Although the world polychronicon is English, and the document to which it gave its name was the most important writing in a period of about two centuries, the word is almost never used, and the writing is seldom mentioned in histories of English literature. For all that, the Polychronicon is a subject with which we Freemasons must familiarize ourselves, because it was one of our principal origins; because without a knowledge of it we can understand neither the history of our Fraternity nor our Ritual; and the Old Charges would be a sealed book without it.
Ranulf Higdon (also spelled Higden) a Benedictine Monk, lived in a monastery in Chester for sixty-four years, and died, it is believed, in 1363 A.D.; he therefore could not have been born later than 1299 A.D. He spent the largest number of those years in compiling a chronicle of which the complete title was, loosely translated, "A Polychronicon from the Beginning of the World to the Reign of Edward III, in seven Books," by "Ranulphi Castrensis Cognomine Higdon." The original work was written in Latin. After Higdon's death, it was carried on by two other compilers. The first of the translations made into English was clone by John of Trevisa, in 1387, and became so famous that the book is often called by his name. Caxton printed it in 1482 A.D., ten years before Columbus discovered America, and there is reason to believe that Columbus's own teacher in geography and navigation had read it. More than 100 copies of the Polyclnonicon are now in existence. One of them was published by the British Government in the Rolls Series as No. 41, edited by Babington and Lumby.
The word Polychionicon defines itself, the poly meaning "many or inclusive," the chronicle meaning "chronicle, or writing of, or history"; a polychronicon was a collection of many paragraphs, or many articles or chapters, on many subjects, of many kinds, and was therefore roughly comparable to a modern encyclopedia, or omnium gatherum. The compiler gathered into his net whatever he could find, from far or near, ancient or modern, events out of history, old stories, tales of adventure, accounts of marvels, bits and fragments of Ancient or of Medieval sciences, antiquarian gossip, or what not. He did not weigh or criticize his sources, or care much what his sources were, and helped himself to whatever suited his fancy or might interest a reader. He left behind him a huge scrap-book, in the miscellany of which are things possible and impossible, credible and incredible, all jumbled together. Works of this kind were immensely popular and might have any one of a dozen titles, but for the most part they were called polychronicons. Higdon's was probably the best of any of them, certainly it was the best written, and it was the best of the great specimens to be produced before the invention of printing. This also was a source book for the earliest writers in Modern English, and any number of its traditions and ideas passed into general literature, so that we all carry about in our minds more than one work or thought which we owe to a book which we have never read, by an author of whom we have never heard.
When in the middle of the Fourteenth Century the first permanent Lodge found the need to have a written charter, or constitution, they had a now unknown scribe prepare for them a document which ever since has been known generally as the Old Charges. The oldest existing specimen is the Regius MS., written at about 1892 A.D. to 1400 A.D.; the second oldest is the Cooke MS., written some twenty or thirty years later. Each of these is a version of an original which either was lost or remains undiscovered; it is not believed that either the writer of the Regius MS., or of the Cooke MS., had the original before him but that he worked from a copy; and it is believed that the Cooke is from an older version and the more important historically.
Beginning at line 132 of the Cooke MS., the author states frankly that what he is setting down about the history of Free-masonry, which he also calls Geometry, he has taken from a number of old books among them a polychronicon. Freely transliterated, his lines read: "You shall understand that among all the crafts of the world men's Masonry has the most notable and largest part of this science of geometry, as it is noted and stated in Stories (Histories) and in the Bible, and in the Master of Stories,. And in the stories that are named Beda. And in Polychronion, a chronicle preuyd (which means, authoritative); De Imagine mundi & Isorodorus ethomolegeriaum, Methodius episcopus & martyr, and many others."
The polychronicon is more likely to have been Higdon's than not, but if it was not Higdon's it was one very similar to it. "The Master of Stories" was Peter Comestor, a Frenchman, who was nicknamed "the bookworm," who became chancellor of Notre Dame in Paris, while there wrote his famous Historia Scholastica. and died at some unknown date between 1178 A.D. and 1189 A.D. "Beda" was the chief ecclesiastical chronicler; he wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation in 731 A.D. De Imagine way written by a Frenchman, believed to have been a bishop, and may have written his book within some years after 1100 A.D.
Isidorus was the noted Isidore, Bishop of Seville, who lived between 570 A.D. and 636 A.D., and whose Sentences, a sort of theological dictionary, was for centuries a standard work scarcely less reverenced than the Bible.
