The purpose of this article is neither to rewrite the history of Freemasonry nor to offer a competing narrative to the currently dominant theory: the borrowing theory associated with E. Ward and the Scottish key advanced by D. Stevenson. According to the latter, speculative Freemasonry was founded in eighteenth-century London and drew its inspiration from Scottish Masonry, of which W. Schaw was said by Stevenson to have been the “creator” in the preceding century. The third degree or grade, for its part, was supposedly invented between 1725 and 1730 by English scholars, the same men who are said to have created symbolic ritual, while craftsmen possessed only basic ceremonies of admission, devoid of symbolism, because they lacked the intellectual capacity to speculate upon their tools. Freemasonry would therefore have been little more than a form of sociability: a convivial brotherhood serving moralising ends.
Our purpose is to bring out a question fundamental to any scholarly inquiry: under what conditions may a body of knowledge be regarded as sound? In other words, we intend to assess the solidity of the foundations upon which this theory rests.
For readers unfamiliar with the history of knowledge, it is important to guard against a persistent illusion: the idea that knowledge always advances cumulatively and in a straight line. The sciences, including the social sciences to which history belongs, do not progress merely by adding new information. They also undergo major revisions, usually after periods of inertia or blockage in which unresolved difficulties continue to accumulate. There is no reason to suppose that the history of Freemasonry, and particularly the history of its origins, should be exempt from this rule. On the contrary, it may be one of the fields in which this reality is most clearly visible.
Its historiography became largely fixed in the late 1980s following the publications of D. Stevenson,[i] and has since remained in a state of relative stasis, comparable to what T. Kuhn described as “normal science” within a scientific paradigm.[ii] Yet in the preface to the French translation of the Scottish historian’s thesis, A. Bernheim had already identified a fundamental weakness in Stevenson’s work.[iii] He recalled that Stevenson himself made no secret of relying upon numerous “provisional hypotheses and imaginative conjectures.”[iv] That observation should have led readers to examine with particular care how Stevenson reached his conclusions, separating hypotheses and conjectures from assertions grounded in well-established documentary facts.
Several openings have nevertheless been made in this interpretative framework through the publications of authors such as P. Geay, A. Kervella, S. Sommers and A. Prescott, though with little response. Even D. Stevenson, in a largely overlooked article published in 2014,[v] revised one of the central claims of his thesis: W. Schaw did not invent the lodge system, since the lodges already existed. Should this not have prompted a broad reopening of the debate on origins? It did not.
Historical inquiry, like all research, necessarily proceeds by means of hypotheses. But a hypothesis is not a conclusion reached in advance. It has value only so long as it remains exposed to contradiction by the evidence. Once an interpretative framework becomes firmly established, however, it may begin to direct the reading of documents to such an extent that anything resisting it is neutralised. Cautious formulations then become convenient certainties; with time, those certainties acquire the appearance of self-evident fact. This risk is not merely theoretical. It lies at the very heart of the subject considered here.
Although the history of Freemasonry has been studied for a long time, with the earliest works regarded as scholarly dating from the mid-nineteenth century, it remains burdened by repeated simplifications, frequently invoked authorities, and sometimes limited documentary evidence. A more structural difficulty must also be considered: the withdrawal of part of the academic world has left considerable room for a body of literature occupying an intermediate zone. It seeks scholarly legitimacy without always submitting itself to the critical procedures expected of a mature field of research. At times it has even claimed a genuine methodology, but, as we shall show, that methodology has often been more asserted than demonstrated, since the procedures employed have not always met the required standards of rigour.
Another problem must be added, less conspicuous but even more decisive: established habits of reading. When a historical subject has long been approached through a small number of dominant models, documents eventually come to be examined within the very framework those models have helped to create. History then ceases to be an inquiry and tends to become the repeated verification of what is already believed. Evidence that challenges the framework is set aside, sometimes through arguments that are insufficiently supported. It is precisely at this point that critical scholarly method becomes indispensable, because it imposes a discipline of vigilance: vigilance towards the sources, the categories employed, inherited classifications, accepted datings, and narratives that appear self-evident simply because they have been repeated for so long.
