Unit 8 · From Stonemasons to Freemasons

Picture a cathedral being built in England about 700 years ago. Carts bring blocks of stone. Men cut, shape and lift each block by hand. The work can take fifty years or more. Some workers spend their whole lives on one building.

These workers were masons, people who build with stone. The most skilled ones carved fine stone for windows, arches and statues. They moved from job to job, wherever a church, castle or bridge was being built.

At the building site, the masons had a shed or hut called a lodge. It was a place to work out of the rain, keep tools, eat and rest. Over time, the word lodge also came to mean the group of masons who worked there together.

Where does the name "freemason" come from? Historians give more than one answer. One idea links it to "freestone," a soft, fine stone that could be carved. Another links it to workers who were free to travel. The honest answer is that we are not certain.

In the British Library in London sits a small book made of vellum, a writing material made from animal skin. It is only a few inches tall. Inside is a long poem in Middle English, the English of about 1390. Scholars call it the Regius Poem.

The poem is a rulebook in rhyme. It tells masons to do honest work and take fair pay. It tells a master to treat apprentices well. It even gives advice on good manners at church and at the table. It sounds a lot like a code of conduct for a workplace today.

For centuries, the little book sat in the royal library. Its catalogue called it a poem about moral duties. In 1838 and 1839 a young scholar, James Halliwell, read it closely. He saw that it was about the masons’ craft. He published it in 1840. Halliwell was not a Mason himself.

Texts like this one are called the Old Charges. A charge is a duty or an instruction. The Regius Poem is the oldest known Old Charge. Its date comes from the handwriting and the language, so scholars say "about 1390."

The Old Charges do more than list rules. They also tell a history of the craft. The Regius Poem says an old English king, Athelstan, gathered the masons and gave them their articles and points, a set of rules. Athelstan was a real king in the 900s.

A second old text, the Cooke Manuscript, was written about 1450. It tells an even bigger story. It links masonry to geometry, to the Greek thinker Euclid and to the building of King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. These stories made the craft sound very old and very noble.

Historians call these stories a legend, a story handed down that may hold some truth but cannot be proved. No record shows that Athelstan met the masons. The Solomon story is a way of honoring the craft, not a record of it.

Many groups tell origin stories like this. Towns, schools and families do it too. The stories tell us what a group was proud of. They are worth reading as legends. They are not the same as evidence.

William Schaw was the Master of Works for King James VI of Scotland. That meant he was in charge of the king’s buildings. On 28 December 1598 he signed a set of rules for the masons of Scotland. A second set followed on 28 December 1599.

Historians call them the Schaw Statutes. A statute is a written rule or law. Schaw’s rules covered safety at work, fines for bad work and how to train apprentices. An apprentice is a young worker learning a trade from a master.

One rule changed history. Schaw told the lodges to keep written records of their meetings. Because of that order, some Scottish lodges began to write things down. Those papers are the oldest lodge records in the world.

The original of the first statutes is kept by the Lodge of Edinburgh, known as Mary’s Chapel. That lodge still meets today. So a rulebook from the 1590s still belongs to the group it was written for.

A minute is a written note of what happened at a meeting. Clubs and school boards still keep minutes today. The oldest lodge minute that survives comes from a lodge called Aitchison’s Haven, near Edinburgh in Scotland.

It is dated 9 January 1599. On that day, the lodge recorded that a man named Robert Widderspone was made a Fellow of Craft. A Fellow of Craft was a fully trained mason, one step above an apprentice. The page is now kept by the Grand Lodge of Scotland.

There is a small puzzle in the date. The minute itself says 1598. In Scotland back then, the new year began on 25 March, not 1 January. So January came near the end of the year 1598. By our calendar, it was January 1599.

A few months later, on 31 July 1599, the Lodge of Edinburgh began its own minutes. Aitchison’s Haven closed in 1852. The Lodge of Edinburgh still meets. So its records are the oldest of any lodge that still exists.

Imagine a mason walking to a job in a town where no one knows him. He says he trained for years. How can the other masons be sure? In Scotland, a trained mason could prove it with the Mason Word, a secret word and sign known only to trained masons.

A paper from 1696, now called the Edinburgh Register House Manuscript, shows how this worked. It lists questions masons asked a stranger who claimed to have the Mason Word. It is the oldest known written set of these questions.

Schaw’s second statutes, from December 1599, add another clue. They told the lodge at Kilwinning to test every fellow and apprentice on the "art of memory." Masons had to remember a lot without writing it down.

Historian David Stevenson links this rule to the memory arts of the time. Scholars then used a memory palace, picturing a building and placing each fact in a room. Not every historian agrees on how far to take this link. But the rule shows that memory mattered in the lodge.