Methodius was a Fourth Century Bishop, who suffered martyrdom in 312 A.D. and won remembrance as the theological opponent of the great "Origen."
The writer of the Cooke MS. may have had these books before him but it is more reasonable to believe that he found them quoted in his polychronicon: the jostling of many writers together, of different periods of time orthodox and heretical, wa, one of the characteristics of the polychronicon.
It is interesting to compare two passages from Higdon's Polychronicon with parallel lines from the Cooke MS. Higdon tell the story of Jubal, Tubalcain, etc., as very loosely transliterated:
"This Lamech took two wives, Ada and Silla, and had two sons; of Ada was born Jabel, that was father of them that wander in tents and pavilions. And Tubal that was inventor of organs and harpers. And of Silla was born Tubalcain, a smith who worked with a hammer; and his sister Naamah, inventor of the craft of weaving.
"Tubalcain founded first the smith's craft, and when Tubalcain wrought in his smithy, Tubal had great liking to hear the hammers sound, and he found proportions and harmony of melody in the hammers, and so they used them much in the accord of melody but he was not the inventor of the instruments of music, for the were invented long afterwards."
The author goes on to say that they were invented by Pythagoras. At another place he tells the story of the two pillars; "The time men knew, so Adam had said, that they should be destroyed by fire or by water, therefore the books that they had made by great travail and study would be destroyed. They enclosed them in two great pillars of marble and of tile. In a pillar of marble for water, and in a pillar of tile for fire, in order to save them for the help of mankind."
The Cooke MS., beginning at line 159, and at various places in the text following it, says (loosely transliterated): "In Adam's line lineally descending clown the seven ages before Noah's Flood there was a man that was called Lamech; he had two wives, one called Ada, and another called Sella. By the first wife he begot two sons, one called Jabel and the other called Jubal." He goes on say that the elder son discovered geometry and Masonry, and made houses; he was a Master of Masons, and built the first city. And his brother Jubal, or Tubal, was fonder of music and song, as Pythagoras is represented as saying in the Polyehronicon. And he goes on to say "that he found that science by the sound of ponderations of his brother's hammers...." "Tubalcain was fonder of the smith's craft, and his sister 'Neemah' was the discoverer of weaving, and this third brother aforesaid had knowledge that God would take vengeance for sin either by fire or by water." They took counsel as to how to save the arts and sciences. "There were two kinds of stone of such quality that one will never burn, and it is called marble. And the other stone will not sink in water and is named Cacerus: And so they devised to write all the sciences that they had found in the two stones." So they made two pillars, and because they did Noah and his wife, and their sons and their wives, eight in all, had the arts and sciences to use to build the world over again "after all the world was drowned."
In one form or another, and to one degree or another, the succeeding versions of the Old Charges repeated these old stories.
When the Mother Grand Lodge came to collect these "old manuscripts" and to compare them in order to prepare the Book of Constitutions in 1722 A.D., they did not quote the Old Charges verbatim but they at least preserved something of them, as witness the paragraph on page 2, including its footnote: "No doubt Adam taught his sons geometry, and the use of it, in the several Arts and Crafts convenient, at least, for those early Times; for Cain, we find, built a city . . . and becoming the Prince of the one-half of Mankind, his Posterity would imitate his Royal Example in improving both the noble Science and the useful Art." After this follows a foot-note: "As other Arts were improved by them, viz., working in Metal by Tubal Cain, Music by Jubal. Pastorage and Tent-making by label, which last is good Architecture." The author of the Old Charges lifted materials out of the Polychronicon almost bodily; the author of these sentences from the Book of Constitutions did not quote those materials verbatim but unquestionably he had the Old Charges in front of him.
The author of the original text of the Old Charges wrote his document in some unknown year represented by the decade 1350 A.D.-1360 A.D. The Cooke MS., is undoubtedly a very close version of it. He wrote his document for a permanent Lodge of Freemasons; they would read or recite it to a Candidate, and either then or not long afterwards would keep a copy of it on a pedestal in front of the Master, as one of the most revered objects in the Lodge Room; and the Masons at that time, with few exceptions, were Operatives; it is very important therefore to note in the Old Charges what it was that those Operative Freemasons were most interested in, and most concerned with, and deemed to be most essential to their Fraternity. From the Cooke MS., we learn that they were concerned with such subjects as these: architecture and its history; geometry; the Liberal Arts and Sciences; the originators or founders of the arts used in architecture; how the art of geometry or architecture was brought to England; and how the Fraternity came to be honored by receiving a Royal Charter. This picture of the Masonic mind as thus mirrored in the Old Charges proves that the Freemasons at that early (late, even in Lodges wholly Operative, were not merely stone-cutters or stone-masons.
