and origin. Whether Wren was accepted into the fraternity is a subject of much debate, Robert Freke Gould having strongly supported the negative. But John Aubrey, antiquarian and author, left a memorandum saying Sir Christopher was "adopted a brother" at a convention of Masons at St. Paul's Church on May 18, 1691. The Postboy, a London publication, in a contemporaneous account of his death described him as "that worthy Freemason." F. De P. Castells in an essay in the Transactions of the Author's Lodge records an excerpt from the minutes of the Lodge of Antiquity, dated June 3, 1723, which says: "The set of Mahogany Candlesticks presented to this Lodge by its worthy old Master, Sir Christopher Wren, ordered to be carefully deposited in a wooden case lin'd with cloth to be Immediately purchased for the purpose."
That at the two Bacons, Roger and Sir Francis, were Masons has long been a legend both believed and disputed, although there is no reliable evidence either way. A discussion of this question belongs properly to the obscure and troublesome problem of the Rosicrucians and kindred occult societies. Much more has been said about it than can be proved, and in the present work it can be noticed only in passing.
There can be little doubt that during the Middle Ages more than one society was devoted to the pursuit of studies which were forbidden by Church and State. Kabbalism, astrology, alchemy, and various mystical philosophies were ticklish things to deal with in an age which believed in witchcraft and sorcery and which, in a heated moment, was likely to lay hold upon a sorcerer and burn him to death. Now and then men engaged in these occult concerns united themselves for the purpose of carrying on correspondence and transmitting their discoveries. They were the scientists of their day, and to their labors may be traced the beginnings of modern chemistry, physics and astronomy. Of all the associations into which the Alchemistical Philosophers or Hermetic Philosophers, as they are variously called, formed themselves, the most considerable appears to have been the Rosicrucian. Whether that body was more than a shadow organization is far from certain, but, at any rate, it afforded a cover sufficient for the purpose and many learned men called themselves Rosicrucians in their books and other writings.
The supposition that a considerable number of them also became Freemasons is only supposition. There are survivals in the modem Masonic ritual which strongly suggest hermetic influence, and not a few students have believed that it is through this channel some of the Fraternity's oldest cult survivals ought to be traced. Albert Pike was inclined to suspect that Ashmole became interested in Freemasonry because he was particularly concerned with hermetic philosophy and believed that the secrets of the society would throw light upon his hobby. Others have hinted that Ashmole's acceptance in itself forged a connecting link between Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.
It is entirely possible that more than one distinguished Englishman who dabbled in occultism dabbled also in Freemasonry. Indeed, it would be rather curious if, after making the acquaintance of the one, they had not investigated the other. Men in an age of mental tyranny searching for a medium through which they might be able to find liberty for philosophical thought and the safe interchange of ideas might well hope to find it behind the tyled door of a Masonic lodge. It is reasonably certain that many scholars who entered the Fraternity in the eighteenth century did so for the freedom they expected to find there. But the whole matter is so befogged in doubt, uncertainty, hypothesis and speculation that it scarcely belongs to the realm of Masonic history, strictly so called.
At all events, the structure of Operative Masonry had altered by imperceptible stages between the days of Richard II and those of James II. At the time of the Revolution of 1688, the camel which had got its nose through a flap of the tent in 1390 had managed to get almost its whole body inside. In other words, the non- operatives were rapidly driving the operatives into a small corner of what had once been their own domicile. But the tent itself was still. a good one, offering refuge to new purposes in need of just such shelter. The final stage of transition was to take place in the thirty odd years which intervened between the time when Dr. Plot wrote the spirited paragraphs recently quoted and the beginning of the Grand Lodge era in 1717.
By then the operative art itself had become little more than a memory. The old lodges were collections of individuals who met occasionally because they had been in the habit of meeting. Their rosters contained the names of many who had never earned blisters to their hands by wielding setting maul or chisel. Many had already closed their doors for the last time. The Old Manuscripts were still treasured, but they had become too worn and too precious to be handled except upon occasions of state. Such craftsmanship as was actually performed was but a shadow of that which had once given vitality to the brotherhood. Tools and implements of architecture were still employed, but more as symbols for the inculcation of moral lessons than as instruments of labor. Now and then, on some St. John's day, there might be a banquet and assembly of a given lodge, but as a going concern the institution was moribund. Thus the curtain of history falls, at the end of an act, upon a scene of deterioration and decay, only to rise again upon a new scene - this time of health and prosperity.
THE movement which culminated in the formation of a Grand Lodge in London in the year 1717 was part of a revival of drooping spirits which at that time was bringing a new sense of security to all England. It was an era of conviviality and gayety, long overdue. For the first time in a generation the specter of civil war appeared to have been completely exorcised, and although Jacobite plotters against the security of the Hanoverian dynasty were still busy at their conspiracies in Paris, even making use of Freemasonry to further their ends, the utter futility of their last military venture was so fresh in the popular mind that none except the blindest partisans of the House of Stuart believed they would ever again be able to summon formidable force to the field of battle.
Many stirring events had taken place since that day when worthy Elias Ashmole and his trusty brethren had sat at the making of Masons in London. King James II had been chased from his throne; sturdy and dour, William of Orange had come, had fought, had worn the crown and passed to his eternal reward; Queen Anne had succeeded to him and in turn had passed away in the political turmoil which assured a Hanoverian succession; the first of the Georges had become king; union had been brought about between England and Scotland and, finally, the Jacobite rising of 1715 had subsided at Preston and Sheriffmuir, an waggish bards were still singing with gusto of the fight where -
There's some say that we wan,
And some say that they wan,
And some say that none wan at a', man!
But ae thing I'm sure,
That at Sheriffmuir
A battle there was that I saw, man!
And we ran and they ran
And they ran and we ran,
And we ran and they ran awa', man!
Finally, and as a culminating reason for the English sense of security, old Louis XIV, ablest, subtlest an most ambitious monarch of his century, had just passe away in France. Continental Europe was so busy with trouble of its own that France was ready to form alliance with England for the naval protection of the both against the ambitions of Spain, an alliance which by the way, was to mark that ultimate maritime advance by which Britannia was truly and fully to rule the waves.
Busy days they were, too, as well as stirring, for London was a cauldron of politics, Whig and Tory striving with every resource which ingenious and not too scrupulous politicians could devise to gain or retain supremacy. Pamphleteers, satirists, ballad makers, literary geniuses and literary hacks waged incessant strife with the written or printed word. Gossip, scandal and intrigue filled the air. To pen an effective lampoon, however scurrilous or inaccurate, was to achieve for an author acclaim as a wit; reputations were made and unmade by the wagging of a head.
There were no newspapers worthy of the name in its modern sense, and for a man to be conversant with what was going on it. was necessary for him to frequent places where the gossip of the hour would be served to suit his taste. It might be the salon of some lady of fashion; it might be around the gaming table or at an athletic field; it most commonly would be at some tavern where birds of a feather observed their immemorial privilege of flocking together. Thus it was always possible to combine business and pleasure and not infrequently the pleasure proved more important than the business.
A phenomenon of the times was the growth of social clubs. An astonishing number of them sprang up in London. Almost any pretext would serve for the organization of a new one. A person with a long nose would observe others of like facial peculiarities and they would hunt kindred physiognomies and create a club. Musicians, actors, scribblers, literary folk, mountebanks, clerks, individuals of every rank and degree, congregated according to their respective interests. Some of these organizations were serious and devoted to the improvement of the members, but a considerable number appear to have been mere cloaks for the indulgence of appetite. It was a time of hearty eating and heavy drinking and many a man's consequence among his fellows was marked by the number of bottles of wine he could consume before failing insensible beneath the table.
That the Masonic societies of London were not of this ephemeral and purely convivial type the evidence conclusively shows. Possibly it was due to a specific intention to preserve the brethren from the extravagances of the hour that strict care was taken to see that steady heads supervised them in their hours of relaxation and to see that means of refreshment were not perverted to excess and intemperance. Moreover, the Masonic societies had been in existence before this new clubdom came into being. It is altogether likely, however, that they were greatly influenced by the habits of the period and that they in turn influenced other societies. It is at least certain that their esoteric character subjected them to the liveliest curiosity; there was much speculation as to the nature of their "secrets"; and at least one club was formed for the purpose of ridiculing and caricaturing them.
How many lodges there were in the metropolis at that time is not certain; there were certainly four and there may have been others. These were undoubtedly remnants of old operative lodges, but apparently much. reduced in circumstances. As was the case with all such bodies in England and Scotland, they were autonomous, each existing as from time immemorial, with exclusive right to determine the qualifications of its members, acknowledging no superior Masonic authority, yet holding allegiance to the ancient customs and venerating the Old Charges.
