THE OLD CHARGES OF BRITISH FREEMASONS.
8o
The uprose constitutions we can well understand being read to, and subscribed by, those
desiring admission into the fellowship or mystery, but our single metrical version presents
difficulties,
viewed by the light of
its
more prosaic brethren, which must have rendered
it
It displays rather the features of an epic poem
unsuitable for the purposes of initiation.
than of a simple ethical code adapted to the genius and requirements of illiterate builders, and
when we
reflect that in all probability the recital of these old legends and rules, together with
the communication of the " Mason Word and Sign," constituted the entire ceremony of admis-
sion into the fraternity,
it is all
the more evident that the form of the historical introduction
and the arrangement of the laws must not be looked
style or
manner
for in the Halliwell
MS., but rather in the
of its less pretentious juniors.
Again, I greatly question if the knowledge and general intelligence of the operatives
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were such as to qualify them to be in any way
instructed or edified by the oral communication of such a poem as the one under consideration.
Fort styles this unique composition "a gossiping poem."
This is fairly correct, but I
"
"
think the writer
to much purpose, for he evidently had access to old Masonic
gossips
documents, the contents of which his quaint verses have partially rescued from oblivion.
In allowing his lucubrations to assume a rhythmical form, the priestly
doubtless influenced by
"
by Elias Ashmole
:
considerations
closely
versifier
was
analogous to those so quaintly expressed
Nor did the Ancients wrap up
their
Chiefest Mysteries, any where
else, then in the Parabolical and Allusive part of Poetry, as the most Sacred, and Venerable
in their Esteeme, and the Securest from Prophane and Vulgar Wits." ^
It is also reasonable
to
suppose that the compiler omitted from his
poem
portions of the old documents he was
familiar with, but which, from his point of view, were objectionable, such, for instance, as
the allusions to
"
Charles Martel
"
and
others,
and the legend of the preservation of the
two stones which withstood the ravages of the Flood. The absence
Charles Martel, as I pointed out some years ago in the " Preemason,"^ may
history of the craft, in the
of any allusion to
extreme unpopularity with the clergy, and, as we have
"
It might have been
Gibbon, "that the Saviour of Christendom would have been canonised, or
expected," says
be accounted
for,
by the
seen, the Halliwell
fact of his
MS. was
the production of one of that order.
by the gratitude of the clergy, who are indebted to his sword for their
But in the public distress, the Mayor of the Palace had been compelled
at least applauded,
present existence.
to apply the riches, or at least the revenues, of the bishops and abbots to the relief of the
His merits were forgotten, his sacrilege alone was
State and the reward of the soldiers.
remembered, and, in an epistle to a Carlo vingian prince, a Gallic synod presumes to declare
that his ancestor was damned that on the opening of his tomb the spectators were affrighted
;
and the aspect of an horrid dragon and that a saint of the times was
indulged with a pleasant vision of the soul and body of Charles Martel burning to all eternity
by a smell of
fire
in the abyss of hell
The author
of
;
" ^
!
what we now know
as the
HalUweU MS.
prominence to those events which were the best calculated to
"800
years ago, of establishing a series of landmarls.
authority for
will be
>
such startling assertions, and neither has
"
it
It
would naturally give
advance the ends he had
or poem,
was not convenient apparently
been so since
!
The
at the time to produce
criticism of Kloss
any
on the age of this MS.
examined when the English Statutes pass under review.
Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum
(1652), Prolcg, p. 3.
=
November
15, 1879.
s
Decline and Fall, vol.
x., p. 27.