The history of Scottish Freemasonry

Where Freemasonry began is one of the most argued-over questions in the history of voluntary societies. For much of the twentieth century the standard account was English: a fraternity that grew out of the medieval masons’ guilds and took its modern form when four London lodges formed a Grand Lodge in 1717. Since the publication of David Stevenson’s The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710 in 1988, historians have given a much larger place to Scotland.¹ The reason is simple. Scotland has the documents. Its lodges kept written minutes from 1599, and those minutes show, decade by decade, how a trade organisation of working masons turned into something recognisably Masonic.

William Schaw and the lodges, 1598–1599

The story starts with William Schaw (c. 1550–1602), a courtier of James VI who was appointed principal Master of Works to the Crown in December 1583, in charge of the royal castles and palaces.¹ Schaw also took the title of General Warden of the masons, and in that role he issued two codes of regulations for the craft, now known as the Schaw Statutes.

The first, dated 28 December 1598, was addressed to all master masons in Scotland. It set out the duties of masons to their lodge and their masters, limited the number of apprentices, laid down how apprentices and fellows of craft were to be admitted in the presence of a set number of masters, and imposed penalties for poor or unsafe work.³ The second, signed at Holyroodhouse on 28 December 1599, went further.² It ranked the lodges, placing Edinburgh first, Kilwinning in Ayrshire second as the “heid and secund ludge”, and Stirling third. It required every lodge to elect a warden each year and to employ a notary as clerk, so that admissions could be recorded in writing. And in a clause that has fascinated historians ever since, it ordered the wardens to test each fellow of craft and apprentice in “the art of memorie and science thairof”.

Stevenson argues that the memory clause links the Scottish lodges to the Renaissance “art of memory”, a technique of fixing ideas in the mind by imagining them placed in a building, and that Schaw, a cultivated man who moved in court circles, was deliberately giving the masons’ lodges a learned and ritual character as well as a regulatory one.¹ Whether or not that reading is accepted, the statutes did something no one disputes. They made the lodge a permanent, organised body that met regularly and kept records. Schaw died in April 1602 and is buried in Dunfermline Abbey, where his monument still stands.

The oldest lodge minutes

Schaw’s order to keep written records was obeyed. The earliest surviving lodge minute in the world comes from the lodge of Aitchison’s Haven, a small harbour in East Lothian. It is dated 9 January 1598, which in modern reckoning is 9 January 1599, since the Scottish year then began on 25 March.⁵ The lodge has long since ceased to work, and its minute book is now held by the Grand Lodge of Scotland.

The Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary’s Chapel), now No. 1 on the roll of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, has minutes beginning on 31 July 1599. They are the oldest minutes of any lodge still working, and the full run from 1598 to 1738 was transcribed and published by Quatuor Coronati Lodge in 1962.⁴ The lodge takes its name from the chapel of St Mary in Niddry’s Wynd where it met, a building demolished in the eighteenth century to make way for Edinburgh’s South Bridge.

These records are ordinary in the best sense. They note the admission of apprentices, disputes between masters, fines for working with “cowans” (masons who had not been properly admitted), and the election of wardens. No English lodge has records like them from before the early eighteenth century.

Gentlemen in the lodge

The most important change recorded in the Scottish minutes is the arrival of men who were not masons by trade. Historians call them non-operative, or accepted, masons, and the process by which they came to outnumber the operatives is the process by which Freemasonry was born.

On 8 June 1600 the Lodge of Edinburgh met at Holyroodhouse. Among those who signed the minute was John Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, who added his mark after his name just as the master masons did.⁴ It is the earliest record of a non-operative attending a lodge, though when or how he was admitted is not known.

In 1634 the same lodge admitted Lord Alexander, his brother Sir Anthony Alexander, and Sir Alexander Strachan of Thornton. The Alexanders were sons of the Earl of Stirling, and Anthony was himself the King’s Master of Works, so the admission of a royal official had a practical logic. But these were the first clear cases of gentlemen being made members, and the lodge itself regards them as the beginning of its non-operative membership.⁶

The best-known early case happened outside Scotland. On 20 May 1641, members of the Lodge of Edinburgh serving with the Scottish army in the north of England admitted Sir Robert Moray at Newcastle, and the admission was recorded in the lodge’s own minute book.⁷ Moray went on to become one of the founders of the Royal Society in 1660, and his initiation is the earliest surviving record of a man being made a mason on English soil.