Whatever had been the nature of the assemblies held in earlier times, they had by then ceased entirely. An individual lodge might meet for its own purposes, but it was under no compulsion to assemble at the behest of anybody outside its membership, or that of a sister lodge. Strictly speaking, there was no such thing even then as a general fraternity of Freemasons; there were lodges of Freemasons and they may have interchanged courtesies and observed relatively identical practices, but each was sovereign and independent in its own right; some of those which boasted of immemorial existence exercised the privilege of constituting new lodges when occasion demanded and opportunity served.
That there were more societies in London than the now famous "Four Old Lodges" and that they had some kind of connection with one another is indicated by William Preston in his Illustrations of Masonry. But Preston's accuracy has been impeached on so many grounds it is unsafe to accept without further proof his statements in this regard; it is therefore necessary to record that they have not as yet been substantiated by dependable corroborative testimony. According to him several lodges were organized in the city after the great London fire and Sir Christopher Wren acted as a Grand Master for them all.
At all events, the brethren of at least the Four Old Lodges decided in the year 1716 that they needed better co-operation with one another than they had enjoyed in the past. As was the custom of the times, these societies were in the habit of meeting at certain taverns - one at the Goose and Gridiron Alehouse in St. Paul's Churchyard, one at the Crown Alehouse in Parker's Lane near Drury Lane, one at the Apple Tree Tavern in Charles Street, Covent Garden, and one at the Rummer and Grapes Tavern in Channel Row, Westminster.
Just how the matter started is not known; Dr. Anderson, who gives the earliest account of it, unfortunately was not gifted with a true journalistic sense. Otherwise he would have tried to ascertain who first broached the suggestion, how it was received, how it was discussed and how the enterprise was set in motion. It appears, however, that on a day in the year 1716, representatives of the Four met at the Apple Tree Tavern. Then, having called to the Chair the oldest Master Mason present who was Master of a lodge they resolved to constitute themselves into "a Grand Lodge pro tempore." Anderson says this was done in due form, although what that due form could have been the worthy doctor does not indicate.
Among other things the assembly voted to hold four quarterly communications (Anderson says to "revive" them) of the officers of the lodges, to be known as the Grand Lodge. They also decided to hold an annual assembly (Anderson says "the" annual assembly) and feast, thereat to choose a Grand Master from among their own number, and to continue this practice until they should "have the honour of a Noble Brother at their head."
This was done, apparently with considerable pomp and ceremony on the feast day of St. John the Baptist in the following year - June 24, 1717. This epoch-making event in the history of Freemasonry took place at the Goose and Gridiron Alehouse. As before, the oldest Master of a Lodge then present was called to the chair. A list of available candidates was present and from the number the assemblage, by a show o hands, chose Anthony Sayer, gentleman, to be the first Grand Master of Masons. Jacob Lamball, a carpenter, and Captain Joseph Elliot were chosen Grand Wardens. The Grand Master was then invested with a badge of office, presented to him with ceremony by the presiding oldest Master, and was declared duly installed, receiving thereupon the homage due his exalted station. After that the assemblage went to dinner.
Although various ancient dignitaries are said in the legends to have been Grand Masters, authentic history must accord to Anthony Sayer the honor of being the first man to whom that title could be properly applied, its modern sense at least. Even to him, the distinction was at the moment a somewhat doubtful one. He was Grand Master of Masons by suffrage of representatives of four London lodges. Other lodges in other parts of England and Scotland had nothing whatever to do with his selection. To most of them his titles and pretensions must have seemed the fruits of usurpation and innovation. Such authority as he had was that which the constituent lodges could confer upon him. Other lodges and other brethren might, if they chose, hold aloof. Many of them did so; some of them in fact set up rival institutions and nominated rival Grand Masters. Nevertheless, the Grand Mastership then created continued to exist as by prescriptive right against all deniers and contenders and finally, after years of struggle, hardship and compromise, became established as the fount and origin from which all regular Freemasonry has since derived sustenance.
Unless they were endued with prescience of an unaccountably high order, it is scarcely probable that the brethren who went so gayly to dinner in the Goose and Gridiron Tavern on that day in 1717 had more than the vaguest notion of what they had done. It is evident from subsequent events that the worthy Mr. Sayer had not the faintest conception of what it meant. A few good-natured and well- intentioned individuals had simply adopted an expedient which seemed advisable for their immediate purposes. That expedient was like a dam thrown across the brook of Operative Masonry - a tiny stream for all that it trickled through a chasm of centuries - destined to raise it into a mighty reservoir which should afterwards send its waters to the remotest corners of the earth. As yet, however, no man could have foreseen all the consequences which were to flow from that particular act.
From the imperfect glimpses which history has permitted, it appears likely that the first Grand Master was chosen because he was a rather amiable old gentleman of considerable influence among the operatives of the Four Old Lodges. Apparently he was not a man of considerable intellectual ability. Either he did not comprehend to the full what his elevation meant or, if he did, he was too old-fashioned and conservative in his ways to keep pace with the energetic men who were rapidly rising to power in the new institution. In 1718 he was succeeded by George Payne, a non-operative of marked vigor. In 1719 he was appointed Grand Warden by T. J. Desagullers, who was chosen Grand Master in that year. A few years later his personal fortunes had sunk to an ebb so low that he called upon the Grand Lodge for pecuniary assistance.
At some time in those days of decline he appears to have become estranged from the new association and to have gone back to the old operative practice of instituting new lodges without proper warrant from the Grand Lodge. He was summoned to explain his conduct before that body in the year 1730. He was acquitted of a charge of practicing clandestinism, but was told that his course had been irregular and was solemnly admonished not to offend further in that regard. Three years later he was tyler of Old King's Arms Lodge No. 28 and received a charitable donation from it. He died in 1742 and was buried with Masonic honors, many distinguished members of the Fraternity attending funeral services.
The second Grand Master was of far different character. George Payne was a well-to-do man, somewhat interested in antiquities, and was of a forceful, energetic temperament. Secretary of the Tax Office and possessed of a wide acquaintance among men in public life, he had personal connections which were invaluable both to him and to the budding Fraternity. He had been Master of the lodge which met at the Rummer and Grapes and no doubt was identified with the new movement from the beginning. He appears to have been among the first to realize the possibilities of speculative development in the old operative system. These he advanced with both tact and vigor.
He and his associates appear to have understood all along that the operatives were to be placated as much as possible and to be led to accept the changes, which by now were inevitable, with a minimum of dissatisfaction and discontent. The time was soon to come when the new institution could break completely with the old, but the correct way had to be found. Accordingly, when Payne was made Grand Master in 1718, Thomas Morrice, a stone cutter, and John Cordwell, a carpenter, were made Grand Wardens. One of the first acts of the new executive was to invite the brethren to bring in any old writings and records they possessed concerning Masons and Masonry, "in order to show the usages of ancient times."
But a figure of even greater Masonic stature than that of Payne had already arisen. Some four or five years before the institution of the Grand Lodge, the Rev. John Theophilus Desaguliers had been made a Mason. Preston says that interesting event took place in the lodge which met at the Goose and Gridiron. He was a man of commanding personality, sanguine and romantic disposition, a naturalist of note and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Historians are not wholly agreed as to whether he or Payne was the leading spirit in the happenings of those early years, but there can be little doubt that the remarkable abilities of Desaguliers have left a more lasting impression on Masonic thought.
Nor is it necessary to make invidious comparisons between the two. They seem to have worked together in a manner which was productive of excellent results. Payne has come to be considered as the father of Masonic Jurisprudence; Desaguliers as the father of Masonic ritual. Payne interested influential men of affairs in the great undertaking; Desaguliers attracted those with a bent for learning and scholarship. Between them they engineered within the course of two or three years a complete transformation of English Freemasonry. When Payne retired from the Grand East at the end of 1718, Desaguliers succeeded to that station; when Desaguliers finished his term of office, Payne succeeded to it for a second time. Between them they filled the highest chair for three of the only four years in the history of the English Grand Lodge when it was not occupied by a nobleman. The Duke of Montagu ascended the Masonic throne in 1721. The Duke of Wharton succeeded him in 1722 and appointed Desaguliers his Deputy. The Duke of Dalkeith became Grand Master in 1723 and again appointed Desaguliers Deputy. By that time the craft of Speculative Freemasonry had been fairly launched, but fifteen years later George Payne and Dr. Desaguliers were still active and influential, for they took part in the action approving Anderson's New Book of Constitutions.
