Ritual , Secrecy , and Civil Society
is almost an irrelevance to the history of Christianity . For the historian , the pressing question is rather what social , political and cultural conditions caused millions of people to believe that Christ came back from the dead , why these beliefs led to wholesale slaughter and invasion , and why they still persist .
For Bloch , the obsession with finding the point of origin bleeds the life from history and distracts us from exploring how society shifts and changes . Religious belief is an example of a historical phenomenon whose study is distorted by an obsession with origins . Religion is like a knot that ties together many different aspects of society . If we only look for the point of origin of religious institutions , we ignore the way they bind together many social and human interconnections . This applies not only to religion , but to all human institutions — including freemasonry .
Freemasonry is a vivid illustration of the debilitating effects of the idol of origins . Freemasons have been obsessed for centuries with establishing where freemasonry came from . The medieval charges have been continually classified and categorised to the point where it is sometimes not entirely clear what the different manuscripts say . 6 These stonemasons ’ documents are pre- cious evidence of artisan organisation in the British Isles , but because of the mania for trying to reconstruct the earliest form of text , many of these charges have never been properly edited and such fundamental palaeographical and codicological characteristics as the date of handwriting and watermarks have not been adequately analysed . We are not even sure where some of the most important manuscripts actually are . 7 Instead of using these documents to understand how stonemasons were organised and what beliefs bound them together , researchers have spent a century engaged in a fruitless and innervating search for the origin of the text in the hope this will help find the origin of freemasonry .
In our search for the smoking gun which might reveal the origin of freemasonry , we constantly ignore the wider picture . The National Archives in London contains over 200 wills of men from different parts of England who died in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and described themselves as freemasons . These are available for download via family history sites such as Ancestry . These wills offer all sorts of sidelights into the social and economic status , craft organisation and cultural milieu of freemasons from 1450 to 1700 . Among the testators are such dis-
6 Andrew Prescott , ' Some Literary Contexts of the Cooke and Regius Manuscripts ' in Freemasonry in Music and Literature , ed . Trevor Stewart , Canonbury Papers 2 ( London : Canonbury Masonic Research Centre , 2005 ), pp . 1-36 .
7 For example , Dowland MS . ( early 17th cent .?), York No . 3 MS . ( 1630 ), Poole MS . ( 1665 ), Ramsey MS . ( second half 17th cent .), Phillipps MS . 3 ( 18th cent ), Crane MS . 2 ( 1780 ), Wren MS ( 1852 copy of an alleged Old Charge MS of 1600 ). For further details , see the relevant entries in W . P . Hughan , The Old Charges of the British Freemasons 2nd edition ( London : George Kenning , 1895 ) and Douglas Knoop and G . P . Jones , A Handlist of Masonic Documents ( Manchester : Manchester University Press , 1942 ).
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