steer well clear of the ‘foul deadly sin’ of sleeping with a fellow Mason’s wife. He should be a patriot (‘To his liege lord the King…be true to him over all thing’) and, crucially, be willing to swear an oath of his commitment to the Craft before the Master Mason and fellow members.
The Manuscript then veers off into a fable of four Masons who refused to make monuments of false gods at the behest of a Roman emperor and so were martyred (see page 81), before recapping Christian fables such as Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel and identifying seven ‘sciences’ in which the civilized Mason should be adept: grammar, dialect, rhetoric, music, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry. The poem ends by reminding the Mason once again of the virtues of truth, honesty and humility.
The Regius Manuscript emphasizes that Middle Ages Masonry had its self-improvement and spiritual aspects, but nevertheless the stonemasons’ guilds remained largely professional organizations-cum-trade unions. However, events at the start of the sixteenth century conspired to ensure that Freemasons would henceforth have far more time on their hands to consider matters of a more abstract, philosophical nature.
The 1500s saw Masonry hit with a devastating triple blow. Firstly, the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment meant it was harder for Masons to jealously guard their trade secrets. With the advent of the printing presses, Gothic cathedrals could no longer be seen as God-made-stone via divine powers: instead, the mechanics of the
The Cooke Manuscript
The second most important medieval document in Freemasonry is the Cooke Manuscript, named after its 1861 translator and editor, Matthew Cooke. Written around 1450, this instructional tome was penned by a Mason rather that a priest, and contains many of the central pillars of Masonic lore. As well as describing the building of King Solomon’s Temple, the manuscript also concerns itself with Masonic symbolism and ritual and was clearly highly influential on the philosophy and minutiae of modern Freemasonry.
no-longer-mysterious flying buttress were laid bare for all to see.
As the Masons came to terms with no longer being workers of modern miracles, their chief patron was also in trouble. The Roman Catholic Church, for so long all-conquering across Europe, faced dissent wherever it turned, with Martin Luther sparking the Protestant Reformation in Germany in 1517 and King Henry VIII breaking all British ties with Rome in 1534. The Church was suddenly in no position to order more cathedrals to be built.
Even if they had done so, they might not have been Gothic ones. The third and final blow to Freemasonry’s standing was that the Gothic style, so dominant since the 1100s, was being supplanted by a return to the simpler classicist values of Roman architecture. Suddenly Masons were running short of work. They would never again recover their position as the most elevated and valued manual workers in the land.
From Operative to Speculative
The Masons’ financial fortunes might have declined during the Renaissance period but the Craft still maintained an enviable social status. The covert fraternity was admired both for its architectural and geometric knowledge and its lofty aims of self-improvement, and as the sixteenth century neared its close there was a tendency for Masonic lodges to admit non-stonemasons—who tended mainly to be sympathetic aristocrats—as honorary members.
This trend began in Scotland, where Freemasonry had long been firmly established: indeed, the world’s oldest surviving Masonic lodge, Kilwinning Lodge No 0, was formed there in 1140. At the end of the 1500s it was even rumoured that King James VI of Scotland had become an honorary Mason. Clearly, membership was no longer restricted to architects and stonecutters.
This was the crucial period in history when Freemasonry underwent a sea change from an elevated series of trade union guilds to a philosophical and moral fraternity open—in theory, at least—to all who wanted to join. This process was largely put on hold in the first part of the seventeenth century, as the English Civil Wars rent the country asunder, but as the Age of Reason dawned in the 1640s and 1650s, Freemasonry truly came into its own.
No longer willing to accept religious doctrine and dogma unquestioningly, people were now investing far more importance in scientific and cerebral analysis of the mysteries of everyday
The Schaw Statutes
In 1598, William Schaw, the Master of Works for Scottish ruler (and suspected Mason) King James VI, passed two statutes seeking clearly to define the nature of Freemasonry. The decrees stated the responsibilities and duties of lodge members and set out the punishments for unsatisfactory work and employing non-initiated Masons. They also required all lodges to keep minutes of every meeting, and obliged them to submit their members to tests of their knowledge of Masonic history and law.
life. These progressive thinkers were greatly impressed with Freemasonry’s stringent moral code and search for self-betterment: to use Masonry’s language, the way that members sought to turn themselves into beings as sturdy, worthy and inspiring as a cathedral.
The traditional operative Freemasons who worked daily with stone and gauge were thus joined in the lodges by a new wave of speculative Masons who had never wielded a chisel in their life. Some traditionalist members opposed the move, afraid that these newcomers would see no reason to keep their zealously guarded trade secrets. A few lodges even burned all written records. Yet before long such accepted or admitted Masons were accepted within the fraternity by all but the most reactionary stonecutters.
Freemasonry thus proudly took its place in the vanguard of progressive thought, alongside institutions such as the recently-formed Royal Society of London, a scientific thinking-shop: many illustrious figures such as Sir Christopher Wren and Elias Ashmole joined both organizations. Yet even amongst the hard intellectual rigour of the age, it is easy to believe such elevated men of reason must have enjoyed a private, boyish frisson at the arcane rituals and elaborate secrecy required to become a speculative Mason.
Dan Brown could be forgiven for latching eagerly onto the speculative Freemasons of the mid-seventeenth century as a plot device. Here, after all, was a covert conglomeration of the age’s greatest and most renowned free thinkers, operating within a ritualistic secret society—who knows what perfidious plots they could have been hatching?
However, such speculation appears largely misplaced. There is no evidence that the Freemasons’ lodges of this era were bent upon anything more than speculative contemplation of a fast-changing world, combined with a rigorous moral code. Members at this time still professed allegiance to God rather than a nebulous Supreme Being: their sole ‘crime’ in reactionary eyes was also to embrace the new-fangled Renaissance cult of rationalism.
Operative Masons’ fortunes also received a spectacular boost in the middle of the century. The Great Fire of London of 1666 razed 40,000 dwellings to the ground and close to 100 churches in the capital. As architects and builders flocked to London, the number of Masons’ lodges in the city rocketed accordingly. Yet this proved a short-lived gain, and by the start of the eighteenth century there were a mere six Masonic lodges in London. Other lodges were scattered across the country in an ad hoc, disjointed manner, and even within these fraternal chapters, observation of Masonic rituals and symbolism was declining. Freemasonry clearly needed to organize or it would die.
The Grand Lodges
By the early eighteenth century, Freemasonry had become so informal that most lodges met only sporadically, at a public house convenient for its members. The four most significant lodges in London regularly