Our approach is therefore to submit a controversial historiographical dossier, one that makes professional historians uncomfortable,[vi] to the requirements of critical scholarly method. The history of Freemasonry must account, as rigorously as possible, for its hypotheses, evidence, gaps, and procedures of validation.
Tested Against Critical Scholarly Method
To test the history of Freemasonry against scholarly method is to determine what may be regarded as securely supported knowledge, what remains merely plausible, and what results from a reconstruction lacking sufficient evidence. It also means accepting that history cannot be required to produce absolute certainties of a kind that the humanities and social sciences are, by their nature, unable to provide.
Hypotheses are necessary to organise the material, frame questions, suggest connections, construct provisional intelligibility, and explore different possibilities. A normal feature of scholarship is that hypotheses are tested, confirmed, revised, or rejected when new evidence appears. If they cease to be exposed to contradiction by the facts, they change in nature. They are no longer instruments of inquiry but moulds into which documents are forced by various forms of circumvention.
This is what has occurred for more than a century in the history of Freemasonry. From the earliest stages of Masonic research, R. F. Gould,[vii] followed by W. Begemann,[viii] maintained that the third Masonic degree was an invention of eighteenth-century scholars, devised between 1725 and 1730. This theory emerged at a time when Darwinian evolution and Comtean positivism strongly shaped scholarly thought. The prevailing conception of history was naturally progressive: continuous and directional, with exceptions, accidents, survivals, and ruptures readily excluded, and with written sources treated as the only admissible evidence. The hypothesis of a third degree invented ex nihilo in the eighteenth century could remain acceptable so long as no source seriously contradicted it. Yet several texts containing explicit references to Masonic mastership (Graham, Sloane No. 3329, and Dumfries No. 4, all assigned dates earlier than 1725–1730, although we shall return to the question of dating) and even a reference to the Hiramic murder in A Dialog between Simon and Philip, have since been discovered and studied. The dominant theory of the late invention of the degree was not officially abandoned. Over time, the contents of these writings were overlooked, and the term “proto-Masonry” began to be used as a means of excluding the possible existence of speculative Freemasonry before the official date of 1717. One of the fundamental requirements of scholarly method is to accept that a hypothesis may be contradicted, revised, or abandoned when the sources demand it. This elementary rule has not been observed, and examples are numerous.
A reading of the literature on the origins of Freemasonry shows that many authors have identified obscurities, missing links, interpretative difficulties, and unresolved questions without ever reconsidering the central proposition they defended: that speculative Freemasonry arose in the eighteenth century. Rather than revise their initial assumptions, they preferred to work around the difficulties, diminish the significance of certain evidence, exclude other material, or ignore it altogether so as not to disturb the coherence of the dominant theory. This reflects a well-known and extensively documented psychological mechanism: once a solution has been reached after considerable effort, it may become easier to interpret the facts in a manner that preserves it than to accept that it must be revised.[ix]
Once contrary evidence appears and its implications are refused, inquiry is no longer advancing by revising its foundations. It has become a construction designed to protect itself.
A second, very concrete example concerns the origins of the Antients. W. Preston appears to have originated the theory of a split. In the 1821 edition of Illustrations of Masonry,[x] the Antients are presented as having emerged from the Moderns. In 1884, two authors (the Englishman R. F. Gould[xi] and the American A. G. Mackey)[xii] used the word schism to describe what they regarded as the origin of the Grand Lodge of the Antients. In 1887, however, H. Sadler decisively refuted this hypothesis on the basis of the registers of both Grand Lodges.[xiii] The Antients were speculative Freemasons, with rituals and symbols, and existed independently of the Moderns. Nevertheless, the schism hypothesis resurfaced in a book by R. Berman in 2013,[xiv] while the same term was used in an article published that year.[xv] It was also echoed in a French publication in 2017.[xvi] These three authors entirely disregard Sadler’s conclusions, even though no contrary evidence has since overturned them.