Elias Ashmole lived from 1617 to 1692. He studied law, history, the stars and old books. He collected rare objects. Later he gave his collection to Oxford University. It became the Ashmolean Museum, one of the oldest public museums in the world.

Ashmole kept a diary. On 16 October 1646 he wrote that he was made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire. He named Colonel Henry Mainwaring of Cheshire and listed the other men who were there. A diary written on the day is a primary source, a record made by someone who was there.

Why does this line matter? Ashmole was not a stonemason. He was a gentleman scholar. His note is the earliest clear record of an English lodge taking in a man like him. Before this, English records of lodges are very thin.

The line also leaves questions. Were the other men in the room working masons, or gentlemen too? What happened in the ceremony? Historians still debate these questions. The diary proves that Ashmole joined. It does not explain everything about what joining meant.

Ashmole was not the only gentleman to join. During the 1600s, lawyers, doctors, landowners and scholars joined lodges in Scotland and England. Some lodges came to have more gentlemen than working masons.

Historians use two words for this change. Operative masons were working builders who cut and set stone for a living. Speculative masons were members who did not build. Speculative comes from a Latin word about looking and thinking.

Speculative masons used building tools as symbols. A square, used to check a right angle, came to stand for fair and honest dealing. That is where the phrase "on the square" comes from. A pair of compasses, used to draw circles, came to stand for keeping one’s actions within limits.

How did this change happen? The Scottish records show lodges slowly taking in gentlemen. The English records are thinner. Some historians see one long, slow growth. Others see new clubs borrowing an old craft’s name and legends. The question is still open.

By the early 1700s, several lodges of gentlemen met in London taverns. At some point, a few of them joined together under one leader. They formed a Grand Lodge, a governing body over many lodges. Its leader was called the Grand Master.

The traditional story says four London lodges met on 24 June 1717 at a tavern called the Goose and Gridiron. There they formed the Grand Lodge. Grand Lodges around the world celebrated its 300th birthday in 2017.

But where does the 1717 story come from? Almost all of it comes from one book, the second edition of James Anderson’s Constitutions, printed in 1738. That was more than twenty years after the event. No record from 1717 itself has been found.

In 2017, historians Andrew Prescott and Susan Mitchell Sommers argued that the Grand Lodge really began around 1721. That year the Duke of Montagu, a famous nobleman, became Grand Master. Other historians still defend 1717. This is a disputed question, and both sides point to evidence.

In 1723 a Scottish minister in London, James Anderson, published The Constitutions of the Free-Masons. A constitution is a set of basic rules for a group. This one gave the Grand Lodge its rules and a long, legend-filled history of the craft.

The first charge was about God and religion. It said a Mason must obey the moral law. Then it did something new. It asked Masons to hold only the religion in which all men agree, and to keep their own opinions to themselves. In Britain then, many public offices were open only to members of the Church of England.

Other rules told members not to argue about politics or religion in the lodge. The lodge was meant to be a calm place where men who disagreed outside could meet as friends. In a time of bitter quarrels over church and king, that was a new idea.

The book traveled far. Lodges in many places used it as their guide. In 1734, Benjamin Franklin reprinted it in Philadelphia. It was the first Masonic book printed in America. A London rulebook now had readers across the ocean.

A new member moved through steps called degrees. By about 1730 there were three: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason. The names came from the old building trade. Each degree had its own ceremony.

A ritual is a ceremony done the same way each time. Masonic rituals used short plays, questions and answers, and symbols. The legends inside them were still changing. A paper from 1726, the Graham Manuscript, tells a story about Noah’s sons, not the story later Masons used.

Members promised to keep the rituals private. Outsiders were curious. In 1730, a writer named Samuel Prichard printed Masonry Dissected, which claimed to reveal all three degrees. It sold very well. Books like it are called exposés.

Lodges were also about charity, giving help to people in need. Lodges collected money to help members who fell on hard times and the families of members who died. Members saw this as one of the main duties of a Mason.

Freemasonry spread fast across Europe in the 1720s and 1730s. Lodges opened in France, Italy and other Catholic countries. Church leaders grew worried about groups that met in private.

On 28 April 1738, Pope Clement XII issued a papal bull, an official letter from the pope, called In eminenti. It was the first time the Catholic Church condemned Freemasonry. Catholics who joined a lodge faced excommunication, being cut off from the Church’s sacraments.

The bull gave two main reasons. Masons swore oaths of secrecy, so the Church could not know what they did. And lodges mixed men of all religions as equals, which the Church saw as a danger to faith. Some historians also point to the politics of the time, when lodges were linked to rival kings. They disagree about how much that mattered.

