For half of the eight centuries or more of its existence Freemasonry consisted of craftsmen who worked for daily wages in one of the branches of architecture, and since they were workmen giving their full time to building in its literal and material sense they are called Operative, and the centuries in which the Fraternity consisted wholly of them is called the Operative Period. Since the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century the same Fraternity has been composed wholly of non-Operatives; these are called Speculative Masons and the period of between two and three centuries since the Craft passed into their hands is called the Speculative Period. The great and central problem for Masonic historians to solve has been the problem of how the Operative Fraternity was transformed into the Speculative Fraternity.
The almost complete lack of written records left behind by the Operative Masons has made the problem an exceptionally difficult one to solve, yet historical scholars are almost unanimously agreed that the crossing from the Operative Period to the Speculative Period was a slow one, and carried on step by step, without planning, without conscious purpose, and that therefore it lasted over at least more than two centuries; that long stretch of time is called the Transition Period. The whole history of Freemasonry therefore arranges itself under three general heads, or into three large periods, The Operative, The Transitional, and 'The Speculative.
Masonic historians were agreed on this arrangement as early as the latter half of the Eighteenth Century, but from then until about one-half century ago they were not in agreement as to what it was which had occurred in The Transition Period; their disagreement was so wide that a number of them gave up the hope of explaining how Operative Freemasonry could turn itself into something as unlike itself as Speculative Freemasonry; a number of them abandoned the belief that the Speculative Fraternity had ever derived from the Operative Fraternity and began to seek its origin elsewhere. During the past half century, and thanks partly to an increase in the efficiency of Masonic research, and partly to an increasingly successful hunt for written records, Masonic historical scholars have been reaching an agreement on the position that the Operative Fraternity was preserved and perpetuated in all its essentials except for literal building work, and that Speculative Freemasonry consisted of putting that ancient Fraternity, as thus preserved and perpetuated, to a new use; the question of why they did so, and how they did so, is the subject matter of this history of the Transition Period.
If a history includes far more facts than non-historians can carry in their memory or may be expected to possess, and if it involves problems that are too difficult, or complex, or erudite to be intelligible to a non-historian, the writer of that history has no choice except to over-simplify. To omit essential parts, to make a problem appear to be easier than it is, to over-simplify, these are crimes against truth which no honorable historian can tolerate. Yet what would you? Non-historians desire or need to read history; what then is an historian to do? Thus far no historian has found a way out of his dilemma except to go ahead and oversimplify and then to make a full and candid confession that he has done so; and after he has thus absolved himself he can address to his non-historian readers that ancient and wise adage that "We must do our best with what we have." It is one of the few instances in which the sly and somewhat lying motto of Caveat emptor becomes pertinent and true.
Such a confession must be made by the author of this book because its subject matter involves not only the well-nigh insoluble problem of the Transition Period but almost every other difficult Masonic problem. The quintessential substance of the book can be stated in a few sentences: Our Fraternity began as a Fraternity of Operative Freemasons at work in Britain and Europe long before, but the particular Fraternity from which ours has descended with no break in continuity began with the Fraternity of those Operative Freemasons who discovered and perpetuated the Gothic style of architecture, and since the first known Gothic building was erected in Paris in 1140-1150 A. D., that is our earliest date; the real movement leading to Speculative Freemasonry was the constituting of permanent and chartered Lodges about 1450 A. D.; non-Operatives sought membership in those Lodges because they found in them a number of truths not to be found elsewhere; these were truths about the subject of work; and these non-Operatives, once they were in control of the ancient Fraternity, put it to the new use of preserving and teaching those truths to men of any and all crafts, arts, trades, or professions; and our Speculative Fraternity is a continuation of that use. This is an over-simplification; but it is not a falsification. The argument on which it rests is such that if any Mason reads through and thinks through the whole body of our records and our literature he will arrive at the same conclusion.