Why did the author of the original version of the Old Charges turn to the Polychronicon? First, because everywhere it was, as he himself noted, a source approved by the scholars of that age. Second because there was no other source to which he could go for the materials he needed. The Old Testament was available to few men, and probably was available to the writer of the Old Charges, for he refers to it as to a familiar book, but there was in it no history of either geometry of architecture and very little history except of the Jews. The Polychronicons were everywhere in use, as encyclopedias are now; in drawing upon one of them he was doing what any other writer would have done, therefore his doing so was neither peculiar nor questionable.
The author of the Old Charges set down what was needed by the Lodge for which he prepared his document, and like any writer now he utilized the best materials then available; he would have been surprised out of his breath could he have looked ahead six hundred years to see some three or four million Masons in the world using a Ritual for which his own document helped to prepare the way, and which would incorporate in itself much of his document. Ranulf Higdon, if, as is probable, it was his Polyochronicon that was used, would have been even more astounded, Benedictine monk that he was, could he have looked forward seven hundred years to see a few passages or paragraphs of his own embedded in that Ritual because of the accident of their having been quoted or used in the Old Charges. Such, however, is the fact, and in the whole scope of Masonic history few other facts are more revealing, or more romantic.
For after the Lodges had used the Old Charges for generations to obligate and admit their Candidates, and after their member ship had become increasingly Speculative, they began to cut down the time required for initiation (a very significant fact) by reducing the first third of the Old Charges to a set of figures, or pictures or diagrams which they drew on a black-board or floorcloth with chalk, or painted on a board, or represented by models and other objects set out on a trestle. It was in this manner that a number of symbols and emblems came into use, the Forty-Seventh Proposition, the Letter G, the Ark, the Two Pillars, the Mosaic Floor, etc., most of them from the Old Charges themselves, and of these a number ultimately derived from the Polychronicon and the other similar learned books on which the author of the Old Charges had drawn. Without the Polychronicon we should probably have never had those particular symbols, and in the oral portions of the Ritual would probably have never had Euclid, Pythagoras, Jubal, Tubal, Cain, etc., nor a good half of the Lectures and Emblems. The Polychronicon was therefore one of the origins of the Ritual of the Freemasonry which we now have; to say so is not a far-fetched theory but is a statement of fact based on written and official documents of unquestioned authenticity.
This use of a Polychronicon by the author of the original version of the Old Charges brings to the front one of the most perplexing problems with which Masonic scholars must wrestle, and historians and specialists in historical research in particular. Any Mason who studies Masonry not as a professional scholar but for his own satisfaction also encounters it, and if he is thoroughgoing must wrestle with it. This is the problem of Masonic tradition. The Old Charges themselves raise the question because in their original version they drew so much upon some one or more polychronicons, and every Polychronicon, Higdon's as much as any other, and as stated above, drew largely from traditions. They also raised the question a second time when they introduced a tradition not taken from a polychronicon in the form of their account of an assembly of Masons called by King Athelstan almost 500 years before the original version was written. What is a Masonic tradition? Is a Mason expected to accept it at its face value whether or no, because it is Masonic? Is it a chapter of history, differing from other history only by its being not written? Or is it a mere tale, repeated generation after generation, possensing no historical weight? And what of the other terms closely associated with it in our nomenclature, such as legend, myth, and oral transmission?
There is in our own language, as in every other, a peculiar set of words which some etymologist, perhaps such as the late Logan Pearsall Smith, once described as "somersault words," because at some point in their history they suddenly turned upside down, and began to mean the opposite of what they had always meant before. The word "hell" once carried the connotation of something made extinct, brought to a complete end; it now connotes something endless. In early Anglo-Saxon, "read" was used of a man who received reports or advices because he could not read. "Story," which now denotes a piece of fiction, and "history" the opposite of fiction, once were the same word. The constellation of words which centers in the word "tradition" belong, many of them, to that class of odd and surprising terms. "Tradition" itself is a Latin compound adopted into English; the trans here shortened to tra means "over" in the sense of across; the dition is an elaboration of do, which meant "give"; a tradition meant "to hand over," but it became confined to the simple use o[ a set of facts which must be preserved and therefore must "be passed along." The picture is easy to see; some man or set of men learned something so important, or knew something so weighty, that it must not be lost, therefore it was passed on, or passed over, or made to hand along to some other set of men, or to the next generation; it was preserved not only because it was true, but also because it was importantly true; in that sense a "tradition" was accepted as reliable, true beyond question, because it was tradition. Then, perhaps during the latter part of the Middle Ages, the word turned a somersault and came to denote a narrative or story without any reliability in it-at least it did so in one of its most common uses.