It was clearly apparent to Payne, when he assumed authority in 1718, that the operative system was too loose and disjointed to serve the practical needs of a compact society of the kind he and his associates had in mind. One of the first things the new Grand Lodge had done was to seize control of the machinery for creating new lodges. It had decreed that no Masons might assemble as a lodge without warrant from the Grand Lodge, although exception was made in case of the original Four Old Lodges, which were conceded to exist as of immemorial right. Straightway there arose, however, a necessity for prescribing the manner in which Masons should be made and lodges constituted. The Grand Lodge proclaimed itself a supreme tribunal, but it had no definite body of laws through which to exercise jurisprudence. Immediate codification of lawful customs and practices became imperative. To this task Grand Master Payne set himself with great earnestness. His appeal for the brethren to bring in "The Old Gothic Constitutions," was the first step in that direction. This was followed by a general request for records and minutes of operative lodges - a request which, by the way, alarmed some of the conservatives to such extent that in many cases those possessing these documents burned them rather than see them fall into the hands of the "innovators."
Payne and his associates were too wise to proceed with unnecessary precipitation. They extracted from the Old Constitutions such material as was usable and this was compiled into a set of regulations which Payne put into effect in his second term of office. These reiterated the Old Charges to a considerable extent, but with this significant difference - the language which once had been used for the guidance of a working craft in the practice of its mechanical business had taken on a symbolical meaning for the guidance of a speculative society which had no concern with a mechanical business.
Meanwhile another change of even greater importance was being made. However admirable the ritualistic observances of operative lodges may have been for the peculiar purposes of those guilds, they were far too crude and simple for the purposes of speculative lodges into which non-operatives of culture and broad understanding were being admitted. So far as anything on the subject is known, it is reasonably certain that the operative system of initiation was not graduated into a series of three degrees; or at least not into a series the successive steps of which were so sharply differentiated as they are in the modern speculative system. There are reasons for believing that there were at least a "Master's Part" and an "Apprentice Part" in the early days of Grand Lodge, but there is no authentic record a third part at that time. Robert Freke Gould was convinced after exhaustive investigation that it was not until about 1740 that the Third Degree met with general acceptance. The oldest record of a lodge working all three was made in the year 1732.
Mackey's History of Freemasonry inclines to the belief that the system of three degrees was perfected by Dr. Desaguliers, probably in the years 1720 and 1721, but that it was not practiced generally by the lodges before 1730, because those bodies preferred to cling to the old operative ritual with which they were more familiar. It is supposed that about this time the Legend of the Temple began to assume the importance it has since held, for it was not long afterwards that inquisitive brethren began inquiring into a probable sequel of that tale. Certainly there is strong ground for believing that only one initiatory ceremony was in use in the Middle Ages, since the Schaw Statutes provided that "na maister or fellow of craft be ressavit or admittit without the number of sex maisters and twa enterit prenteissis the wardene of that lodge being one of the said sex."
Regardless of how the initiatory rite may have been divided before Dr. Desaguliers gave his personal attention to the matter, there can be no doubt that his labors were followed by a revision and remodeling of the work which completely changed it to a speculative character. It is of record that the learned doctor paid a visit on August 24, 1721, to the Lodge of Edinburgh, for a conference with the "Deacon, Warden and Master Masons, " who received him after he had given satisfactory proof of his Masonic qualifications. Inasmuch as this was at a time when diligent search was being prosecuted for every scrap of Masonic information, it is a fair inference that he was seeking what light he could get on the ancient practices.
The Lodge at Edinburgh was an old one. Moreover, less than ten years before the Desaguliers, visit had been torn by a controversy over the question whether the Masters alone were entitled to give "the Mason Word" and the secrets connected with it and to receive the fees arising therefrom. The Fellows had disputed this right and this led to schism and the creation of a new lodge. The issue was submitted to arbitration and the arbiters decided that the Fellows might meet by themselves, give "the Mason Word" and receive the fees. A problem of such importance could not but concern those who were working out the destinies of Freemasonry in London.
Precisely what Dr. Desaguliers did to the ritual and with it there is no way of knowing. The likeliest hypothesis is that he took a somewhat rambling and uncertain operative system, rearranged it, reduced it to order, supplied certain deficiencies, rephrased parts of it in sonorous eighteenth-century English and preserved everything in it which was hallowed by time and associations. Probably his most important contribution lay in the field of re-interpretation, thereby investing with moral and ethical meaning many things which before had held only the practical implications of operative craftsmanship. That his function was not that of an inventor there is every reason to believe, especially when the modern ritual is compared with such survivals of the old one as have come down through the Old Manuscripts.
Meanwhile the new Grand Lodge was developing with amazing rapidity. In 1717 there had been but four old lodges to lend their support; by December of 1721 twenty lodges acknowledged allegiance. Then it had been necessary to elevate a person of little importance to its highest office. Now a duke was at the head of it. Gentlemen of learning and fashion were knocking at lodge doors for admittance. For its first three years the Grand Lodge had held its assemblies at a tavern and to these all Master Masons were invited. Now it was necessary to hold them in Stationers' Hall; they were no longer mass meetings but were conventions which each lodge was represented by its Master and Wardens.
At a Communication on September 29, 1721, the Grand Master ordered Dr. James Anderson to prepare a new digest of the charges and laws or, as a record expresses it, "His Grace's Worship and the Lodge finding Fault with all the Copies of the old Gothic Constitutions, order'd Brother James Anderson, A.M., to digest the same in a new and better method." The task was prosecuted with such vigor that on December 27 the Grand Master appointed a committee of fourteen to examine Anderson's manuscript and make report. On March 25, 1722, the committee reported it had read the manuscript, "the History, Charges, Regulations and Master's Song," and had approved it with certain alterations. This work, which was revised in 1738 and which is commonly known as Anderson's Constitutions of 1723, was in every real sense an official pronouncement of the Grand Lodge, and it remained for a long time the cornerstone of Masonic literature. Both Desaguliers and Payne had their hands in it; Desaguliers wrote an introduction and Payne's Regulations were incorporated in the text.
Following the introduction, the first part of the book is devoted to the "history" of the Craft, an account of which has been given heretofore in the present discussion. The second part is given over to "The Charges of a Free-Mason, extracted from the ancient records of Lodges beyond the Sea, and of those of England, Scotland and Ireland, for the use of the Lodges in London: to be read at the making of New Brethren, or when the Master shall order it."
The "Charges" are followed by Payne's Regulations, which composed the constitution and by-laws of the Grand Lodge. There are thirty-nine articles in all and a postscript prescribing the manner of constituting a new lodge. To this was attached a decree of approval, signed by the Grand Master, Deputy Grand Master, Grand Wardens and the Masters and Wardens of particular lodges. By way of appendix there was a Master's song, composed by Anderson - a long, desultory, rhyming narrative of the "history" of Freemasonry, divided into five parts and twenty-eight stanzas and a chorus. A Warden's song and an Enter'd 'Prentices' song were added later.
By approving this work the Grand Lodge burned all its bridges behind it. As it was doubtless intended to be, Anderson's Constitutions was the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence and the Riot Act of Speculative Freemasonry. It served notice on the world that this Grand Lodge was the sole legal heir of Operative Masonry, and, since an heir rarely comes into his inheritance before the decease of the person from whom he inherits, that Operative Masonry had definitely passed from the scene.
So far as that demise was concerned, the announcement was a trifle premature. Operative Masonry still had enough life to voice indignant protest. The book provoked an uproar in Grand Lodge itself, conservatives strongly opposing it. Some who were not so conservative objected to the manner in which the author had used Payne's Regulations. Outside the Craft Anderson's flamboyant account of Masonic history brought ridicule upon the author, as it has continued to bring ridicule upon him to this present day. It is said that he was so deeply pained by its reception that he did not appear again in Grand Lodge for eight years.
Notwithstanding all this, the Grand Lodge continued to thrive and to gain accessions. Of the original Four Old Lodges, the one which met at the Goose and Gridiron moved its headquarters several times and once or twice changed its name. In 1768 it began calling itself Antiquity Lodge No. 1. After the reunion of "Moderns" and "Antients" it was listed as Antiquity Lodge No. 2. The one which met at the Crown Tavern became extinct in 1736 and was struck off the Grand Lodge list in 1740. The one which met at the Apple Tree Tavern received a new charter in 1723. After having shifted up and down on the list, it changed its name in 1768 to Lodge of Fortitude. In 1818 it united with Cumberland Lodge, which had been organized in 1753, under the title Fortitude and Old Cumberland Lodge No. 12. The fourth Old Lodge had many vicissitudes of fortune. In the early days it had many distinguished members, including dukes, earls, counts, barons and knights and such notable Craftsmen as Payne, Desaguliers and Anderson. Its membership began to fall off in 1735, and in 1747 it was ordered erased from the lists. Four years later it was restored, but it continued to Ianguish until, in 1774, it was merged with Somerset House Lodge, a healthy and prosperous body which was able to preserve the old organization's continuity and kept its number.
