Chapter 109. The Origins of Freemasonry: Operative Lodges, the Scottish Evidence and the Grand Lodge of 1717

Freemasonry tells two stories about its origins. In its own legends it is as old as geometry, reaching back through the medieval cathedral builders to Solomon’s Temple, to Hiram, to Enoch’s pillars or to Egypt. The documentary record is much shorter. It begins with the manuscript “Old Charges” of the masons’ craft, takes institutional shape in the Scottish statutes of 1598-1599, shows gentlemen entering lodges in the seventeenth century, and becomes public with the Grand Lodge formed in London in 1717. The library’s historians, chiefly Margaret Jacob, R. F. Gould, Sanford Holst and John Michael Greer, reconstruct the documented line. Masonic and other writers such as Albert Churchward and Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas offer ancient origins. Nesta Webster reads the whole question in her own way. Politics runs through the story, since in Jacob’s account the eighteenth-century lodge became a school for constitutional self-government.

The Old Charges and the guild

The oldest Masonic documents are the “Old Charges,” manuscript constitutions of the masons’ trade. Gould catalogues them roll by roll and copy by copy. They include the poem published by J. O. Halliwell in 1840 and 1844, the Scottish versions (the Melrose text “is clearly a transcript of one of A.D. 1581, or earlier”), and later rolls such as the Papworth MS of 1714. He treats with suspicion documents that claim too much, such as the supposed York constitution of 926 first announced in 1808, “of whom no trace can be found” [Gould, Gould’s History of Freemasonry Throughout the World, Vol. I, #63659, “The Old Charges”]. Yates summarises their legendary content. “Masonry, or building, or architecture is identified with geometry”, discovered before the Flood or taught by Abraham to the Egyptians and attributed to “Thoth-Hermes… who is identified with Euclid” [Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, #62112, ch. 15]. Jacob quotes a 1659 manuscript held by the Royal Society. In it Hermes, “the father of Wisemen,” “found out the two pillars of Stone whereon the Sciences were written.” The same text speaks of “parliament” and of observing “the Charges in the Constitution,” and she reads this as evidence of its revolutionary-era setting [Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry, #78059, ch. 1 “Origins”].

Holst traces the guild framework itself. In 1376 the London masons were one of the city’s forty-seven “sufficient misteries.” In 1475 Edinburgh’s “Masons and Wrights” were incorporated by a Seal of Cause. Its rules provided seven-year apprenticeships, examination by “four men” before an apprentice became “fellow of the craft,” and burial of the brethren. From this incorporation came the Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary’s Chapel), “the records of this lodge, from 1599 forward” surviving [Holst, Sworn in Secret, #50535, ch. 15 “Master Masons to the Crown”]. Webster, drawing on Masonic writers, mentions the Culdees, the Roman collegia and the York charter of 926. She adds that “all this is speculation. No documentary evidence has ever been produced” before Gothic times [Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, #69057, ch. V “Origins of Freemasonry”].

Scotland: Schaw, Moray and the first gentlemen

Greer gives the decisive Scottish evidence. William Schaw (1550-1602), appointed Master of Works by James VI in 1583, “issued a set of ordinances, the first Schaw Statutes,” in 1598 and a revised second set in 1599. “These statutes are the earliest detailed records of the organization of operative masons in Scotland, and provide a crucial snapshot of the Scottish lodges early in their evolution toward Freemasonry” [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Schaw, William”]. Holst describes Schaw as a well-born courtier set over the Mylne dynasty of royal Master Masons. In his account Schaw’s actions “would have a tremendous impact on the legends of Freemasonry,” including those of the St Clairs of Roslin [Holst, #50535, ch. 15].

The first records of non-masons follow. Yates cites “a well authenticated earlier” initiation than Ashmole’s: “the admission into the mason’s lodge of Edinburgh of Robert Moray, on 20 May 1641” [Yates, #62112, ch. 15]. Jacob places Moray’s admission in “the 1650s.” She notes that the Dundee lodge admitted non-masons throughout the seventeenth century until “by 1700 the gentlemen have taken charge.” She cites David Stevenson’s view of Scotland as “the home of modern freemasonry” [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1]. Jacob offers an economic explanation. In the advanced wage economy of Scotland and England, lodges “began to admit nonmasons largely because their dues were needed… What began out of necessity transformed this one guild into a voluntary society” [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1].