The historiography of Masonic origins also shows that a theory may survive after it has ceased to provide satisfactory answers. This is precisely what occurs when an interpretative framework is no longer tested and begins to function as inherited certainty. D. Stevenson demonstrated that Masonic lodges existed in Scotland before W. Schaw organised them, but he never answered a fundamental question: where did these lodges come from, when all possessed Old Charges, English regulations, in their archives? This is a singular fact and suggests a common foundation for English and Scottish Masonry.
Ward attempted to remove the difficulty by invoking borrowing:[xvii] the Old Charges were said to be present in Scottish lodges only because they had been borrowed from English masons. Yet this claim rests upon circular reasoning. Why are English Old Charges found in Scottish lodges? Because they were borrowed. How do we know that borrowing occurred? Because English Old Charges are found in Scottish lodges. The conclusion is placed in the premise. Taken as a whole, the Masonic documentation points instead towards the existence of a cross-border Masonic fellowship.
These examples are intended to recall an essential principle: a theory is not sound because it is old, widely shared, or supported by prestigious names. It is sound only if it withstands critical examination of both its sources and the analytical method employed. Every claim must be checked patiently, methodically, and rigorously; what is demonstrated must be distinguished from what is merely assumed; and a historiographical dossier must be reopened when its foundations become fragile.
Biases and Interpretative Distortions
A rigorous and methodical examination of Masonic historiography reveals several biases and interpretative distortions that have exerted a lasting influence upon the field, producing an account that appears more coherent than the documentation itself allows.
The first is anchoring bias. It consists in assigning excessive weight to an initial piece of information, interpretation, or explanatory framework, even when later evidence should lead to its revision. Once an idea has been established, it becomes a fixed point. Everything that follows is read, assessed, or adjusted in relation to it.
An early historiographical narrative may therefore continue to organise the reading of the sources even after contrary evidence appears. The clearest example is probably 24 June 1717. No contemporary documentary evidence survives for the supposed founding act of the Grand Lodge of London and Westminster, yet this date continues to be retained, sometimes even by authors who had themselves identified the problems raised by Anderson’s writings. The alleged founding meeting of 24 June 1717 is reported only in the Constitutions of 1738, written twenty-one years after the supposed event, while the earliest surviving documents issued by that Grand Lodge date from 1723. As P. Méreaux observed,[xviii] numerous members of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076 criticised Anderson’s narrative. W. Begemann was the most severe critic of Anderson’s writings, rejecting everything that could not be supported by documentary evidence.[xix] Yet the whole of Masonic historiography continued to be organised around this date.
This anchoring around 1717 is reinforced by authority bias. Authority bias consists in assigning excessive value to a claim because of the prestige, status, or reputation of the person making it, rather than examining the claim on its own merits. A proposition is no longer accepted because it has been demonstrated, but because it comes from a recognised author, an expert, a distinguished scholar, a reputed school, or an institution regarded as legitimate. In England, the conclusions of D. Knoop and G. P. Jones have acquired an almost untouchable status. Although they clearly identified problems in the reliability of part of Anderson’s account,[xx] they declined to follow Begemann’s conclusions. Despite the absence of documents concerning the birth of the Grand Lodge, they preferred to conclude that ‘the main facts of his story are probably correct, though some of the details and explanations are open to considerable doubt’.[xxi] Masonic historians have attributed too much weight to their conclusions simply because of their names, with the result that those conclusions are no longer properly debated or challenged. Knoop and Jones thus continued to transmit the myth of 24 June 1717. Yet P. Kebbell exposed and criticised their partiality.[xxii] Even after the work of S. M. Sommers and A. Prescott,[xxiii] the myth continues to appear in lectures and in journals regarded as authoritative because they employ peer review.