IT is a maxim of correct military strategy that no army invading strange territory is safe when it leaves unreduced in its rear an enemy stronghold. However sharply invested by besiegers, such a focal point of opposition forms a constant menace, particularly threatening if things should go wrong at the front of invasion. If there are several of them in occupied territory, the slightest relaxation of vigor or vigilance upon the art of the conqueror may be the signal for an uprising of formidable proportions. Because it over-looked this contingency, or at least was unable to provide against it, the new Grand Lodge was compelled to enter into a struggle for Masonic supremacy which covered practically the whole of its first century, and from which it emerged half victorious and half vanquished.
Speculative Masonry was in a real sense an invasion of territory which Operative Masonry had occupied from time immemorial. It was not invited into that field by general suffrage of the operative bodies. By no stretch of the imagination could the Four Old Lodges of London claim power of attorney to act for the whole Craft, to sign away, devise or bequeath the rights of sister lodges. When the Grand Lodge in 1717 drew up a decree forbidding Masons to assemble as Lodges without its express license, it arrogated to itself an empery which it could hope to maintain only by the law of adverse possession and by the exercise of such moral and spiritual forces as it could bring to bear against any and every contender. Conceivably, what it had done others might do, and it would be required to look to its own defenses whenever its authority should be challenged.
It began, however, with great advantages. The four, original constituent lodges were situated at the capita of the nation. They were united for a common purpose and thus formed the strongest Masonic unit then in existence. They left the door wide open for other lodges to enter, whenever they might choose to do so. There was, to be sure, an admittance fee to be paid at the gate. This was nothing less than formal surrender of sovereignty to the Grand Lodge, by the terms of which the petitioning body should acknowledge itself as forever afterwards existing by means of the Grand Lodge's warrant. But of far greater importance was the fact that the Grand Lodge could create at the most considerable center of population and influence in the Kingdom as many new lodges as it pleased - create them, too, at a time when the popularity of the institution was so great that throngs of eager applicants were forever besieging its portals. By the simple expedient of refusing to regard "regular" all lodges which refused to conform, and thereby stamping their members with the stigma of clandestinism, the new organization clothed itself in armor of steel. Having seized sovereign power, it invited all Masons to submit thereto, but the invitation was such as dictators habitually extend, since unpleasant consequences were in store for all who refused to accept.
The first Grand Lodge was the creature of the Four Old Lodges, but once created it in turn became creator. All regular Grand Lodges since that time have come into existence in much the same way. Stripped to essentials, a Grand Lodge is simply a piece of machinery whereby the will of its constituent lodges is expressed. Having brought it into being, those bodies voluntarily accept its authority and acknowledge its sovereignty. That surrender once made is irrevocable without the Grand Lodge's consent - a consent which, by the way, is usually given only for the purpose of allowing a member lodge to help establish a new Grand Lodge. Henceforth each constituent lodge, whatever may have been its previous character or the nature of antecedent allegiances, continues to exist only by virtue of the charter or dispensation it has received in return for its surrender. New lodges, of course, come into existence only by its fiat and are its creatures from the beginning. This is now a self-perpetuating system which has worked admirably in practice, but in the first quarter of the eighteenth century it was a hitherto untried experiment.
The position of the Grand Lodge in the years 1717-23 was somewhat analogous to that of a revolutionary junta which has seized the capital of a nation, run up its flag and invited the whole country to come in or be shot. In this case, a very important section of the country welcomed the enterprise as giving promise of a stable and satisfactory government where all before had been anarchy and confusion. But there were those who preferred the confusion of the old regime to the orderliness of the new. Some of these made a grudging, half-hearted submission which permitted them to enter the new organization and at the same time to maintain within it a faction of opposition and dissent. Still others refused to have anything whatever to do with it. A few of both classes waited in sullen silence until they might have opportunity to raise under aggressive leadership the standard of counter- revolution.
It was not possible for the prime movers to iron out all such difficulties as they went along. The best they could do was to trust to the counsels of expediency, feeling their way forward almost from day to day, strengthening themselves as opportunity served. When they encountered an obstacle they could not remove they simply went around it. Of all obstacles the chief one was that innate conservatism, that hostility change, which has always been one of the most striking characteristics of Freemasonry.
The student who would get a true sense of what the movement involved must bear that conservatism always in mind and, furthermore, must remember that Operative Masonry was very largely in the keeping of Britons of the mechanical trades, traditionally stubborn and tenacious in respect of old privileges and rights. The whole trend of the movement itself was toward taking control of the institution out of their hands and giving it over to an aristocracy of birth and learning. Moreover, in furtherance of that tendency it was proposed to make radical alterations in the body of Masonry itself - such alterations were, in fact necessary if the basis was to be shifted from its operative to its philosophical phases and if it was to be converted into a social organization for the amusement and instruction of persons of culture. Although it was never intended to do more than rearrange old customs to make them adaptable to new purposes, a certain amount of innovation was inescapable. Since every innovation was certain to encounter resistance, the task the reformers had. set themselves was bound in the nature of things to be exceedingly difficult.
So it proved in the event . They began by making full allowance for the tender susceptibilities of the elder operative brethren. It was perhaps this that led them to the choice of Anthony Sayer for the first Grand Master, and to the selection of operatives, or at least of mechanics, for the early Grand Wardens. From the difficulties in which Sayer ultimately involved himself it is apparent that even he was but a half-hearted convert. Only a few years after the Grand Lodge had claimed exclusive authority for constituting new lodges, Sayer was found disregarding that fundamental law of modern Masonry to such extent that he was summoned to appear and make satisfactory amends for contumacy. If Sayer, who had been honored with the Grand Mastership, was so careless of Grand Lodge discipline, it may be assumed that others were even more contemptuous of it.
Maintaining discipline was indeed the hardest task with which the new body was confronted. How hard was it is shown by the remarkable course which the Duke of Wharton pursued in obtaining the Grand Mastership. Montagu had been so successful in his administration in 1721 that the more influential brethren wished to keep him in office for the ensuing year. Accordingly the annual feast at which a new choice was to be made was postponed. But Wharton, recently made a Mason, although not a Master of a Lodge, summoned a number of Masons to meet him at Stationers' Hall on June 24, 1722. No Grand Officers were there, so this group called upon the oldest Master Mason present to preside. Wharton was then declared elected Grand Master of Masons.
These proceedings were so grossly irregular that many distinguished brethren refused to have anything to do with the pretensions of Wharton. Nevertheless Montagu, wishing to preserve peace at any price, summoned the Grand Lodge to meet on January 17, 1723, when Wharton, after he had promised to be "true and faithful" was "proclaimed" Grand Master in proper form. The Earl of Dalkeith was formally elected Grand Master on April 25 and was proclaimed on June 24, 1723.
By this time the Grand Lodge had been strengthened by the adherence of not fewer than twenty-five lodges, since that number sent representatives to the January convocation. Others there were, however, which not only refused to acknowledge its authority but actually flouted it. At least one of these set itself up in 1725 as a Grand Lodge in its own right, with full power to license and constitute new lodges. This was an immemorial body which sat at York; an account of its action will appear more fully in another part of the present narrative.
After the election of Montagu, no further attempt to have been made to curry favor with operative brethren by appointing them to high office. Indeed the institution was rapidly becoming an aristocratic one in personnel as well as in ideals, and it felt itself strong enough to go forward on the new course it had marked out for itself. That was the year in which Anderson prepared the first draft of his Constitutions and in which Desaguliers was busiest at his revision of the ritual. The reception which Anderson's manuscript met was a stormy one - so stormy, in fact, that after receiving it the Grand Lodge seems to have been in no great rush to print and circulate it. When finally it should appear in its 1738 form, it was to precipitate a greater conflict which for long had been impending.
Whatever it was that Desaguliers, did to the ritual, there can be no doubt that the changes then proposed were so drastic that a majority of the lodges was inclined to hold aloof from them. Although they may have been exemplified in Grand Lodge itself - especially that part of them which comprised the Third Degree - they do not seem to have been in common practice in the lodge rooms for some eight or ten years. Nevertheless they must have been widely discussed. Freemasonry had become so popular in London that all sorts of men wished to identify themselves with it. Those who could not get in by the door were strongly disposed to slip in, if they could, by the window. Numerous clandestine lodges were formed; there were "exposures" of the secret work and one book, called Masonry Dissected, purported to disclose all the secret work. It has been suggested that the revelations of this publication were so near the truth that Grand Lodge took alarm and hastened to change the ritual on that account. How much plausibility can be attached to that theory it is now impossible to say. Certainly there were alterations in the method of installing the Worshipful Master; the Third Degree was rearranged; the symbolical preparation of candidates was modified, there were transfers of parts between the First degree and the Second and operative practices were submitted to a general overhauling and revision.