Members saw things differently. To them, the lodge was a place of friendship and moral teaching, open to good men of any faith. Both views help explain the long tension between the Church and the lodges.

In 1730, Benjamin Franklin was a young printer in Philadelphia. He owned a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. In December 1730 his paper reported that several lodges of Freemasons had been set up in the colony. People were curious and guessing about them. Franklin’s tone was a bit teasing.

A few months later, Franklin joined one of those lodges himself. He became a member of St. John’s Lodge in Philadelphia in 1731. By 1734 he was Grand Master of the Masons of Pennsylvania, the leader of all the lodges there.

That same year, Franklin used his press to reprint Anderson’s Constitutions. It was the first Masonic book printed in America. Later, while he lived in France, Franklin belonged to a famous Paris lodge called the Nine Sisters.

Franklin’s story shows how a fraternity, a brotherhood club, could spread through print. A rulebook from London crossed the ocean and was sold in Philadelphia by a printer who was also a member.

On 4 November 1752, a lodge in Fredericksburg, Virginia, wrote a short note in its account book. It said that Mr. George Washington had been made an Entered Apprentice that evening. Washington was 20 years old. He paid a fee of two pounds and three shillings.

A ledger is a book where money and events are recorded. The lodge’s ledger shows each step Washington took. He became a Fellow Craft on 3 March 1753 and a Master Mason on 4 August 1753. That is less than a year for all three degrees.

Washington stayed a Mason all his life. In 1788 he was named master of the lodge in Alexandria, Virginia, near his home at Mount Vernon. When he died in 1799, Masons took part in his funeral.

Some later stories made Washington the head of all American Masons. That is not true. No such office existed. The records show a real member, but not a national leader of the fraternity.

Paul Revere was a silversmith in Boston. He made cups, spoons and engraved prints. Today he is famous for his midnight ride in April 1775, warning that British troops were coming. He was also a devoted Mason.

Revere belonged to St. Andrew’s Lodge in Boston. He stayed active for decades. In the 1790s he served as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, the top leader of the state’s Masons.

Another member was Dr. Joseph Warren, a Boston doctor and patriot leader. Warren led a group of Massachusetts Masons before the war. He was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. John Hancock, who signed the Declaration of Independence first, was also a Mason.

So some well-known patriots were Masons. That is documented, which means proved by records from the time. But being in the same club does not prove the club planned the Revolution. Many patriots were not Masons, and many Masons were not patriots.

In 1798, John Adams was President of the United States. The country was worried about a possible war with France. The Grand Lodge of Massachusetts sent him a friendly letter of support. Its Grand Master was Josiah Bartlett.

On 22 June 1798, Adams wrote back. He thanked the Masons warmly. Then he said something plain. He had never had the chance to be initiated into their fraternity. To be initiated means to be brought into a group through a ceremony.

Adams also praised the Masons he had known. He said many of his best friends were Masons. So the letter is friendly, not angry. It does not attack the lodge at all. It simply shows that he was not a member.

This is a strong kind of evidence. It is a firsthand statement, from the person himself, written at the time. Anyone who says Adams was a Mason has to explain away his own letter.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Later he became the third president. Many websites, posters and lists of famous Masons include his name. Is that true? Let’s check the records.

Historians have looked for lodge records with his name. They have found none. Monticello, the museum at Jefferson’s home, says he is not known to have belonged to any fraternal group such as the Freemasons. No lodge list, minute or letter names him as a member.

Notice the careful wording: "not known to have belonged." Historians rarely say "never" unless they have a statement like Adams’s letter. With Jefferson, we have an absence of evidence, meaning no records turn up. That is different from proof that something never happened.

So the honest answer is this. We have no evidence that Jefferson was a Mason. Until someone finds a real record, a claim that he was one is unsupported. A lodge list, a letter or a minute could change that answer.

In 1798, many Americans were afraid of a secret group called the Illuminati. It had been started in Bavaria, in Germany, in 1776 and was shut down there in the 1780s. Books claimed it was secretly working through Masonic lodges.

A man named G. W. Snyder sent Washington one of these books. He worried that American lodges were in danger. Washington answered him in two letters, on 25 September and 24 October 1798.

Washington wrote that he did not lead any lodge. He said he had seldom been inside one in many years. He also said he did not believe any lodges in this country were spreading Illuminati ideas. He did think such ideas might be spreading in other ways.

These letters are useful. Washington was a real Mason, but in old age he said his part in lodge life had been small. Letters like these help us measure a claim, not just repeat it.

A cornerstone is the first stone set at the corner of a new building. In the 1700s, laying it was a big public event. Masons often led these ceremonies. It made sense, since their fraternity took its symbols from builders.