Authority bias is accompanied by ipse dixitism, one of its derivatives: a statement is treated as true simply because it has been made, without sufficient demonstration. Perhaps the clearest example is the dating of Dumfries No. 4. Its assignment to the early eighteenth century rests upon the reported opinion of an expert from the British Museum. Knoop, Jones, and Hamer, commonly treated as models of methodological rigour in Masonic studies, wrote:
In the opinion of Mr A. J. Collins of the MSS. Department of the British Museum, who, by the courtesy of the Lodge, quite recently had an opportunity of examining the document, it was written fairly early in the eighteenth century.[xxiv]
What exactly was dated, and by what method? The physical document or the composition of its content? What arguments supported the opinion? We are not told. Can scholarly rigour be claimed on such a basis? It cannot. Yet this dating was adopted, repeated, and ultimately treated as self-evident. An expert opinion is never, by itself, proof. Until its criteria are disclosed, it cannot substitute for demonstration.
Authority bias has distorted research and encouraged a culture of scholarly deference, particularly visible in popular works. This is especially problematic because Masonic research has long claimed a scientific or scholarly status. Invoking scholarship is not enough to produce scholarly work. Its criteria, procedures, and the means by which its conclusions may be challenged must be made explicit. Yet this transparency is often absent, while readers are asked to accept on trust the claims of self-appointed authorities whose articles or books contain little or no analysis of primary sources and almost no documentary references. This leads to another problem: selection bias.
Selection bias arises when an author constructs a theory from a partial body of sources or systematically privileges evidence compatible with an existing framework. Many studies omit documents that might weaken the theory defended, sometimes through ignorance because they rely on secondary literature, and sometimes because the documents themselves are inconvenient. Selection bias is also reinforced by the difficulty of accessing primary sources. There has been no sustained centralisation or accumulation of documentary evidence, which mechanically encourages reliance on second-hand scholarship. The danger is clear: each new study gives the impression of beginning afresh, while in reality it inherits an already filtered corpus, a pre-established order, and sometimes a set of long-standing misunderstandings. The framework itself is no longer re-examined. A recent publication by F. Venzi is particularly revealing in this respect. The former Grand Master of the Regular Grand Lodge of Italy and member of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076 proposed a new theory of origins,[xxv] combining, to some extent, N. B. Cryer’s theory involving the Mystery Plays with E. Ward’s borrowing theory and the resulting invention of a “Tradition”. The author offers little beyond a personal reinterpretation of the few documentary sources selected to support his case.
Another familiar research bias is confirmation bias. Authors naturally tend to favour information that supports their assumptions, received ideas, convictions, and hypotheses. No researcher approaches a subject in complete neutrality: each brings prior representations, convictions, and sometimes a theory that is already largely formed. This initial framework may lead the researcher, often without conscious intent, to retain information that confirms what is already believed while paying less attention to material that contradicts it. The bias operates at several levels: in the formulation of the problem, the interpretation of facts, and the hierarchy assigned to arguments. Certain data are emphasised because they support the demonstration, while other relevant evidence is minimised, qualified, or excluded. This mechanism is a serious limitation in research because it may create an impression of intellectual solidity while the analysis rests upon only part of the available evidence.
Rigorous inquiry therefore requires the initial hypothesis to be tested systematically against varied sources, including those that weaken or qualify the argument being advanced.
Confirmation bias is compounded, within the long-established and relatively closed world of Masonic research, by conformity bias, a tendency found in human organisations more generally. It describes the inclination to align with a dominant opinion or with interpretative frameworks already accepted within one’s intellectual environment.
Researchers do not merely select what confirms their own convictions; they are also more likely to retain what accords with what a group, a research tradition, or an academic context regards as valid. This restricts critical distance and makes relevant alternative analyses less visible.
Major Methodological Failures
The biases and distortions just described have had damaging consequences. They developed within the approach of the self-styled “authentic school”, which presented itself as rigorous while containing defects capable of producing a distorted representation of the past. The disconnection between the dominant theory and the documentary evidence stems, to a considerable extent, from the intrinsic limitations of the method by which the sources were studied. The result could only be a serious distortion of the historical record and, ultimately, a falsified account of the facts.
From the outset, the study of Masonic origins has rested upon a fatal methodological error: the dating of the contents of Masonic manuscripts has regularly, if not almost invariably, been confused with the dating of their physical supports. Yet every theory of origins relies upon these texts to reconstruct the course of history.