No doubt much of this remodeling was necessary, but it led to one profound disadvantage. It subjected to the charge of innovation those who had been responsible for it. Innovation is and always has been an ugly word to Masonic ears. In a world of change Freemasonry has always been proud of its stability. Its boast is that it has always remained constant to its own inner light; that its practices are hallowed by the undeviating course of the Craftsmen as they have followed one another all down through the centuries. What might be considered a trivial departure in almost any other human institution would be regarded in Masonry as shaking the very foundations upon which it is built. Upon this rock of faithful adherence to what is tried and approved it has built its house and woe unto that man or set of men who would try to pull one stone out of its assigned place in that structure!
It was very well for the new Grand Lodge to say it had not in fact brought novelty into the institution; that it had merely re- interpreted what had always been there. The country was full of elder brethren who would accept no such explanation; who would be willing to follow any leader who raised the battle cry of "No Innovation!" even though he might himself be as flagrant in innovation as those whom he condemned. That cry soon was to be raised and it was to throw the Craft into a convulsion from which it would not recover in more than a generation. In the evolution of Freemasonry changes had to come, but it was inevitable that there should be trouble in store for those through whom they came.
Scarcely had it been discovered that the symbolism of the Third Degree must be perfected to round out the complete cycle of Masonic instruction when it was also discovered that the Third Degree itself was incomplete. In simple truth, the Drama of the Third Degree left things in a state of suspension. It had to do with Something Which Was Lost and with a vague hint this something at a future time might be red. What was that something? Had it been recovered? Could it be recovered? Was the story forever to go without a sequel? Such were the questions speculative brethren asked themselves. Some of them in a way which is not at all clear found the answer in the Royal Arch Degree, which began to be practiced shortly. This practice for a long time the Grand Lodge styled "irregular," but since lodges used it without imperilling their Grand Lodge standing, the implied rebuke was not taken seriously. As for other bodies without the official fold, it is reasonable to suppose they paid little attention to a charge of "irregularity" which could only mean they had gone a little further along the road of innovation the Grand Lodge itself had pointed out to them.
A far more serious cause for dissension soon appeared. Operative Masonry for as long a period as the Old Charges could indicate had been fundamentally Christian and Trinitarian. It required of its devotees not only belief in God but also adherence to orthodox Christianity. That strict orthodoxy many of the eighteenth-century liberals who were being drawn into the Fraternity could not wholly support. Accordingly, the first paragraph of the Charges as drawn up by Anderson appeared under the caption, "Concerning God and Religion," and was as follows:
A Mason is oblig'd by his Tenure, to obey the moral Law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a Stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious Libertine. But though in ancient Times Masons were charg'd in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet 'tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves; that is, to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, by whatever Denomination or Persuasions they might be distinguish'd; whereby Masonry becomes the Center of Union, and the means of conciliating true Friendship among Persons that must have remain'd at a Perpetual Distance.
No greater or more statesmanlike thing was ever written into a Masonic document; this declaration has been the charter of Masonic liberty and tolerance whereby it could make good its claim of universality. Through it the orthodox and the heterodox, the Christian, the Jew, the Mohammedan, the Buddhist, the Confucianist, the Deist of the eighteenth century and the Fundamentalist of the twentieth have been able to unite in human service and in their common reverence for the Supreme Architect of the Universe, however various their understandings of Him may be. Anderson would deserve a place among Masonic immortals for this one paragraph alone, even if he deserved it for nothing else. Surely it must be said of him that in penning those words he caught a truer glimpse of the inner spirit of Freemasonry than he did in all the high-flown rhetoric of his legendary narrative.
So much of liberalism was nevertheless a bitter draught for the conservatism of that day to swallow. Some brethren refused it outright. The furore which arose when the document was first read in Grand Lodge soon had the whole Craft in a state of excitement. Historians who have ascribed the Great Division to it have gone perhaps further than the f acts would warrant. It gave, however, a crown to the dissent which had long existed and was still growing and which was only awaiting the right leader to flame into open defiance of the Grand Lodge. That leader was at hand in the person of Laurence Dermott.
While Masonry had been developing in England under the ‘gis of the Grand Lodge, it had been growing with almost equal popularity in other parts of the British Isles, especially in Ireland and in Scotland. Of the nature of the constitution of Irish lodges at that time there is little authentic information. It is supposed, however, that they were simple developments of the operative system, somewhat paralleling those in England, differing in minor respects as all operative lodges appear to have differed in different regions.
There was in London a considerable number of young Irishmen, many of whom had no doubt been "made" in Irish lodges. It is not unlikely that these gathered in their own Masonic organizations at the nation's capital, and some of them no doubt were drawn into bodies which looked askance at the course being pursued by the lodges operating under the direction of the Grand Lodge. Among these Irish refugees was Laurence Dermott, a painter by trade, a man of ardent and flaming spirit, possessing literary gifts of no mean order and withal a born organizer and leader of men. Dermott was born in Ireland in 1720. He was made a Mason in 1740 in Lodge No. 26 of Ireland, and was installed as its Master on June 24, 1746. Later he went to London, but he found little fellowship among the leaders of Grand Lodge Masonry, with whom he was soon to be in open conflict.
Kindred spirits there were in plenty, however, among the dissident Masons who had long looked with hostility upon the trend of Grand Lodge affairs. Some of these had already formed themselves into Masonic groups, for which they no doubt felt they had full authority under operative precedents. How numerous they were it is impossible to say, but it is on record that in 1739, the year following the publication of Anderson's revised Constitutions, Grand Lodge too cognizance of the fact that "irregular" Masons were being made, and warned the membership against intercourse with these "private" lodges.
As Henry Sadler has so convincingly stated in his Masonic Facts and Fictions, a considerable proportion of the "private" lodges was undoubtedly made up of Irish Masons, working men for the most part, painters, tailors, mechanics of various degrees, who were instinctively drawn to the old operatives and as instinctively hostile to the aristocratic tendencies then developing in Grand Lodge circles. The customs of these bodies were closely akin to those of the Irish lodges. They practiced the Royal Arch as a separate, or fourth, degree; their colors, Craft warrants, Book of Constitutions, by-laws and systems of registration differed from those used by lodges under the English Grand Lodge, and there were numerous other differences.
For the ten years after 1739 they seem to have grown slowly and without a defined purpose of setting up organized opposition to the English governing body as then constituted. They fell into a way of alluding to themselves as York Masons, probably meaning thereby to convey the idea that they were descended from that famous assembly at York in the reign of Athelstan. It is quite likely that some of the changes which had been introduced into the ritual by Grand Lodge were designed for the purpose of making it impossible for them to visit "regular" lodges. If so, this action merely crystallized their opposition while it gave them the opportunity to raise the cry, "No Innovation!"
In the year 1751 there were at least seven of these lodges in London, acknowledging allegiance to a nebulous body which they termed the Grand Committee. On July 17, 1751, they held an Assembly at the Turk's Head Tavern in Greek Street, Soho, when each Master of a subscribing lodge was authorized to grant dispensations and warrants and act as Grand Master. By this it is assumed that the Grand Committee exercised, as a collective body and by majority vote, the principal functions of a Grand Lodge. It chartered additional lodges and in 1752 Dermott was elected as its secretary. Finally, on December 5, 1753, it met and proclaimed itself The Grand Lodge of England According to the Old Institutions, with Dermott filling the important post of Grand Secretary. Thus fully organized opposition to the Grand Lodge of England had come into being.
At the outset the new body possessed advantages which the older Grand Lodge lacked. It was young, it was vigorous, it had no internal feuds, and it had a rich field of discontent to exploit. It worked four degrees instead of three and this was a lure to a degree thirsty public. It very shrewdly attacked the old Grand Lodge for its "innovations," although it had perforce to do so in a Pickwickian sense, since it, too, had made innovations, if not the same ones or to the same extent. But it cried in stentorian tones from all the house tops that the brand of Masonry it supplied was the only genuine Ancient variety; that what its rival offered was of a Modern cast. It was not the first Grand Lodge in the English field, but it was the more vociferous and more audacious in its claims. Hence, by a truly remarkable twist of affairs, adherents of the new Grand Lodge came to be known as "Antients" and the supporters of the old one had to be content with being known as the "Moderns" their opponents called them. In more dignified Masonic parlance the new Grand Body is usually referred to as the Atholl Grand Lodge, from the Dukes of Atholl - or Athol or Athole as the name is variously spelled - who served it long and notably in the Grand Master's chair.
