Lodges and incorporations

Freemasonry as it emerged in seventeenth-century Scotland was based on lodges, secret or semi-secret organisations of initiates combining sociability and fraternity with elaborate secrets and (usually) with efforts to regulate entry to the craft of stonemason and the working practices of stonemasons. In the course of the century increasing numbers of non-stonemasons were accepted as members, and a few lodges came to be dominated by such men. Summarising the origins and development of these early lodges is not easy, however. The dates of the earliest known references to the existence of individual lodges can be listed, but it is rarely possible to establish the dates on which they were founded. Sometimes lodge records survive from what was probably the time of their foundation, but they seldom admit that the lodge is a new creation. In an age which looked to tradition and antiquity to give status and legitimacy, few institutions were brashly prepared to announce that they were novelties, and the masons with their claims to be heirs of a great past were particularly unlikely to do so: in the various localities there had been masons for generations, who felt bound to each other by their practice of the same craft, and lodges tended to see themselves growing out of this past rather than being created at a certain time.