F. A. Woodford nevertheless warned researchers against precisely this danger, reminding them that the date of a transcription does not correspond to the date at which its content was composed.[xxvi] His warning had little effect. The mere survival of a text in an old manuscript, such as Cooke MS or Regius MS, created the illusion that the surviving witness was an original and encouraged the assumption that the date of the parchment marked the period in which the content had first been composed. Yet the Masonic texts, the Old Charges and other manuscripts, are copies, not originals, as several commentators repeatedly observed. Despite the criticism directed by English Freemasons at W. Begemann’s work, particularly his 1888 classification of the Old Charges, the attempt to group the texts into homogeneous sets was indispensable. Begemann’s error lay in combining the smallest coherent groups of texts, which he called branches, into larger and much less coherent groups, the families. This second category was artificial and obscured the gradual evolution of the texts.
The decisive error was introduced by the English authentic school itself, although it claimed to safeguard the scholarly character of Masonic research. In the chronological table included in both editions of The Old Charges of the British Freemasons, W. J. Hughan created a chronology of surviving copies rather than of lost originals, which cannot provide the required historical sequence. Although H. Poole abandoned that chronology, he did little better when he inserted the dates of copies directly into the classification by families and branches. W. McLeod, finally, not only failed to free himself from an approach used for more than a century but also adhered to the preconceived idea of an “original standard” from which almost all the texts supposedly derived.[xxvii] He reconstructed this hypothetical document and then used it as the standard by which to establish his classification and chronological tree. To an inexperienced reader, his method may appear to possess the formal trappings of academic rigour, but close examination reveals serious methodological weaknesses and insufficient verifiability. How can a problem be resolved by using as evidence a document manufactured from an unverifiable hypothesis, when the existence of that document may itself be disputed?
Researchers who relied exclusively upon handwriting, codicology, or a date written on the document, when one was present, to determine the period to which the content of an Old Charge or another manuscript belonged were therefore seriously mistaken. When dealing with transcriptions, only an internal comparative analysis of the contents, informed by historical contextualisation, can position the texts in time. Likewise, although the dialect of the oldest Masonic texts may provide chronological indications concerning the act of copying, it cannot fix the date or place of their original composition. The dialect is that of the copyist. If a scribe translated a text originally written in Latin or French, the two dominant written languages in England until the thirteenth century, and did so in a place other than that in which the dialect originated (mobility in the medieval world should not be underestimated) then dating the original text solely from the dialect of the surviving copy constitutes another serious methodological error.
Whenever proposed chronologies confuse the date of the surviving copies with the date at which their contents were composed, the theories of origin built upon those chronologies must be re-examined. This error alone does not prove that every conclusion reached by those theories is false; it does, however, show that their chronological foundations are insufficient to establish those conclusions.
Is Freemasonry unique in having to conduct historical inquiry from copies rather than originals? Certainly not. This difficulty is not peculiar to Masonic studies. Scholars of Ibadism[xxviii] likewise work in the absence of originals and rely upon eighteenth-century transcriptions of texts first composed in the eighth century. It is by analysing their contents rather than the physical supports, and by comparing them with other writings and historical events from the period in which they are thought to have been composed, that scholars date the lost originals and assess the information preserved in them.
A second error, closely connected with this fundamental problem of dating, is equally damaging: the projection of later categories onto earlier documents. Masonic historians read texts predating the eighteenth century through the categories of a later obediential Freemasonry. Yet the same word may carry different meanings according to its context of use. Our research has shown that terms such as mason, master mason, and fellow are polysemous. Our research has shown that terms such as mason, master mason, and fellow are polysemous. Earlier Masonic texts could not therefore be properly understood when read through later institutional categories. To interpret old documents through the organisation of early eighteenth-century Freemasonry is to write history backwards, to assume that the very question requiring investigation has already been answered.