Into the work of the new association Dermott threw himself with the zeal of a crusader. One of the early tasks he set for himself was the preparation of a hand book which should correspond to Anderson's Constitutions. This he called Ahiman Rezon -meaning Worthy Brother Secretary - with the long sub-title: or a Help to a Brother, showing the excellency of Secrecy and the first cause or motive of Freemasonry; the Principles of the Craft and the Benefits from a Strict Observance thereof, etc., also the Old and New Regulations, etc. To which is added the greatest collection of Masons' Songs, etc. By Laurence Dermott, Secretary. It was first published in 1756, and there were several later editions. The Constitutions as set forth were afterwards adopted by many other Grand Lodges, notably those of Maryland, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. In the course of his "history," Dermott paid his respects to the ritual of the rival Grand Lodge in the following sprightly manner:
"About the year 1717 some joyous companions who had passed the degree of a craft (though very rusty) resolved to form a lodge for themselves in order (by conversation) to recollect what had been formerly dictated to them, or if that should be found impracticable, to substitute something new, which might for the future pass for Masonry among themselves. At this meeting the question was asked whether any person in the assembly knew the Master's part, and being answered in the negative, it was resolved, nem. con., that the deficiency should be made up, with a new composition, and what fragments of the old order found amongst them should be immediately reformed, and made more pliable to the humours of the people."
Having been served by Robert Turner and Edward Vaughan as Grand Masters from 1753 to 1756, the Antient Grand Lodge elected the Earl of Blesington to that office in 1756. He served until 1759 when he was succeeded by the Earl of Kelly, who served until 1766. Thomas Mathew was Grand Master until 1771. John, third Duke of Atholl, was Grand Master 1771 to 1774, when he was succeeded by the fourth Duke of Atholl. From 1783 to 1791 the Earl of Antrim was Grand Master. The fourth Duke of Atholl resumed the Chair in 1791 and served until 1813, when he was succeeded, for a short space before the merging of the two Grand lodges, by the Duke of Kent.
The Antients greatly strengthened their position by obtaining Masonic recognition from the Grand Lodges of Ireland and Scotland. Their greatest strength, however, lay in their own energy. In 1753 they had approximately a dozen lodges but they doubled the number in the next four years. By 1766 sixty-four others had been enrolled and by the Union of 1813 the Atholl Grand Lodge listed 359 supporting lodges, although some of these had become inactive. Through the happy expedient of warranting movable military lodges, the Antients spread their influence wherever the British army might go. In this way Freemasonry became much more widely distributed through the American Colonies than it might otherwise have been. This practice was so successful that the Moderns in time were obliged to adopt it in self -defense.
The Antients modeled their Constitutions upon those of Ireland. The Ahiman Rezon drew heavily upon Irish Masonic literature, although its historical account paralleled that of Anderson so closely that no great discrepancies might be observed. The seals of the Antients and of the Grand Lodge of Ireland were almost identical. They used blue and gold ribbons for the seals of warrants, a practice then employed by the Grand Lodge of Ireland but not by the Moderns. They also employed the Irish system of numbering loges. A record of the Grand Committee for August 1752, discloses that the by-laws of Dermott's mother lodge No. 26 on the Irish roll, were adopted by the Antients as the correct model for Antient usage.
In the field of foreign relations, Dermott completely out-generalled the Moderns. Not only was he instrumental in obtaining Scottish recognition, but, with the powerful support of the third Duke of Atholl, he secured exclusive recognition for his own body from the Scottish Grand Lodge. Atholl was for a brief season Grand Master of both the Scottish and the Antient Grand Lodges. Then, in 1782, the Antients chose for their Grand Master the Earl of Antrim who had been Grand Master of Ireland. By a diplomatic interchange of notes it was arranged that the Irish Grand Lodge should recognize as regular only those English Masons who could produce Antient certificates. Later the English and Irish bodies rescinded these actions and assumed a neutral attitude toward the contending English factions, but meanwhile the Antients had profited immensely by the favor shown them, since it was but reasonable to expect that prospective Masons in England would prefer to cast their lot with a body which could insure for them full Masonic recognition when traveling in the sister Grand Jurisdictions.
Thus, side by side for threescore years, two Grand Lodges continued to exist in England and to struggle for supremacy in Scotland, Ireland and the Colonies. The differences between them were actually not so marked as were the resemblances. On occasion they cooperated in charitable exercises. But as time went oil and as the harmful effects of the division became increasingly apparent, a sentiment looking toward reunion began to grow. How it operated to heal the breach must be reserved for another chapter.
FAMILY feuds are more bitter than other civil wars are fought with greater passion and stubbornness than are other wars. So it was with the strife which for the greater part of a century divided English Freemasonry into two hostile camps. But time itself is a great assuager of animosities and so it proved in this case. One generation of belligerents died away, to pass an inheritance of fratricidal struggle to the second one. Meanwhile the original issues had become so confused it was not always possible for the heirs to know just why and for what they were fighting. Gradually the senselessness of the controversy began to take hold of the minds of younger leaders, and thus by imperceptible degrees a way was opened for peace.
The echoes of that conflict have now, after another hundred years, died away into an indistinct murmur. As the average schoolboy remembers in a vague way that in the War of the Roses the House of York wore a rose of one color and the House of Lancaster one of another, but is unable to say with assurance which wore the red and which the white, so now the average member of a Masonic Lodge is rarely sure whether it is of Modern or of Antient origin, and cares even less about the matter. Questions once so violently debated have for modern times but academic interest. Undoubtedly there was right and wrong on both sides of that quarrel, and but little good can be served in trying to measure the respective shares of merit and of blame. Historians have lavished a good deal of expensive white paper and printer's ink defending this side and assaulting that one. Literary heads have been broken with such hard words as "Schismatics," "Seceders," "Dissenters," "Rebels." But the treaty of peace which ended the breach was a fair and honorable one, entered into in good faith by both sides. The fact that each retained much of what it had contended for and made reasonable concessions to the other may properly be taken as evidence that neither bad a monopoly upon the justice of the causes at issue. The cement of love and affection has united both branches of Freemasonry into one band of friends and brethren among whom no further contention should arise, save that noble emulation who best can serve the common good of all mankind. In the present work it has been deemed wise to regard the cleavage as a division of English Freemasonry. In simple candor it should be said, however, that it has been ably and learnedly reasoned that it was in fact a schism, with the Antients as secessionists from the body of Modern Freemasonry. With ability and learning also it has been argued that the Antients were in truth a separate branch, springing from a body of independents who never at any time accepted the hegemony of the first Grand Lodge of Moderns. Mackey's History of Freemasonry strongly supports the one theory. Henry Sadler in Masonic Facts and Fictions, on the other hand, so brilliantly made out a case for the hypothesis that the Antient Grand Lodge was a growth from independent origins and therefore not illegal that the weight of modern criticism inclines very largely to that view. It is not a matter that can be determined with mathematical precision. Whether they were separate streams or whether one diverged from the other is of less consequence than the undeniable fact that in time they became merged into one majestic current.
The division was attended by inconveniences for both factions. Friends and neighbors who were Freemasons nevertheless found themselves estranged from one another, without always knowing precisely why. Among the rank and file of members it was not always possible to keep fires of resentment burning. Now and then brethren of Modern and Antient persuasions were unable to realize they might be incurring severe penalties by fraternizing in Masonic intercourse. Each Grand Lodge had to admonish its adherents from time to time that such complacency was unlawful.
As early as 1764 Dermott in the Ahiman Rezon observed that he cherished no animosity against the Moderns and in 1778 he expressed a wish that he might in his lifetime see a union of the two. At that time, however, the Antients were on the crest of prosperity. They were gaining accessions far more rapidly than were the Moderns, and had outmaneuvered their rivals so skillfully in the department of foreign relations that they were recognized in many parts of the English-speaking world as wielding a dominant influence in English Masonry. The peculiar genius of Dermott had done much to put them into that advantageous situation. He was far and away the best propagandist of his times, and in a period of intense controversy, his Was an art not to be despised.
Although they must have been disturbed by the progress their rivals were making, the Moderns were not as yet ready to make pacific overtures to the aggressive Antients. In 1777 their Grand Lodge issued a stern edict forbidding its supporters to have Masonic intercourse with Antients under pain of expulsion, and decreeing that no Antient should be admitted to a Modern Lodge until he had been "re-made." Some twenty years later, however, the rivals were forced to make common cause to escape the provisions of legislation intended to drive all secret societies out of the country.
By this time, moreover, the balance of authority had begun to slip toward the Moderns. Dermott having paid the usual human score and departed from this life, the Antients soon began to miss his capable leadership. Meanwhile several persons of exceptional ability had begun to make their influence felt among the Moderns, notably the Earl of Moira, an avowed protagonist of peace and reconciliation. But while Lord Moira was an ardent advocate of union, he lost no opportunity to strengthen the position of his own Grand Lodge and he managed to do this in ways that proved him capable of statesmanship of the highest order.
