Ritual , Secrecy , and Civil Society
Freemasonry has invoked the past since its inception . The two oldest surviving manuscripts describing the legendary masonic history , the Cooke manuscript and the Regius manuscript , both in the British Library in London , date from the early fifteenth century . Comparison of the texts show how they are independent compositions and are not derived from earlier lost histories . 29 The claim that the tenth-century King Æthelstan granted a charter to the stonemasons to hold an assembly is chronologically impossible and a characteristic medieval fabrication . 30 The legends in the Cooke and Regius manuscripts were created by junior stonemasons in order to justify meetings to protest against the controls over wages and prices imposed by legislation following labour shortages after the Black Death . 31 It was not enough for these journeymen masons to claim that a pre-conquest king had given them privileges . They invented a fabulous history claiming to show how kings and emperors had recognised the craft of masonry as special since the time of Noah . As the English government attempted to further control the wages of stonemasons and their rights to meet , the stonemasons in return elaborated their legendary history , fabricating stories of further charters and privileges .
The kind of process we see at work in the Cooke and Regius manuscripts also occurs in many other medieval institutions , ranging from guilds to monasteries . 32 The myths and fabrications of the stonemasons ’ documents are particularly valuable for the insights they provide into the outlook and mentality of the medieval artisan , as Lisa Cooper has shown in her book on Artisans and Narrative Craft in Later Medieval England . 33 Yet they have rarely been studied from that point of view . The other remarkable feature of these medieval legends of the stonemasons is their persistence . Although we do not have any other extant manuscripts until the end of the sixteenth century , manuscripts of these medieval legends proliferated during the seventeenth century .
29 On Cooke , Regius and the Old Charges , see Prescott , ' Literary Contexts '; ' The Old Charges ' in Handbook of Freemasonry , pp . 33-49 ; ' Inventing Symbols : the Case of the Stonemasons ’ in Signs and Symbols : Proceedings of the 2006 Harlaxton Conference in Memory of Janet Backhouse ed . A . Payne and J . Cherry ( Donington : Shaun Tyas , 2009 ), pp . 100-118 .
30 The York legend claims that Æthelstan sanctioned a meeting of masons under the auspices of his youngest son Edwin at York in 926 . In 926 , York was still under the rule of the Danish king Sihtric . It was not conquered by Æthelstan until 927 : Sarah Foot , Æthelstan : The First King of England ( New Haven : Yale University Press , 2011 ), pp . 18-19 . There is no evidence that Æthelstan had a son called Edwin . In an attempt to rescue the legend , James Anderson suggested in the eighteenth century that the Edwin in question could have been Æthelstan ' s brother who drowned in 933 : Foot , Æthelstan , pp . 235-7 ; Andrew Prescott , '" King Athelston That Was a Worthy Kinge of England "': Anglo-Saxon Myths of the Freemasons ' in The Power of Words : Anglo-Saxon Studies presented to Donald G . Scragg on his Seventieth Birthday ( Morgantown : University of West Virginia Press , 2006 ), pp . 397-434 .
31 Prescott , ' Old Charges ', pp . 40-1 .
32 See , for example , Gervase Rosser , ' Myth , Image and Social Process in the English Medieval Town ', Urban History 23:1 ( 1996 ), pp . 5-25 .
33 Lisa H . Cooper , Artisans and Craft in Late Medieval England ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2011 ), pp . 56-82 .
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