Towards a Scholarly Re-examination of the Evidence
Identifying the shortcomings of an historiography is not enough. Criticism has value only if it reopens the inquiry rather than closes it. Having identified the biases and concrete limitations of the dominant methodology, we must now state what a genuine scholarly re-examination would require. It cannot consist merely in replacing one hypothesis with another inside the existing framework. It demands a much deeper reconsideration of the conditions under which knowledge was produced, transmitted, and ordered. Only then can we hope to leave an impasse sustained less by a complete absence of sources than by the manner in which those sources have been read, classified, and connected.
The first requirement is an effective return to the documentary sources. In practice, this means reopening the manuscripts, revisiting the transcriptions, comparing the different versions, and bringing Masonic writings into dialogue with other documents: ordinances, charters, registers, craft archives, publications, newspapers, and private notes. Such documentary breadth makes it possible to escape the sterile confrontation between a small number of canonical texts and the interpretations imposed upon them. As we have shown in our work on origins, wills and ordinances indicate that the word mason could also mean “geometer”, rather than merely “stone mason” in the modern occupational sense. This fundamentally changes how the Old Charges are read and how their contents are understood.
A second requirement concerns dating and, inseparably from it, the classification of the texts. Until a reliable documentary chronology has been established, everything else remains fragile. This does not mean claiming that every text in the corpus can be dated with absolute precision; such an ambition would be illusory. At a minimum, however, the date of the physical support must be rigorously distinguished from the date of the content, secure chronological anchors must be identified, and manuscripts must be placed before or after those points according to explicit criteria. Classification should be the demonstrated result of a critical ordering of the texts. It becomes meaningful when it reveals transformations, affinities, and shifts, in short, a comprehensible process of textual evolution. To move beyond terminological confusion and accumulated nomenclatures, the ordering must be reconsidered from the ground up, even if this requires abandoning divisions that have become more obscuring than useful. In this perspective, close linguistic study is essential. Archaisms, variations in vocabulary, semantic shifts, and apparently minor formulations may be decisive, for the detail often contains the key. Such features can reveal textual affinities, refine an ordering, identify the survival of an earlier state of a text, or expose later revisions. This is why direct engagement with the surviving manuscripts, and therefore a sufficient command of English, is also necessary.
A further requirement is constant historical contextualisation. A text is never fully intelligible in isolation. It acquires meaning within an institutional, religious, political, legal, and social environment that must be reconstructed with precision. The Old Charges are not a self-contained documentary corpus. They must continually be placed within a wider social, political, legal, and religious context. Only then do they cease to appear as isolated textual blocks and recover their full historical intelligibility.
Another requirement, less common in this field, is the explicit ranking of results. Not every conclusion belongs on the same level. What has been firmly demonstrated must be distinguished from what remains probable; what is plausible must be distinguished from what is still conjectural. This distinction is essential because it protects research from two opposite errors: excessive confidence and wholesale scepticism. An honest hypothesis, even one still open to revision, is preferable to an artificial certainty.
Finally, it must be accepted that a scholarly re-examination of the dossier will necessarily be collective, slow, and unfinished. The corpus is extensive, dispersed, unevenly transcribed, and sometimes difficult to access. Several manuscripts have not yet been consulted; others require further verification; some datings will remain debatable; and certain questions will remain open. To seek premature closure would reproduce one of the defects criticised here.
The appropriate course is to reopen the field on sounder foundations and provide future researchers with stronger tools: a more reliable chronology, clarified terminology, explicit criteria of classification, and a corpus that is better located, more accurately transcribed, and, as far as possible, more effectively centralised. It is in this spirit that our work has called for the creation of a more accessible documentary collection open to researchers from different disciplines.
Ultimately, a genuine scholarly re-examination requires a change in intellectual practice. Masonic historiography must move away from inherited authorities, received classifications, and narratives whose coherence is too perfect, towards research capable of beginning again from the documentation itself, tolerating its gaps, recognising its resistance, and drawing conclusions only to the extent justified by what can actually be established.
Only then can the subject escape the circle in which it has been confined: a debate that appears exhausted but has never in fact been reconsidered in all its dimensions.