Non-Operatives were accepted into the permanent, chartered Lodges one at a time. There was never a planned, or concerted movement of them. It is doubtful if any Lodge became wholly Speculative (or "Accepted") before about 1600 A. D. But the explanation of the Transition from an Operative to a Speculative Fraternity does not lie in the increasing number of those accepted, non-Operatives, because the Operative membership could have stopped accepting them any time it wished; rather the secret lies in the new use which these accepted non-Operatives made of Operative Freemasonry; and since the Operative Masons themselves did not close the door on accepted non-Operatives (except in Lodges here and there) it follows that the Operative Masons themselves approved of the new use to which their Fraternity was being put. A number of Lodges refused to have themselves put to that new use; many of them continued to make use of Freemasonry for Operative and for Speculative purposes at the same time; but that is neither here nor there; that which carried Freemasonry through the Transition Period was the fact that finally so many Lodges were wholly devoted to the new use that they were by 1717 A. D. able to erect a Grand Lodge System and were able by means of it to make Freemasonry wholly Speculative. Operative Masonry in the sense of architecture and building activities continued as before, through the Transition and until now; in England these builders organized a Fraternity of their own no fewer than three times, and they have one now; but these societies of practicing (or Operative) Masons lie outside the Speculative Fraternity, have no place in it, and have not had any say about it, and they pass out of the ken of the historian of our own Fraternity at about 1650 A. D.
In his Concise History of Freemasonry, published in 1903 A. D., Robert Freke Gould accounted for the Transition on the theory that the practice of accepting non-Operatives of itself, and without help from other facts or practices, led to the setting up of a Fraternity wholly Speculative. As instances of such acceptances he gave a small list of members who left some record of their initiation behind them; his list has been repeated by almost every other historian since. In it were such instances as: Boswell the Laird of Auchinleck was accepted into the Lodge of Edinburgh in 1600 A. D.; the City Company of Masons in London had a division, possibly a side order, called "The Accepcion" at least as early as 1620 A. D.; Elias Ashmole was made a Mason in a wholly Speculative Lodge at Warrington in 1646 A. D.; Dr. Robert Plot referred to Freemasons in a book he published in 1686 A. D.; Randle Holme described himself as a Freemason in a book he published in 1688 A. D. A Lodge at Aberdeen prepared what it called The Lodge Book in 1670 A. D., and proved itself to be part Operative, part Speculative, and to have an outdoor ceremony (which sounds like our Third Degree); there was a Speculative Lodge at York in 1705 A. D.; the Book of Constitutions published in 1723 A. D., referred to Lodges and to Christopher Wren as Grand Master in the period following the London fire, which occurred in 1666 A. D.; etc., etc. So far as the individuals mentioned are concerned they mean nothing because doubtless some non-Operative members had been accepted into Operative Lodges, temporary or permanent, from the first; the principal value of such a catalog of instances lies in its proof that there were Speculative Lodges at least as early as 1646 A. D. The oldest version of the Old Charges mention non-Operatives as having been in the Craft in ancient times, and does so without further comment.
Gould's theory was in substance that at about 1600 A. D. a few non-Operatives were accepted into membership; that while the number was few at first it slowly increased; and that Speculative Freemasonry resulted when the number of Accepted Masons (or Speculatives - the terms are here used interchangeably) overtook the number of Operative members; the problem of the Transition would be thus explained by a theory of simple arithmetical increase; but this is only to state the problem, and does not solve it; why did the number of Accepted Masons increase? William James Hughan had a theory of another kind; namely, that Speculative Freemasonry, of itself, "grew out of," or developed out of, Operative Freemasonry, and therefore his explanation of the Transition means that the Transition represented nothing but the mere passage of time. But this leaves too much unexplained. Why did not Speculative "grow out of" Operative centuries before? It had plenty of time. Why did it grow up out of it in England only, when Operative Freemasonry had been the same on the Continent as there? When the first Lodges either half Speculative or wholly Speculative were formed there was a vast amount of Operative Masonry outside those Lodges; why did not it develop into Speculative Freemasonry? There is an even larger amount of Operative building now, organized in hundreds of unions; is there anywhere in it any trace of Speculative Freemasonry in process of formation? If the whole body of Operative Freemasonry in Britain grew up and grew into Speculative Freemasonry, why is it that the history of our own Fraternity leads invariably back to a (comparatively) few and small permanent Lodges using copies of the Old Charges? Neither the idea of growth nor of inevitable development can explain the Transition. Something special was at work, something new arose. Speculative Freemasonry did not come out of Operative Freemasonry in general, but out of that something new and something special. What that was has been already explained; in a few early permanent Lodges their members began to put Freemasonry to a new use, and whether this was done by the Operative members first or the Speculative members first does not matter; they both approved it, and they joined together in doing it.