England: Ashmole, Plot and the hidden lodges

Ashmole’s diary entry is the best-known English record. Webster quotes it: “I was made a Freemason at Warrington in Lancashire with Col. Henry Mainwaring.” She adds Yarker’s comment that “the majority of the members present were not operative masons,” and Ashmole’s 1682 attendance at Mason Hall in London [Webster, #69057, ch. V]. Yates notes that the Royalist Ashmole was admitted together with a Roundhead cousin, so “members of opposite parties in the civil wars could join in Freemasonry” [Yates, #62112, ch. 15]. Holst quotes Robert Plot’s Natural History of Staffordshire (1686). Plot found “persons of the most eminent quality” admitted by “certain secret signes, whereby they are known to one another all over the Nation.” An “accepted mason” was obliged to help a brother “tho’ from the top of a Steeple.” Holst also cites a Scarborough lodge of 1705 and the minutes of the York lodge from 1712, which record gentlemen presiding [Holst, #50535, ch. 20 “Lodges Young and Grand”]. Webster and Mackey both report a 1703 decision of the Lodge of St Paul “that the privileges of Masonry should no longer be restricted to operative Masons” [Webster, #69057, ch. V; Mackey, The History of Freemasonry, #65129].

1717, Wren and the legend-making

Jacob opens with the fact: “In 1717, four old London lodges consolidated… They formed the Grand Lodge of London.” Holst gives the date as 24 June 1717 [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1; Holst, #50535, ch. 20]. On Wren the record is thin and disputed. Jacob writes that “Wren, had been asked to head the London lodges as early as 1710.” In another passage she has him presiding “somewhere before 1717” as Grand Master. Webster repeats the Masonic tradition of Inigo Jones as Grand Master under James I and of Wren from “about 1685 to 1702” [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1; Webster, #69057, ch. V]. Webster’s own list, from the Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, records twelve theories of origin. They are the patriarchs, the pagan mysteries, Solomon’s Temple, the Crusades, the Templars, the Roman collegia, medieval operatives, the Rosicrucians, Cromwell, the Stuarts, Wren, and “Dr. Desaguliers and his friends in 1717” [Webster, #69057, ch. V].

Anderson’s book followed. Gould records the Grand Lodge resolution of 29 September 1721 empowering “Bro. James Anderson, A.M., to digest the old Gothic Constitutions, in a new and better method.” He also notes that an unauthorized print of Old Constitutions (1722) appeared “one year earlier than the premier Book of Constitutions” [Gould, #63659]. Jacob dates the Constitutions to 1723 and reads its plural title as “an amalgam of various constitutions used by individual lodges.” Its religious clause obliged a brother “only… to that religion in which all men agree” [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1]. Webster rejects the sceptics’ view that the system “was devised… by Dr. Desaguliers, Dr. Anderson, and others.” She concludes that they “revised but did not originate the ritual” [Webster, #69057, ch. V].

Politics and society: Jacob’s “schools of government”

Jacob’s central thesis is political. Masonic practices such as “elections, majority rule, orations by elected officials, national governance under a Grand Lodge, and constitutions” all “owed their origin to the growth of parliamentary power.” She links the Whig republican John Toland and Lord Mayor Sir Robert Clayton “directly to London lodges that may have formed the nucleus of the Grand Lodge.” The lodges were “schools for government—more, rather than less, democratic government.” Freemasons “did not cause the French Revolution of 1789, as the conspiracy theorists right up to the Nazis claimed, but they did make it more rather than less likely to happen” [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1; ch. 3 “Schools of Government”].

She also documents a libertine strand. Toland’s papers in the British Library (MSS ADD 4295) contain the record of the “Chevaliers de la Jubilation,” held at “Gaillardin” on 24 November 1710. The members used “brother,” “Grand Master” and “constitutions,” and Jacob finds the libertinism in “the list of food and drink, and in the noticeable deterioration of the handwriting as the meeting proceeds.” Associates of this circle circulated the treatise of the “three great imposters,” Jesus, Moses and Mohammed [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1]. Jacob follows the lodges’ dues, charity and market dealings, and the women’s “lodges of adoption.” By 1785 there were “probably well over fifteen hundred women freemasons.” One ritual had a Queen of the Amazons urging her sisters “to regard as tyrants those who will not obey women” [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1; ch. 4 “Money, Equality, and Fraternity”; ch. 5 “Women in the Lodges”]. The Church condemned the lodges in 1738 and objected, among other things, to “frequent elections as being republican” [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1].