Conclusion
The principal problem of Masonic historiography is not simply that it has had to address a difficult, incomplete, ancient, dispersed, and sometimes obscure subject. Many historical dossiers present the same difficulties. The deeper problem is that a series of biases, methodological errors, artificial constructions, and inherited habits of reading accumulated over time until they produced an interpretative framework that became widely accepted without being sufficiently questioned.
A critical examination of earlier work reveals the repeated operation of the same mechanism: an assumption gives rise to an assertion; supported by a prestigious name, the assertion acquires the force of authority; it then directs the selection of sources; once stabilised, it becomes an anchor for generations of readers; and finally it is incorporated into a broader narrative that appears all the more credible because it is simple. Once an interpretation has assumed a settled form, it may persist with remarkable inertia, even against the very sources that should have invalidated it. The result is an intellectual construction capable of absorbing every form of resistance. Rather than resolving the difficulties, later developments founded upon the same artificial assumptions have generated further artificial problems. The impression of mastery has increased while the historical reality has receded. The framework has survived because it offered the illusion of coherence, reinforced by repeated appeals to authority and constant reiteration.
This does not mean that everything is false or that no reliable knowledge has been produced. Such a conclusion would be no more rigorous than the position criticised here. The point is more precise: a historiographical dossier may have been studied for a long time and discussed at great length while never having undergone a sufficiently thorough methodological re-examination. It may appear to be an exhausted field while still awaiting a genuine reconsideration of its foundations.
This is why method is essential. Returning to the sources, revisiting the transcriptions, checking translations, distinguishing the physical support from the content, reopening questions of dating, reconsidering classifications, contextualising the texts, ranking the levels of certainty, accepting documentary gaps, and resisting narratives that fit too neatly: these are the minimum conditions for a scholarly re-examination of the dossier.
The centre of gravity of the debate must therefore shift. The question is not which narrative will prevail over the others, nor which historiographical tradition will retain its prestige. The question is according to what rules a historical proposition may be regarded as acceptable, debatable, or rejected. Until the hierarchy of evidence has been clearly restored, the field will remain vulnerable to inertia, repetition, and narratives of convenience.
Understood in this way, a scholarly re-examination is not an act of demolition. It does not seek to destroy the history of Masonic origins, but to restore that history to its proper complexity. It requires acceptance that certain certainties may dissolve, that some narratives may lose their self-evident status, that some categories may need revision, and that some questions may remain open for longer than anticipated. Only on this condition can a historiography founded upon authority give way to a history genuinely grounded in the critical examination of sources.
David Taillades
Paper presented at the International Congress of the Universal Masonic Union of the Modern Rite (UMURM), Marseille, 11 April 2026.
Extract from Beyond the Myths of Freemasonry, 2026.
[i] David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590-1710, Cambridge University Press, 1988. French translation: Les Origines de la franc-maçonnerie : le siècle écossais – 1590-1710, Télètes, Paris, 1992. David Stevenson, The first freemasons, Scotland early lodges and their members, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen, 1988. French translation: Les Premiers Francs-Maçons, Ivoire-Clair, Paris, 2000.
[ii] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962. French translation: La structure des révolutions scientifiques, Flammarion, Paris, 1999.
[iii] David Stevenson, Les Origines de la franc-maçonnerie : le siècle écossais – 1590-1710, op. cit., p. i.
[iv] David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590-1710, Cambridge, p. 3.
[v] David Stevenson, “The Origins of Freemasonry. Scotland”, in Henrik Bogdan & Jan Snoek eds, Handbook of Freemasonry, Brill, Leiden – Boston, 2014, p. 51: The Masons over whom Schaw claimed jurisdiction were to be organised in lodges, and it has become clear that these were lodges that already existed. That is, Schaw was not founding them, but was introducing standard regulations for them, partly derived from the Old Charges.
[vi] “La franc-maçonnerie spéculative, de l’histoire aux imaginaires”, inaugural lecture, Verhaegen Chair (ULB), 1 March 2017. See: https://youtu.be/EMd_ieXuwVM [accessed the 7 april 2026].