A myth was originally a piece of knowledge, but it was known only to a few, and the path of its early history intersects at a common point the paths of secret, and of mystery; a myth was knowledge, but it was secret knowledge. Then, and because so much of what many cults and priesthoods advertised as secret knowledge turned out to be tall tales about gods, devils, heroes, monsters, et al. which nobody could accept literally, the word turned a somersault, and a myth became the least secret of things, and the farthest removed from knowledge. Legend meant something read, as when a teacher read a book or a man in public office read a report; then it turned upside clown to mean something not written as a record, something of the same kind as our modern fictional stories. These are etymologic notes, and normally can have no place in a book about Freemasonry, but they may be of help to a student of Masonic traditions because they warn him that he is dealing with slippery words, and remind him that before he makes up his mind about anything purporting to be, or said to be, a Masonic legend, myth, story, or tradition he must make an unusually cautious examination to see whether it is true or not true-as, in example, the Rite H.A., is not a legend, yet the two greatest and most complete Histories of Freemasonry call it a legend, and discuss it as if it were one.
A list of suggestions will give a Mason an armory to have in his mind ready-made when he undertakes his study of Masonic traditions; or, to state it otherwise, that in Freemasonry which is traditional; how these suggestions reflect back upon the Old Charges and the Polychronicon they themselves will make clear.
1. If "tradition" is taken in its very oldest and most literal sense of "go over" or "send over to the next generation," then the whole of Freemasonry is traditional, and that is one of the stupendous facts about it; for twenty-five or thirty generations Freemasons have been handing it over, or passing it on, to each succeeding generation.
2. Before reading, writing, and printing were in general use specialists were employed to learn by heart long histories, biographies, genealogies, technical knowledge, etc.; practitioners of it were tested at intervals of every year or so to make sure that their memories had not been at fault on so much as one word. This was called Oral Transmission; modern writers, when referring back to it, and especially if they are careless, usually call it tradition. If we have anything in Freemasonry which was preserved by Oral Transmission we can treat it as we could treat a written document, even if it is now called a tradition.
3. Before writing and printing, a story might be preserved by the people and without Oral Transmission, because it was a good story, or because it had a place in their holidays, or fetes, or feasts, etc. Such a story might or might not be a true story, but ususally if it had been a true story to begin with "the story would gain by telling"; if such a story is called a tradition, the historian will try to recover the original facts and free them from the accretions of fiction. The stories about King Arthur are a case in point. If a Masonic Tradition be a tradition of that sort no Masonic historian is absolved, merely because he is a Mason, of separating the fact in it from the fiction in it, and his Brethren ought not to be shocked when he does so, because it is his moral duty.
4. Some traditions in Freemasonry are things we Masons do for no other reason than that Masons have always done them, oration after generation, century after century. If any iconoclast asks us if we have no better reason for continuing to do them we can answer that no better reason can be found anywhere for doing anything. "Keep the young generation in hail," cried George Meredith to his contemporaries; in a traditional custom weare keeping the old generation in hail, and that also is a satisfying thing to do. Why do we celebrate the St. Johns Days? We Masons have no patron saints. It is because we have always done so. It is a tradition.
5. Finally, and perhaps this is the most
useful of these suggestions, when we come upon an historical tradition
in Freemasonry there are two things to do about it. The account
of the Assembly at York called by King Athelstan is an example
of a number of such traditions. If we examine it as historians,
and as historians decide against its historicity because sufficient
evidence is lacking, we can rule it in whole or in part out of
history and
preserve it as non-historical tradition.
Nevertheless and at the same time it is
an easily proved fact that Masons possessed such a tradition as
King Athelstan in the Middle of the Fourteenth Century and presumably
before that date; it is also a fact that both the Masons themselves
and the civil authorities believed it to be true; and it is also
easily proved that they acted in good faith upon that belief.
The content of that tradition may in part be non-historical; but
even if an iconoclast avers that it is wholly non-historical it
still remains true that few other facts or events have had a larger
part in the history of our Fraternity than that of tradition.
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