Early Scottish lodges

The Lodge of Edinburgh's later premises at 19 Hill Street, photographed in 2012. This is not its sixteenth-century meeting place. Photograph: kim traynor, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Early Scottish lodges provide a substantial body of evidence for Freemasonry before the formation of the eighteenth-century Grand Lodges. Surviving minutes, craft agreements and The Schaw Statutes show organisations concerned with the mason trade, membership and fellowship. Their membership and relations with local authorities varied considerably.^[1]

The surviving records

The date of a first surviving reference establishes that a lodge existed by that point; it does not necessarily identify its foundation. Stevenson arranges the following early examples by their earliest known references.^[2]

Lodge	Earliest reference listed by Stevenson
Aitchison's Haven	9 January 1599
Edinburgh	31 July 1599
St Andrews	27 November 1599
Kilwinning and Stirling	28 December 1599
Haddington	1599
Dunfermline	1600–1601

The evidence is uneven. Aitchison's Haven and Edinburgh have series of minutes beginning in 1599; Kilwinning's surviving minutes begin in 1642, although the lodge is named in the 1599 statutes. Some other lodges are known only through isolated references.^[1] The Lodge of Edinburgh confirms that it preserves minutes reaching back to July 1599.^[3]

Lodges and incorporations

A Scottish craft incorporation was a body exercising trade privileges under burgh authority. It was not necessarily identical to a lodge. In Edinburgh, the lodge and the Incorporation of Masons and Wrights shared personnel and premises but maintained distinct claims to authority. Elsewhere the relationship could be closer, looser or absent. Local evidence is therefore needed before using “guild”, “incorporation” and “lodge” interchangeably.^[1]

Lodge records include admissions, fees, trade disputes and communal meals. They reveal an organisation's decisions more readily than the personal beliefs or motives of each member.^[1]

Members outside the mason trade

Edinburgh's records name Lord Alexander, Anthony Alexander and Alexander Strachan among admissions in 1634, and Robert Moray in 1641.^[3] These examples should not obscure less prominent members from other occupations. A non-operative member was someone outside stonemasonry, not necessarily a gentleman.^[1]

Recruitment did not follow a uniform progression from working masons to gentlemen. Stevenson finds interruptions, reversals and considerable local variation. The distinction between occupation and intellectual interests is discussed in Operative and speculative Freemasonry.^[1]

References

↑ ^1.0 ^1.1 ^1.2 ^1.3 ^1.4 ^1.5 David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590–1710 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 190–212.
↑ Stevenson, Origins of Freemasonry, pp. 190–191, 234–235.
↑ ^3.0 ^3.1 Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary's Chapel) No. 1, Oldest Masonic Minutes and The admission of Speculative Freemasons.