The Origins of Freemasonry. Margaret C. Jacob
wealth. They focused on secret passwords, rituals, and a great deal of merrymaking. But willy-nilly, and oftentimes unselfconsciously, they proceeded to set up governments in microcosm, complete with elections, officers, and taxes.
However interested in new forms of governance, freemasons nonetheless had to live in the real world. Chapter 4 will explore how the masonic claim of being a fraternity that was a meritocracy worked in a market—and money-drive—society that was also deeply hierarchical. At the core of that chapter are plaintive letters of the 1780s from French brothers and sisters sent into the Grand Lodge of France, asking—sometimes demanding, other times begging—for charitable assistance. Who got charity from the lodges and under what circumstances brings us closer to knowing how people could live in a world where, in fact, merit counted for little, yet where people believed that it did, or at the least, that it should determine one’s place or reward in society. Finally, chapter 5 turns to the volatile issue of what the lodges did about women, particularly in France, where their membership was significant and can be documented. We will see that the actual records from eighteenth-century lodges, as opposed to the inherited myths, can be quite revealing all by themselves.
CHAPTER 1
Origins
In 1717, four old London lodges consolidated and a remarkable social organization emerged. They formed the Grand Lodge of London, an umbrella organization to which other British, and eventually even foreign lodges would give their affiliation, and then as their numbers grew, seek to imitate. Within decades Benjamin Franklin brought the freemasonry he had learned in London to Philadelphia. From this rather simple beginning grew an organization that by 1750 was steeped in controversy yet growing in popularity in both Europe and America.1
Who were these masons, why did they form a “Grand Lodge”? Were there no masons before 1717? Masons, carpenters, bakers, bell makers, barber-surgeons had all been protected and supervised by guilds for centuries in many European countries. Medieval and early modern guilds provided social life, benefits, wage protection, and quality control over skills and finished goods.2 The identity of members and hence their right to work in places far from home was protected by secret words and handshakes. A worker who knew them was truly a member of the guide. Frequently, the guild masters acted in concert with town officials to maintain order and to ensure the stability of prices and wages as well as the quality of work.3 But of the many medieval artisan crafts, only the masons’ guilds survived the transition into modern market conditions by becoming something other than a protective and disciplining club for workers, by becoming freemasonry. 4
In seventeenth-century urban Scotland and England, where the open, unprotected wage economy had become far advanced relative to the rest of Europe, lodges saw their numbers dwindle. They began to admit nonmasons largely because their dues were needed. The guild system had essentially broken down, and if buildings were to be built, capital was needed. What began out of necessity transformed this one guild into a voluntary society; in the process few of the original stonemasons found a place. Thus began a transformation that is sometimes called the transition from operative to speculative masonry; let us just call it the transition from masonic guild to freemasonry. The four London lodges must have gone through such a process. We meet them only in 1717 when the existence of the Grand Lodge became known. But the great English architect, Sir Christopher Wren, had been asked to head the London lodges as early as 1710—one of the few pieces of information we have about them before 1717.5
Besides conviviality and fellowship, the masonic lodges held other cultural attractions for merchants and gentlemen. Master masons were literate and known for their mathematical and architectural skills, particularly with fortifications, military and urban. The myth and lore associated with the lodges tied the geometrical skills of the masters with ancient learning supposedly inherited from the legendary Egyptian priest, Hermes Trismegistes.6 He was thought to have taught Moses and to have transmitted a mystical understanding of the heavens that included a dedication to mathematics. Educated nonmasons may have been attracted to the lodges because of orally transmitted legends about their antiquity, and because in them the prosperous found useful men skilled in architecture and engineering. The mystical, in the form of the Hermetic tradition, combined with the utilitarian to bond brothers who became increasingly interested in the first, while shedding the second.7
Two individuals stand out from the transitional period of masonry as practiced by simple stone workers, to masonry as a new form of social fraternizing. One of the earliest nonmasons to be admitted into a lodge in the 1650s was Sir Robert Moray, a Scot, a man of the new science associated with Bacon and Descartes, and a military engineer. He was also one of the founders of the Royal Society of London and a key player in the English civil wars. Moray, like the Oxford antiquarian, Elias Ashmole, who also accepted membership in a lodge in that decade, may have believed that masonry put him closer to the oldest tradition of ancient wisdom, associated with Hermes, out of which mathematics and the mechanical arts were said to have been nourished. Moray always signed his letters with his masonic emblem—a mark of his dedication to the ancient craft. For his part, Ashmole dabbled in alchemy (as did his contemporary Sir Isaac Newton) and may be described as a seeker after ancient lore and wisdom.8 By the 1690s more and more gentlemen like Moray and Ashmole, some merchants, and others who were denizens of London political life had been brought into the lodges.
The details of the historical process by which, after 1650, a guild of workers evolved into a voluntary society of gentlemen are probably forever lost. While there are Scottish records, the English ones have mostly disappeared. As we will see with greater detail in Chapter 4, one lodge in Dundee, Scotland, shows nonmasons being admitted throughout the seventeenth century, but by 1700 the gentlemen have taken charge of the lodge.9 The Scottish historian, David Stevenson, sees Scotland as the home of modern freemasonry.10 It was—since lodges there were the first to become social clubs for the genteel. But the freemasonry of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—the fraternity, ideals and constitution exported to continental Europe—encoded not the local Scottish customs and clan governance, but the institutions and constitutional ideals originating in the English Revolution against royal absolutism.
A manuscript from 1659, now housed in the Royal Society of London, makes the link between ancient wisdom and national governance. “This Craft … founded by worthy Kings and Princes and many other worshipful men” prescribes dedication to the seven liberal arts, particularly geometry. Hermes taught it and he was “the father of Wisemen [who] found out the two pillars of Stone whereon the Sciences were written and taught them forth, and at the making of the Tower of Babylon there was the craft of masonry found….”11 The manuscript narration about “Free Masons’ Word and Signs,” gives away its contemporary milieu, the revolution of the 1640s, the birth of constitutional government bound by laws or rules. It speaks in passing about “parliament” and further admonishes its members: “You shall … truly observe the Charges in the Constitution.” It also invokes the ancient teacher and philosopher Hermes and the sciences that he taught. As we shall see in chapter 3, the document had been collected by the new Royal Society because it was attempting to write a history of all the trades and crafts—a project it never completed.
As the Oxford English Dictionary shows, the use of the term “constitution” to mean “rules, statutes, or charges” adopted by a body has few if any precedents prior to the 1650s. In that revolutionary decade, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, parliament enacted laws for the new republic. Simultaneously, voluntary societies with constitutions, however loosely structured, came into existence. At one point the 1659 document speaks quaintly of a French king as having been “elected,” at another it speaks of a biblical time when “the King … made a great Councell and parliament was called to know how they might find meanes” to provide for the unemployed.12 The English masons saw their history as inextricably bound up, not always happily, with the fate of kings and states. After 1700 they also came increasingly