Through the rest of the seventeenth century more lodges admitted gentlemen, and some, such as the Lodge of Aberdeen, came to have more non-operative members than operatives. Aberdeen’s “Mark Book” of 1670 lists its members together with the marks they used, nobles, ministers and merchants alongside the masons.¹

The Mason Word

What drew gentlemen to a trade body? Part of the answer seems to be a secret. From the 1630s Scottish sources refer to the “Mason Word”, a means of recognition that let a properly admitted mason prove his status to strangers. A poem published in Perth in 1638, Henry Adamson’s The Muses Threnodie, contains the lines “For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse; We have the Mason Word and second sight”, which shows that the Word was by then known well enough to be mentioned in verse, and already carried a hint of the occult.¹

The earliest surviving description of what admission involved is a document of 1696 now in the National Records of Scotland, known as the Edinburgh Register House Manuscript. It sets out the questions masons put to anyone claiming to have the Word before they would acknowledge him, followed by an account of how the Word was given to a new entrant.⁸ Several similar Scottish texts survive from the years around 1700. Together they are the oldest evidence for Masonic ritual, and they describe two grades, entered apprentice and fellow of craft, before the three-degree system appeared in the 1720s.

The St Clairs of Roslin, and some myths

Two documents of about 1601 and 1628, known as the St Clair Charters, record masons from several lodges recognising the St Clairs of Roslin as patrons and protectors of the craft in Scotland. Facsimiles were published by David Murray Lyon in his history of the Lodge of Edinburgh.³ On the strength of these charters the family later claimed a hereditary right to lead the masons.

That claim has grown in the retelling. Rosslyn Chapel, begun by William Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, in 1446, has been linked in popular books to the Knights Templar, to hidden treasure and to a secret origin of Freemasonry. There is no historical evidence for any of this. The Templars were suppressed between 1307 and 1312, more than a century before the chapel was begun, and the earliest records of Masonic lodges come from the 1590s, a century and a half after it.⁹ Stevenson concludes that, for all their later prominence in Masonic tradition, the St Clairs contributed little to the development of either the operative or the speculative craft.¹

The Grand Lodge of Scotland, 1736

By the early eighteenth century Scotland had around a hundred lodges, independent of one another and answerable to no central body. A Grand Lodge was formed in London in 1717, by the traditional date, though recent research suggests it may only have been organised in 1721.¹⁰ Ireland had a Grand Lodge by 1725. In 1735 four Edinburgh lodges began to discuss doing the same for Scotland, and invited every lodge they knew of to send representatives.

The meeting was held on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1736, in Mary’s Chapel. About a third of the Scottish lodges, thirty-three by the usual count, were represented.⁵ William St Clair of Roslin, who had been made a mason in Lodge Canongate Kilwinning only that May, formally gave up any hereditary claim his family had to be patrons of the craft, and was then elected the first Grand Master Mason of Scotland.¹ Lodges were ranked on the roll by the antiquity they could prove from their records, which is why the Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary’s Chapel) is No. 1.

The Grand Lodge has been based in George Street, Edinburgh, since the nineteenth century. Its first Freemasons’ Hall there, designed by David Bryce, opened in 1859. It was replaced in 1911–12 by the present building, by the architect Alexander Hunter Crawford, which is listed at Category A and also houses the Grand Lodge’s museum and library.¹¹

Kilwinning and the question of precedence

Not every lodge accepted the new order. The lodge at Kilwinning in Ayrshire had a strong tradition that it was the oldest in Scotland, founded by the masons who built Kilwinning Abbey, and Schaw had acknowledged its standing in 1599. But its early records had been lost, and the Grand Lodge placed it second on the roll, behind Edinburgh. In 1743 Kilwinning withdrew and for more than sixty years acted as a Grand Lodge in its own right, issuing charters to new lodges. Many of the lodges it chartered, before and after 1736, took “Kilwinning” into their names, Canongate Kilwinning among them.

The dispute was settled in 1807. Kilwinning rejoined the Grand Lodge and was placed at the head of the roll as Lodge Mother Kilwinning, No. 0, a compromise that honoured its claim without formally accepting it.¹²

Burns and the eighteenth century

Eighteenth-century Scottish Freemasonry was sociable, convivial and patriotic, and its best-known member is Robert Burns. He was initiated in the Lodge St David at Tarbolton, in Ayrshire, on 4 July 1781, at the age of twenty-two, and was passed and raised there on 1 October 1781.¹³ He was later Depute Master of Lodge St James Tarbolton, and the Masonic connections he made helped him find subscribers and patrons when he went to Edinburgh in 1786. Lodge Canongate Kilwinning holds that he was made its Poet Laureate in 1787, though the famous painting of the scene is imaginary and some historians doubt the details.¹⁴ His “Farewell to the Brethren of St James’s Lodge, Tarbolton” is still sung in Scottish lodges.

Scottish lodges abroad

Scots travelled, and they took their lodges with them. The Grand Lodge of Scotland began chartering lodges overseas in the eighteenth century, in the American colonies and elsewhere. One of the most famous was the Lodge of St Andrew in Boston, which worked under a Scottish charter from 1760 and counted Paul Revere and Joseph Warren among its members in the years before the American Revolution.¹⁵

In the nineteenth century Scottish lodges followed trade and empire to India, Africa, Australia, the Pacific and East Asia. Lodges abroad were grouped into District Grand Lodges answerable to Edinburgh, and many still are. Today the Grand Lodge of Scotland has thirty-two Provincial Grand Lodges at home and twenty-six District Grand Lodges overseas.⁵

Japan was part of this story. Freemasonry arrived with the foreign settlements after the ports opened in 1859. Lodge Hiogo and Osaka No. 498 received its Scottish charter in February 1870 and was consecrated in Kobe that May.¹⁶ Lodge Star in the East No. 640 followed in Yokohama, chartered at Freemasons’ Hall in Edinburgh on 1 May 1879 and consecrated on 16 September that year. Both still work today under the District Grand Lodge of the Far East.