Expansion and schism

Holst traces the spread of the new system. The Grand Lodge of Ireland is recorded in 1725. York declared its own “Grand Lodge of All England” the same year. Desaguliers brought Chester back as a Provincial Grand Lodge in 1727, and the Grand Lodge of Scotland was formed in 1736 under William St Clair. In America, Benjamin Franklin was initiated in 1731 and became Grand Master of Pennsylvania in 1734 [Holst, #50535, ch. 20]. Jacob records that Ramsay’s oration in Paris (she dates it to 1738, Greer to 1736) described Freemasonry as “an entire spiritual nation” [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1; Greer, #64911]. In England a rival Antient grand lodge appeared in the 1750s. “A minority of English lodges left the Modern grand lodge, as the Antients called their rivals… and for more than six decades England had two” grand lodges, until the union of 1813 created the United Grand Lodge of England. The Royal Arch, “the first of the higher degrees,” belonged at first to the Antient side [Greer, #64911, “Antient-Modern Schism”; “Royal Arch”].

The alternative origin theses

• Egyptian. Churchward, a 30th-degree Mason, traced the craft to a prehistoric “Stellar Cult” of the Pole Star, about 600,000 years old, and dated the Great Pyramid to that era. The 2005 introduction to his book records that he received “scholarly disdain and the ridicule of Masonic historians” [Churchward, The Arcana of Freemasonry, #66015]. Webster quotes him admitting that all writing on origins “has hitherto been theories, without any facts for their foundation” [Webster, #69057, ch. V].
• Solomonic, Hiramic and Enochian. Knight and Lomas, in the Romanian edition of their book, trace Masonic ritual from Neolithic “Grooved Ware” astronomers and the “megalithic yard” through Venus-aligned temple building, Hiram “son of Venus” and an “Enochian Jesus” to the Templars and Rosslyn. Their “Masonic Testament” runs from Enoch to the Templars [Knight & Lomas, Francmasoneria, Venus și Secretul Vieții lui Iisus, #86921, Contents]. The two pillars of the 1659 manuscript show that the Enochian-Hermetic motif was already present in the Old Charges tradition [Jacob, #78059, ch. 1].
• Templar and Rosicrucian. These are treated in the two preceding chapters. Holst rejects Bannockburn but looks for other Templar links [Holst, #50535, ch. 13]. Yates finds only “hinting” Rosicrucian contacts [Yates, #62112, ch. 15].
• Webster’s synthesis. She opens with an eighteenth-century Mason’s remark that “the origin of Freemasonry… is known to Freemasons alone.” She concludes that the craft is “a dual system”: an operative guild form joined to “a secret group of philosophical Adepts,” whose central idea of a loss and its recovery is “the ancient secret tradition” [Webster, #69057, ch. V].

Key points

• The Old Charges trace masonry through geometry to Hermes, Euclid and the two pillars. Gould catalogues the manuscripts and rejects forgeries such as the “York 926” constitution.
• Greer calls the Schaw Statutes of 1598-1599 “the earliest detailed records of the organization of operative masons in Scotland.”
• Non-masons entered the lodges in the seventeenth century: Moray (1641 or the 1650s), Ashmole (1646), and Plot’s “persons of the most eminent quality” (1686).
• The Grand Lodge of 1717 united four London lodges. Wren’s role as Grand Master is a tradition with thin documentary support.
• Anderson was commissioned in 1721 to “digest the old Gothic Constitutions.” The 1723 Constitutions set a minimal religion “in which all men agree.”
• Jacob argues that the lodges were Whig-republican “schools of government” and documents libertine circles (the 1710 “Chevaliers de la Jubilation”) and women’s lodges.
• The Antient-Modern schism left England with two grand lodges for “more than six decades” until the union of 1813.
• The Egyptian (Churchward), Venus-Enochian (Knight and Lomas), Templar and Rosicrucian origins are claims made by their authors. Webster treats Freemasonry as an operative form joined to an adept tradition.