If an historian had a sufficiently pictorial eye he could lay out the whole two and one-half centuries in the form of a panoramic picture. As this was unrolled from the top it would show, in one chronological portion of the picture after another, the following: There had always been much of what we now call Speculative in the earliest Operative Craft. It was not only the ideas, customs, and usages of the Lodges and the Craftsmen at work that we inherited, but the essentials of the whole Masonic Community. Our own particular Speculative Fraternity came to us through the Lodges which became permanent, and used the Old Charges beginning at about the middle of the Fourteenth Century. Accepted Masons took the same oath to preserve the secrets and not to violate the Landmarks as did Operative members. Their historic mission was not to destroy an old Fraternity in order to put a new one in its place (why go to that trouble?) but to preserve and to perpetuate the old Fraternity and yet at the same time to put it to a new use. The subsequent history of what they did proves that that new use was of very great and very vital importance to the world. There were some hundreds of self-constituted Lodges in England, Scotland, and Ireland before 1717 A. D., some of them wholly Operative, some wholly Speculative, some a mixture of both. When a few of these constituted a Grand Lodge in London in 1717 A. D., it did not disturb the local Lodges already at work. It was not until the new Grand Lodge System proved so extraordinarily effectual over the period about 1750 A. D., that the whole Fraternity became completely Speculative. It would be a mistake to suppose that this Transition was carried through by the Accepted (or non-Operative, or Speculative) members and Lodges only, and as against Operative opposition: Operative Lodges were always able to refuse to accept a non-Operative petitioner, and would have done so had they been in opposition; the Accepted Masons saw more clearly than the Operatives the possible universality and world importance of Freemasonry; nevertheless the Fraternity (speaking on the whole) was brought through the Transition by Operatives and Speculatives combined.
Superficially akin to Gould's theory that the Transition was effected by an adding of members and to Hughan's theory of inevitable growth was the theory, once widely held, that Speculative Freemasonry emerged from Operative because tradition has always had a powerful appeal to Englishmen. The Operative Masons, so the argument runs, kept up a set of customs and usages for many generations; after these customs and usages had ceased to have any value to Operative Masons non-Operatives continued to keep them going because they did not have the heart to see anything so venerable, or so beautiful (like old ivory) because of its age, brought to an end. According to this theory the Transition had consisted of nothing more than the willingness of a large number of non-Operatives to keep alive a set of customs after the men to whom those customs had belonged were no longer willing to continue them. This theory had almost everything wrong with it that could be wrong with a theory. Speculative Freemasonry began long before Operative Masons had ceased to keep up their usages and customs. Speculative Freemasonry has old customs and usages in it but does not consist of them - is not a repetition for the sake of repetition. It is possible to believe that a few Englishmen would rather continue old customs than see them die but the number of Masons in England has never been few. The theory cannot explain why some millions of Americans would be willing to keep up a set of old English customs - in the Revolutionary War Period when our National Fraternity was established, Americans were not enamored of old English customs!
The theory never had in it anything more
than guesswork, and of an amateurish kind at that. But it was
no more completely a piece of guesswork than was a companion theory
which once had a vogue in the United States, and which was that
Operative Freemasonry died, came to a dead stop, fell into ruins,
and that a number of gentlemen of the clubable type set up in
London a new Fraternity for which, for the sake of making it more
venerable in appearance, and to give it a cachet of mystery or
secrecy, they borrowed the trappings of defunct Freemasonry. If
this theory were true historians would drop the Transition Period
from the books, because there could have been no Transition; there
was a dead end to Operative Freemasonry, there was then a short
gap, and then a wholly new society was organized among the ruins.
Of the many facts which stand ready to refute this amazing notion
one will suffice; it completely ignores the many Speculative Lodges
which were at work a century before 1717 A. D., it ignores the
Speculative elements which were always in Operative Freemasonry,
it ignores the fact that Operatives as much as Speculatives built
up the Speculative Fraternity, and it ignores the fact that the
new Grand Lodge of 1717 A. D., was not created out of hand, but
was an action taken (even during its first two or three years)
by at least twenty lodges which were in existence before 1717
A. D.
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