In 1801, Preston relates in his Illustrations, several brethren of the Modernist group were summoned before Grand Lodge to answer a charge they had served as officers in an Antient lodge. They were found guilty and were ordered forthwith to cease a practice which was declared to be highly irregular. They wished to be at peace with their own grand body, but they were reluctant to give up their new connections. They asked that operation of the sentence be suspended for three months, during which time they promised to do what they could to bring about an adjustment of the differences between the Modern and Antient lodges. This was agreed to, and Lord Moira was made member of a committee to take the thing in hand and do everything possible to further the enterprise. In effect this amounted to a rather definite proposal for union and it was of all the greater significance because it emanated from the supreme governing power of the Moderns.
The three months dragged out into two years before the committee found so many obstacles in the way of a successful prosecution of its task that it concluded to give it up for the time being. Thereupon the Modern Grand Lodge punished its recalcitrant brethren and issued a stiffer decree than ever against all Moderns who should hold Masonic intercourse with Antient Masons. Defeated in this direction, Lord Moira had by no means exhausted his resources. Indeed, in that same year, 1803, he turned the defeat to such account that he was able to begin a series of diplomatic maneuvers which was completely to reverse the existing situation in regard to foreign relations.
In November of that year, as it is related in Laurie's History of Freemasonry, Moira visited the Grand Lodge of Scotland and in a moving and tactful address reviewed the story of the Modernist - Antient dispute. He said that the Grand Lodge of England had opened its arms and its heart to the seceding brethren, but these had obstinately refused to accept reconciliation. The speech made a profound impression upon the Scottish brethren, and although at the time it was delivered the Grand Lodge of Scotland and the Antient Grand Lodge were in fraternal relations with each other, the former speedily opened correspondence with the Moderns. Presently it granted formal recognition to them as constituting the sovereign Grand Jurisdiction of England. This action was emphasized in the strongest possible manner in 1805, when the Scottish Grand Lodge elected the Prince of Wales as Grand Master and the Earl of Moira as Acting Grand Master, the positions which those distinguished Masons were then holding under the Modern Grand Lodge.
That was turning the tables upon the Antients with a vengeance, but Moira was still far from the end of his resources. In 1808 he was largely instrumental in bringing about a correspondence with the Grand Lodge of Ireland. These negotiations ended with complete recognition of the Moderns by the Irish body and thus the last important diplomatic connection of the Antients with another Grand Lodge in the British Isles was irrevocably severed. The Antients found themselves where, only a few years before, the Moderns had been - cut off from Masonic intercourse with the great body of British Freemasonry. Their position was all the more imperilled when, the Prince of Wales having ascended the throne of England, the Duke of Sussex became Grand Master of the Moderns. Sussex was a strong advocate of union and so was his brother the Duke of Kent, who was Grand Master of the Antient Grand Lodge of Canada.
Meanwhile Moira had kept patiently at his appointed task. He and the Duke of Atholl engaged in a series of friendly conversations in which it was reciprocally agreed that some way should be found to bring the two bodies together. On October 26, 1809, Moira issued a warrant constituting a special lodge which should undertake to bring about a means of union. This body met on November 21 and resolved to call itself "The Special Lodge of Promulgation." In the spring of 1810 Moira was able to report to the Modern Grand Lodge that he and the Grand Master of the Antients "were both fully of opinion that it would be an event truly desirable to consolidate under one head the two Societies of Masons that existed in this country." This report was transmitted in due form to the Antient Grand Lodge, where it was favorably received. After further discussions it was agreed to try to find a way to reconciliation. Each Grand Lodge thereupon appointed a special committee on union and on July 21, 1810, the two committees met in joint session under the presidency of Lord Moira.
Many and intricate were the problems which had to be solved, but perhaps the most important was the one which related to the Royal Arch Degree. The Antients, it will be remembered, had a system of four degrees, of which the Royal Arch was the fourth. The Moderns had a system of three degrees, but the Royal Arch had been worked by many Modern lodges as a continuation of the Third Degree. Originally this had been without official sanction of the Modern Grand Lodge, but it had grown into a sort of supplementary department, branching out into a Royal Arch Chapter and ultimately a Grand Chapter.
The Four Degree System had been of inestimable advantage to the Antients. Naturally, all other things being equal, the average candidate for Freemasonry would rather join a lodge which had four degrees than one which had only three, and no small part of the astonishing growth of the Antients can be attributed to this understandable human preference. Each organization for the better part of a century had been insisting with much heat that its system was the only true Craft Masonry, and each was still reluctant to give up its own practice for that of the other.
Then, too, there were numerous other details of procedure, which had to be adjusted. There were differences in ritual, in symbols and signs, in methods of listing lodges, in colors. It was early felt that the only feasible path to union was the way of compromise and accommodation. The leaders were wise enough, however, not to insist that all of these problems be finally solved as a condition precedent to union, preferring to hasten union as rapidly as possible and trust to mutual good will to make the necessary adjustments afterwards.
Before the end of the year 1813 conditions were highly propitious for the great change. At the head of the Modern Grand Lodge were Sussex and Moira. At the head of the Antients was Atholl, good friend of Sussex, and the Duke of Kent, brother to Sussex as well as Antient Grand Master of Canada. On November 8, 1813, Atholl resigned his Grand Mastership in favor of Kent, thereby further simplifying the situation, since one of the royal brothers was now Grand Master of the Antients and the other of the Moderns. The installation took place on December 1. The Modern Grand Master and his staff attended the ceremonies, giving further evidence of their zeal for union by consenting to be "made" Antients in a lodge especially convened for that purpose.
During all this time the Lodge of Promulgation, consisting of nine Master Masons or Past Masters from each Grand Lodge had been keeping steadily at its work of drafting a basis for agreement. It was ready to make its report, which consisted of the now famous Masonic document known as the "Articles of Union Between the Two Grand Lodges of Freemasons in England." It was signed and scaled in duplicate and at a December meeting of each body it was formally ratified. December 27 was set as the day when the union should be completed at a "Grand Assembly of Freemasons for the Union of the Two Grand Lodges of England." The important items of the agreement were to the following effect:
1. That a perpetual and irrevocable union in one Brotherhood and under one Grand Lodge should exist forever.
2. That "pure Ancient Masonry consists of three degrees and no more; viz., those of the Entered Apprentice, the including the Supreme Fellowcraft and the Master Mason, including the Supreme Order of the Holy Royal Arch. But this article is not intended to prevent any lodge or chapter from holding a meeting in any of the degrees of the Orders of Chivalry, according to the constitutions of the said Orders."
3. That there should be unity of obligations, discipline working in lodges, and clothing according to the landmarks, laws and traditions of the Craft.
4. That for the purpose of establishing uniform work and practice it "is agreed that the obligations and forms that have, from time immemorial, been established, used and practiced in the Craft shall be recognized, accepted and taken by the members of both Fraternities." For the purpose of securing uniformity it was agreed to ask the Grand Lodges of Scotland and Ireland to send accredited delegates to the forthcoming Assembly to witness the solemn engagement of the uniting brotherhoods "to abide by the true forms and obligations," so that it might be "declared, recognized and known that they all are bound by the same solemn pledge, and work under the same law."
5. That the two Grand Masters should each appoint nine Master Masons or Past Masters to meet at some convenient place where each party should open in a separate apartment a "just and perfect lodge" according to its own practices. These were to "give and receive mutually and reciprocally the obligations of both Fraternities, deciding by lot which shall take priority in giving and receiving the same." Being thus duly and equally enlightened they were to be empowered to hold a Lodge of Reconciliation or visit all lodges, instructing them fully in the joint work.
6. That as soon as the solemn declaration had been made in the presence of the witnesses from Scotland and Ireland, the general assembly should proceed to the election of a Grand Master, the brother chosen to be installed immediately and to nominate and appoint the various Grand Officers. Immediately thereafter "the Grand Incorporated Lodge" was to be opened "in ample form, under the style and title of THE UNITED GRAND LODGE OF ANCIENT FREEMASONS OF ENGLAND." Grand Officers of both bodies were to be recognized as Past Grand Officers of the United Grand Lodge; in case existing Grand Secretaries, Pursuivants and Tylers should not be reappointed, they should receive lifetime annuities out of the treasury.
7. That the United Grand Lodge should be composed of all present and past Grand Masters, present and past Deputy and Provincial Grand Masters, present and past Grand Wardens, Grand Chaplain, Grand Treasurer, Grand Secretary, Grand Sword Bearer, twelve Grand Stewards, actual Masters and Wardens of all warranted lodges, past Masters who served before the Union. Seniority of past Grand Lodge officers was to be determined by the time of their previous appointments; where two were contemporaries seniority was to be determined by lot.
