Freemasonry

The received account is precise: on 24 June 1717, four London lodges met at the Goose and Gridiron alehouse in St Paul's Churchyard and constituted the first Grand Lodge. The date is engraved on the fraternity's own sense of itself, and its tercentenary was marked in 2017.

The difficulty is the source. The 1717 meeting is not recorded in any document written at the time. It appears first in James Anderson's New Book of Constitutions of 1738, twenty-one years afterwards, in a historical preface by an author whose earlier 1723 Constitutions, written closer to the events, does not mention it. The Grand Lodge's own minutes do not begin until 1723.

Andrew Prescott and Susan Mitchell Sommers set this problem out in detail in work published for the tercentenary itself, which is an unusual thing for a commemorative occasion to host. Their argument is not that the meeting is an invention, but that a single retrospective account by an interested author, unsupported by contemporary record and contradicted in emphasis by that author's own earlier book, cannot carry the weight placed on it. They suggest the organisation of a grand lodge was more plausibly a gradual process across the early 1720s, and that 1717 is a foundation narrative composed after the fact to give it a clean origin.

The wider history is not affected. Lodges of accepted, non-operative members are attested in Scotland from the late sixteenth century and in England through the seventeenth, and Margaret Jacob's work established how thoroughly lodge sociability was woven into eighteenth-century European political culture. The fraternity's antiquity is not in question.

What is in question is a specific date, and the reason it is worth raising is methodological rather than deflationary. An institution that keeps unusually good records of itself from 1723 onwards has, for the years before that, exactly one late and interested witness. The distinction between what an organisation documents and what it remembers is visible here more clearly than almost anywhere else in this collection.

Freemasonry is a secret society whose secrets are available in any large library. Exposures began almost as soon as the Grand Lodge did. Masonry Dissected appeared in 1730, Three Distinct Knocks in 1760, Jachin and Boaz in 1762, and Duncan's Ritual, still the standard American reference, in 1866. Grand Lodges have published their own ritual books. Anyone who wants to read the ceremonies can.

What is actually withheld is narrower than the reputation suggests: the modes of recognition, and the experience of undergoing the ceremony without knowing what comes next. The obligations a candidate takes are about not disclosing those, and the fearsome penalties attached to them have been symbolic for a long time and are omitted outright in many jurisdictions.

The structure is simple. Three degrees, Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason, are worked in a lodge, and the third contains the drama of Hiram Abiff, the architect murdered rather than reveal what he knows and then raised. Everything above the third degree, the Scottish Rite's thirty-three and the York Rite bodies, is additional and confers no authority over a craft lodge, whatever the numbering implies.

The persistent question is not what happens in lodge but what membership did outside it. Historians of the eighteenth century treat the lodges as a genuinely new civic form, where men of different rank and confession met under rules of their own making, and read that as more consequential than any ritual.