Ritual, Secrecy, and Civil Society Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 18

The Origins of Freemasonry and the Invention of Tradition

This may partly be related to continued disputes about the wage levels of masons — the levels of wages mentioned in sixteenth and seventeenth century Old Charge manuscripts are manipulated in line with contemporary wage claims .

The spread of Old Charge manuscripts is also probably related to the major developments in the organisation of freemasonry in Scotland . The first surviving manuscript of the Old Charges after Cooke and Regius , Grand Lodge Manuscript 1 , is dated 25 December 1583 , just four days after the appointment of William Schaw as Master of the King ’ s Works in Scotland . ³⁴ This requires further investigation , but it is unlikely to be a coincidence . It seems possible that Schaw began his work by seeking evidence of masonic legends and that Grand Lodge Manuscript 1 may be a result of this . We cannot be completely certain of what happened , but Old Charge manuscripts were extensively in use in Scotland in the late seventeenth century , ³⁵ and this illustrates how we should regard the process of the development of freemasonry from medieval times as a complex and varied continuum .

Much of the organisational structure of Freemasonry bears the impress of medieval guilds , such as quarterly meetings , the names of officers such as master and wardens , and the use of oaths . Another major element in the development of freemasonry were the organisational reforms instituted by William Schaw in Scotland , succinctly summarised by David Stevenson as including the earliest use of the word lodge in the modern masonic sense ; the earliest lodge minute books ; earliest examples of non-operatives joining lodges ; earliest evidence of the use of symbols to communicate ethical ideas ; and earliest references to the mason word . ³⁶ The way in which the discussion of the origins of freemasonry has been distorted by masonic anxieties about national precedence is evident from the fact that this sixteenth and seventeenth century freemasonry in Scotland is consistently downplayed and disregarded , apparently out of concern that England ’ s precedence may be undermined . Yet the people involved in the creation of the Grand Lodge in London knew that they needed to learn about Scotland . One of the first actions of Desaguliers after the creation of Grand Lodge in 1721 was to visit the Lodge of Edinburgh , where as David Stevenson observes there is the earliest evidence for the emergence of a third degree . ³⁷

Masonic scholars have generated an extraordinary number of theories about the origin of freemasonry , which have been given imposing names like transitional , original birth , religious base , Rosicrucian , Enlightenment , Royal Society , and so on . The striking thing about all these theories is their difficulty in dealing with mixed and complex developments . They all assume linear