8. That seniority of lodges on the combined roll be determined in the following fashion: The No. 1 lodges on each old list to draw lots, the winner taking No. 1 and the loser No. 2 on the new list. No. 2 lodge on the winner's list would then become No. 3 on the new and No. 2 on the loser's list would become No. 4 and so on, alternating throughout the rolls.
9. That upon a day appointed for installation of the new Grand Lodge officers the Articles of Union be formally ratified by affixing thereto the great seal of the United Grand Lodge, which seal was to be made out of both seals then in use and the old seals were then to be broken.
10. That the regalia of Grand Officers should be "in addition to white gloves and aprons and the respective jewels or emblems of distinction, garter blue and gold."
11. That Grand Lodge quarterly communications be held on the first Wednesdays of March, June, September and December and that stipulated assessments be levied for support of Grand Lodge.
12. That emergency communications might be summoned at the discretion of responsible Grand Lodge Officers.
13. That each successive Grand Master be elected at the September meeting (with power to nominate and appoint his own Deputy, Wardens and Secretary) and that Grand Lodge at the same time should nominate three candidates for each office of Treasurer, Chaplain and Sword Bearer, from among whom the Grand Master-elect should make appointments at the December meeting; that installation should take place on the feast day of St. John the Evangelist, unless the Grand Master should appoint another day.
14. That there should be an annual Masonic festival.
15. That as soon as the revisions of obligations, forms, had been worked out, speedy and effectual means should be taken to familiarize therewith all the members of each lodge; in London delegations of expert craftsmen in groups of three were to visit the several lodges in rotation.
16. That United Grand Lodge charters should be given to lodges and provincial Grand Lodges as soon as these could prove proficiency in the work.
17. That all property and moneys of the two Fraternities be pooled in one Grand Fund and that, as soon as it could be done, the United Grand Lodge should have power to create a single trusteeship. Freemasons' Hall should continue to be fraternal headquarters and a full-length portrait of the Duke of Atholl should be hung there with those of Past Grand Masters of the Modern Lodge.
18. That no appropriations of Masonic benevolence funds be made other than for works of charity.
19. That the charitable fund be distributed in London by a committee or Lodge of Benevolence, to be composed of twelve Masters of lodges and three Grand Officers and to sit on the third Wednesday of each month.
20. That a plan, "with rules and regulations, for the solemnity of the Union" should be prepared before the approaching festival of St. John.
21. That a revision should be made at once of the rules and regulations of both Fraternities and that a new Book of Constitutions should be prepared and published.
It will be seen from the foregoing that the Articles of Union merely outlined the general terms of agreement without attempting to go into innumerable details remaining to be perfected. The original Lodge of Promulgation continued its work until 1816, harmonizing differences between the two rituals. The task of preparing a code of regulations was assigned to a Board of General Purposes. An International Commission was formed to bring into essential unison various points of Mystery and Craft. This Commission drafted a compact consisting of eight resolutions which ultimately was accepted by the Grand Lodges of England, Ireland and Scotland and which effectually completed the consolidation of Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry.
And so the story of trials and tribulations had a pleasant ending after all. The two Grand Lodges were married and lived happily ever after. The formal ceremony of wedding took place with the pomp and circumstance worthy of an affair so important. Preston's sprightly pen has left an account from which it appears that on a day previously determined - December 27, 1813 - Freemasons' Hall had the honor of receiving both bodies. In adjoining rooms they opened their respective Grand Lodges according to the peculiar customs of each. Meanwhile in the principal assembly room Masters, Wardens and Past Masters of the various lodges had been seated in such manner that Moderns and Antients intermingled.
At a signal the Grand Procession marched into the room in double line, each Modern dignitary being accompanied by his Antient contemporary, the Grand Masters, Kent and Sussex, bringing up the rear. As the procession approached the Grand Master's throne its individuals faced inward and then opened up a lane down which the royal brothers marched arm in arm. They took seats on each side of the throne, being flanked by their respective staffs and distinguished visitors. In the Grand West and the Grand South similar arrangements were carried out, the respective Grand Wardens sitting to right and left of each Warden's station. After an invocation by the Rev. Dr. Barry, Grand Chaplain of the Antients, the Act of Union was read by the Grand Director of Ceremonies, Sir George Naylor. Then the Rev. Dr. Coghlan, Grand Chaplain of the Moderns, addressed the assembly in these words:
"Hear ye: This is the Act of Union engrossed in confirmation of Articles solemnly concluded between the two Grand Lodges of Free and Accepted Masons of England, signed, sealed and ratified by the two Grand Lodges respectively: by which they are hereafter and forever to be known and acknowledged by the style and title of The United Grand Lodge of Ancient Freemasons of England. How say you, Brothers, Representatives of the two Fraternities? Do you accept of, ratify and confirm the same?"
As with one voice the assemblage replied, "We do accept, ratify and confirm the same."
"And may the Great Architect of the Universe make the union perpetual!" cried Dr. Coghlan.
"So mote it be!" the assemblage replied.
Dr. Barry then made formal proclamation that the union had been ratified, with a second prayer that it might be perpetual, to which there was another chorus of amens. After a symphony played by the Grand Organist, Samuel Wesley, the two Grand Masters arose and, followed by their staffs, approached an Ark of the Covenant which had been placed before the throne. The square, level, plumb and gavel were presented to them in turn. After making symbolic trial of the ark with these implements, they proclaimed it a symbol of a union which, they prayed, might endure forever.
"So mote it be! " chanted the brethren in chorus.
The ark was then consecrated by the ancient rite of Corn, Wine and Oil. When that had been done, a recess was called, when the Masters and Past Masters composing the Lodge of Reconciliation retired to another room. There, under the presidency of Count Lagardje, Past Grand Master of Masons in Sweden, they ratified the forms and ceremonies previously agreed upon. This action was formally reported to the Grand Lodge. The accepted form of obligation was read to the assembly, and the brethren, with hands joined, vowed faithfully to keep and perform it.
Officers of the old Grand Lodges then divested themselves of their insignia of office. The Duke of Kent obtained the floor and, observing that the task which had induced him to assume the Antient Grand Mastership had been accomplished, he nominated the Duke of Sussex for Grand Master. The election was by unanimous voice and Sussex was escorted to the throne by his brother and Count Lagardje. After the transaction of routine business, the communication was closed in proper form.
A great deal of work remained to be done, but there was a wholesome desire throughout the united Craft to forget old grudges and promote peace and harmony. How this generous spirit operated to smooth away difficulties of ritual and practice was admirably expressed by W. B. Hextall in his article in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (Volume XXIII, page 304) when he said:
"A conclusion to which I personally come is that for many years after the Union - speaking approximately until about 1825 - a good deal of 'give and take' concerning ritual went on unofficially, in London as well as in the Provinces, and that our Craft ceremonies, as practiced from 1830 and earlier, considerably deviated from those which were ascertained in the Lodge of Promulgation, 1809 - 11; worked in the Lodge of Reconciliation, 1813-16; and approved by Grand Lodge on 5th June, 1816. The material from which we have to draw inference is slight, but at the same time cogent; and when (to name a few points only) we find duties originally assigned to the Senior Deacon transferred to his junior colleague; the entrusting with the means of satisfactory proof leading to the second degree otherwise performed; and the admission of a member or visitor by proof of his having ascertained the degree in which the Lodge is opened from an inspection of the three great lights at the entrance (Lodge of Promulgation minutes, January 5th, 1810) fallen into complete disuse; it is difficult to avoid recalling that, to a large extent, the subject of Craft working must have been placed in the melting pot, and that quite apart from the means of instruction officially provided in 1813."
Several Lodges of Instruction did in fact come into existence and some of them became permanent. As they differed slightly from one another they are probably accountable for certain variations in "workings" which later came into use.
Precisely how strong the old Grand Lodges were at the moment of union it is impossible to ascertain with a degree of certainty. A Modern roll of 1812 mentioned 620 lodges and an Antient record of 1813 listed 354. It is certain, however, that some on both lists had become extinct or had passed under the control of foreign or colonial Grand Lodges. Hughan in Memorials of the Union observes that the United Grand Lodge started out with 636 lodges, of which 385 were of Modern and 251 of Antient origin.
The union of 1813 completed the evolutionary phase by which Speculative Masonry had developed from Operative Masonry in a period of slightly less than a century. It is impossible to exaggerate the Masonic importance of this event. Henceforth a strong, solidified, progressive Fraternity should be able to extend its influence, preserve its discipline and establish its authority throughout the world. It is still divided into numerous Grand jurisdictions, each sovereign in its own sphere, all working harmoniously together and each giving full faith and credit to the official acts of any other. Freemasonry in 1927 numbered its adherents by millions and of these approximately 97 per cent. were under the control of regular Anglo-Saxon Grand Lodges or of other Grand Lodges recognized by them as regular. It is possible that the future may lead to an even more perfect union. Who can say?