[vii] Robert Freke Gould, The History of Freemasonry, vol. 1 à 3, Thomas C. Jack Ed., London, 1884 – 1885.
[viii] Wilhelm Begemann, “An attempt to classify the Old Charges of the British Freemasons,” AQC, vol. 1, 1888, pp. 152-161.
[ix] Paul Watzlawick, La réalité de la réalité. Confusion, désinformation, communication, Seuil, Paris, 1978, ch. 4, “De la récompense arbitraire à l’émergence de visions du monde”, pp. 53-61.
[x] William Preston, Illustrations of Masonry, A. & R. Spottiswoode, London, 1821.
[xi] Robert Freke Gould, The History of Freemasonry, Thomas C. Jack, London, vol. III, 1884, p. 37, footnote page 1: […] the great schism by which the masons of England were, for more than half a century, arrayed in hostile camps.
[xii] Albert G. Mackey, An Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, vol. 1, Everts & Co, Philadelphia, 1884, p. 214: Dermott was undoubtedly the moving and sustaining spirit of the great schism.
[xiii] Henry Sadler, Masonic Facts and Fictions: Comprising a New Theory on the Origin of the ‘Ancient’ Grand Lodge, London, 1887, Kessinger reprints, 2010.
[xiv] Ric Berman, Schism: the battle that forged Freemasonry, Sussex Academic Press, Eastbourne, 2013.
[xv] Aubrey P. Newman, The Moderns and the Antients Revisited, AQC, vol. 126, 2013, pp. 121-146.
[xvi] Roger Dachez, “La ‘tradition des Antients’ : un mythe historiographique français”, Renaissance Traditionnelle, n° 136, April 2017, pp. 112-139.
[xvii] Eric Ward, “The Birth of Freemasonry (Another Theory),” AQC, vol. 92, 1979, pp. 99-102.
[xviii] Pierre Méreaux, Les Constitutions d’Anderson : vérité ou imposture, Editions du Rocher, Monaco, 1995, pp. 80-87.
[xix] Trevor Stewart, The Stewart Papers: Begemann displayed, NFV GmbH, Hamburg, 2017, p. 354: Modern critical methods of historical research do not tolerate that sort of approach [ie. filling the gaps in history with additions or invention of his own fantasy] and historical accuracy compels a condemnation of Anderson’s figments and denies him a reputation that he never really deserved.
[xx] Douglas Knoop, Gwilym Peredur Jones, The Genesis of Freemasonry, An Account of the Rise and Development of Freemasonry In Its Operative, Accepted, and Early Speculative Phases, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1947, chapter VIII.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 168: The main facts of his story are probably correct, though some of the details and explanations are open to considerable doubt.
[xxii] Peter Kebbell, The changing face of English Freemasonry, 1640-1740, University of Bristol, 2009, p. 6. PhD thesis.
[xxiii] Andrew Prescott, Susan Mitchell Sommers, “1717 and all that”, Masonic paper, 2018 : https://bit.ly/3cCFmBP
[xxiv] Douglas Knoop, Gwilym Peredur Jones, Douglas Hamer, The Early Masonic Catechisms, Quatuor Coronati Lodge, London, 2nd Edition, 1975, p. 51: In the opinion of Mr A. J. Collins of the MSS. Department of the British Museum, who, by the courtesy of the Lodge, quite recently had an opportunity of examining the document, it was written fairly early in the eighteenth century.
[xxv] Fabio Venzi, Massoneria, Teorie sulle Origini. Dall’Homo Ludens all’invenzione di una Tradizione, Anator, Roma, 2020.
[xxvi] William James Hughan, The Old Charges of British Freemasons, 1st edition, op. cit., preface de Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford, p. xi: […] the date of the transcription is no clue to the real antiquity of the MS […].
[xxvii] Wallace McLeod, “The Old Charges”, Heredom, vol. 14, 2006, pp. 105-144.
[xxviii] It is a branch of Islam, like Sunnism or Shiism.