On 18 September 1793, a crowd gathered on a hill in the new federal city, which would become Washington, D.C. The Grand Lodge of Maryland led the ceremony, with members of Alexandria Lodge No. 22 from Virginia. President Washington took part as a Mason.

Washington laid a silver plate with the stone. It recorded the date and the event. There was a parade, music and speeches. It was one of the most public things the Masons did in the young nation.

Here is a surprise. Today no one knows exactly where that cornerstone is. Searches have not found it. The ceremony is well documented, but the stone itself is hidden somewhere in the Capitol’s walls.

Some books and videos claim the American Revolution was planned inside Masonic lodges. It is a popular story, and it can sound convincing. Let’s test that claim with what we know from the records.

First, Masons were on both sides. The British army had its own lodges that traveled with its regiments. Many British officers were Masons. In Boston, Prince Hall and fourteen other free Black men were made Masons in a lodge attached to a British regiment. Lodge histories give the date as 1775; a 2026 study argues for 1778.

Second, many key founders were not Masons. John Adams said so himself. Jefferson is not known to have joined. Careful counts of the 56 signers of the Declaration find proof of lodge membership for only a small number of them. Counts differ from source to source.

The claim is unsupported. Masons were part of colonial life, as churches and clubs were. Some patriots met in lodges. But no record shows the lodges as a body planning the war. Most Masons, like most colonists, simply took one side or the other.

On 4 July 1776, the same day it approved the Declaration, Congress asked three men to design a seal. A seal is an official design stamped on important papers to show they are real. The three were Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

They asked for help from Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, an artist living in Philadelphia. Franklin suggested a scene of Moses at the Red Sea. Jefferson suggested the people of Israel in the wilderness. The committee’s final design mixed several ideas.

The committee’s report of 20 August 1776 included an eye. It described the Eye of Providence in a glowing triangle, shining over the whole design. Providence means God’s care and guidance. An eye like this was a common symbol of God’s watchfulness in Christian art long before.

Congress set the design aside. But the eye idea stayed in the record. Of the three committee members, only Franklin was a Mason. Du Simitière has no records showing Masonic membership, so historians say he is not known to have been a Mason.

After the first design was set aside, Congress tried again. A second committee worked in 1780. A third worked in 1782. Each committee added ideas. None of them finished the job alone.

In June 1782, Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, took the best ideas from all three. A young Philadelphia lawyer, William Barton, helped with the back of the seal. Congress adopted the Great Seal on 20 June 1782.

The front shows the eagle. The back, called the reverse, shows an unfinished pyramid. At its base are the Roman numerals MDCCLXXVI, which mean 1776. Above it is the eye in a triangle. There are two Latin mottos. A motto is a short saying. One means that God has favored our undertakings. The other means a new order of the ages.

What did the unfinished pyramid mean? The designers explained it as strength and lasting power, with the country still being built. The eye showed Providence watching over it. The record shows no Masonic plan behind these choices.

For more than 150 years, few Americans ever saw the back of the Great Seal. Then, in the 1930s, Henry A. Wallace read the State Department’s history of the seal. Wallace was the Secretary of Agriculture. He took the idea to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Roosevelt liked it. In 1935, both sides of the Great Seal were printed on the back of the one-dollar bill. That is the design Maya was holding. It is still there today, on every one-dollar bill printed since.

Here is an interesting detail. Wallace and Roosevelt were both Masons. Years later, Wallace wrote that the eye had caught their attention because Masons also used an all-seeing eye as a symbol of God. So Masons did help choose to put the seal on the dollar.

But look closely at the timeline. The eye was proposed in 1776 and the pyramid adopted in 1782. Wallace and Roosevelt copied a design that already existed. They did not create it. Two different questions have two different answers.

Let’s go back to Maya’s question: did the Freemasons put the eye on the pyramid? Historians test a claim by following the paper trail, the records made at the time, step by step.

Step one: who designed the eye? The 1776 committee and its artist, Du Simitière, who is not known to have been a Mason. Step two: who added the pyramid? Thomson and Barton in 1782. The records do not show a Masonic plan. Step three: who put it on the dollar? Wallace and Roosevelt in 1935, both Masons.

There is one more twist. Masons did use an all-seeing eye in their own art. It became common in American Masonic books by the late 1790s, after the seal was adopted. Historians still debate whether Masons used it earlier. Both the seal and the lodges drew on the older Christian symbol.

So the claim is partly true and partly false. Masons did not design the seal. Two Masons did choose to put it on the dollar. A good conclusion keeps both facts. It does not stretch one of them into a secret plot.