The First Freemasons: Scotland's Early Lodges & Their Members

Freemasonry has long been a controversial subject. This book sets out to place the early history of freemasonry on a sound footing by undertaking a comprehensive survey of the earliest of all masonic lodges, those of Scotland, in the first century of their existence. Most of these early Scottish lodges still exist today, and many of them have records dating from the seventeenth century—and indeed in two cases, from 1599. Yet no previous attempt has been made to use this evidence systematically in order to analyse the lodges, their activities, and their members. The picture that emerges is of the Medieval mythology of the mason craft being blended in Scotland in the closing years of the sixteenth century with a rich mix of late Renaissance intellectual developments to create a movement unique in its ideals and organisation. The secret societies (the very existence of the lodges was at first kept secret) were at first confined largely to craftsmen, but in time men from other ranks of s