What makes Scottish Freemasonry distinctive

Much of what makes a Scottish lodge different comes straight out of this history.

• Independence. Scottish lodges existed long before their Grand Lodge, and they kept their own character after it was formed. Each has its own bye-laws, its own traditions and often its own colours, and the Grand Lodge has never imposed a single standard ritual.
• The Mark. Masons’ marks appear throughout the early Scottish records, and the Mark was worked as a separate degree in Scotland by 1778.¹⁷ The Grand Lodge of Scotland, almost alone among Grand Lodges, treats the Mark as part of Craft Freemasonry, conferred in the lodge on Master Masons. Star in the East has worked it since 1920.
• Titles. The Master of a Scottish lodge is the Right Worshipful Master, supported by a Depute Master and a Substitute Master as well as the two Wardens.
• Precedence by antiquity. The roll still runs from Mother Kilwinning No. 0 and Mary’s Chapel No. 1, a reminder of the records on which it was built.

For more on how a Scottish lodge works today, see What is Scottish Freemasonry?

A note on sources

The history of Freemasonry has suffered from two kinds of writer: Masonic enthusiasts who wanted the craft to be older and grander than the evidence allows, and conspiracy writers who wanted it to be more sinister. Since the mid-twentieth century the subject has been put on a firmer footing by historians working from the documents, notably Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones in Manchester, Harry Carr and the members of Quatuor Coronati Lodge in London, and David Stevenson, emeritus professor of Scottish history at the University of St Andrews. Stevenson’s two books of 1988 remain the starting point for anyone interested in the Scottish story, and this article relies on them heavily.

Some dates in early Masonic history vary between sources, often because of the change from the old Scottish calendar, in which the year began on 25 March, or because a later history copied an error. Where the sources disagree we have given the date supported by the original records or by the most careful modern study. If you spot an error, please write to the Secretary.

Notes

1. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; repr. 1990), ISBN 978-0-521-39654-7. Cambridge Core.
2. Text of the second Schaw Statutes, from the Eglinton muniments: William Fraser, Memorials of the Montgomeries, Earls of Eglinton, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1859), pp. 239–240.
3. David Murray Lyon, History of the Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary’s Chapel) No. 1, Embracing an Account of the Rise and Progress of Freemasonry in Scotland (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1873), which prints the first Schaw Statutes and facsimiles of the St Clair Charters.
4. Harry Carr (ed.), The Minutes of the Lodge of Edinburgh, Mary’s Chapel, No. 1, 1598–1738, Quatuor Coronatorum Antigrapha vol. 13 (London: Quatuor Coronati Lodge, 1962). PDF from Quatuor Coronati Lodge.
5. David Stevenson, The First Freemasons: Scotland’s Early Lodges and their Members (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988; 2nd edn, Edinburgh: Grand Lodge of Scotland, 2001); Grand Lodge of Scotland Year Book 2026, pp. 34–40.
6. Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary’s Chapel) No. 1, history of the lodge; see also Lyon (note 3).
7. “Moray, Robert”, Scotland, Scandinavia and Northern European Biographical Database, University of St Andrews, SSNE 6599; Carr (note 4).
8. Douglas Knoop, G. P. Jones and Douglas Hamer (eds), The Early Masonic Catechisms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1943; 2nd edn, ed. Harry Carr, London: Quatuor Coronati Lodge, 1963).
9. Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, review of the Rosslyn Chapel literature; on the dates of the earliest lodges, Stevenson (note 1).
10. Andrew Prescott and Susan Mitchell Sommers, “Searching for the Apple Tree: Revisiting the Earliest Years of Organized English Freemasonry”, in John S. Wade (ed.), Reflections on 300 Years of Freemasonry (London: Lewis Masonic, 2017).
11. Historic Environment Scotland, listed building record for Freemasons’ Hall, 96–98 George Street, Edinburgh, Category A (British Listed Buildings).
12. North Ayrshire Heritage Trails, “Mother Lodge, Kilwinning”; Stevenson (note 5).
13. Grand Lodge of Scotland, “Our National Bard, Brother Robert Burns”.
14. National Trust for Scotland, “Freemasonry and Robert Burns”, Robert Burns Birthplace Museum collections.
15. Paul Revere Memorial Association, “Paul Revere and Freemasonry: A Lifelong Pursuit”.
16. “Lodge Hiogo & Osaka No. 498”, District Grand Lodge of the Far East history papers, skirret.com.
17. “The Mark Degree in the Far East”, District Grand Lodge of the Far East history papers, skirret.com.