Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

of 1.5 members over a fourteen year span; the lodge itself was chartered in 1745,
and the initial membership total was sixteen. Similar to Clark’s analysis, few if
any stonemasons were recorded among the Dundee lodge ranks, and the overall
impression of the returns for No. 47 is that the majority of members belonged to
the “middling and lesser trades,” without the “shift towards the middle- and
upper-classes over time, underlined by the decline of lesser trades.” 188
This assertion is supported by a comparison with recruitment patterns
from the Ancients in England. From 1751-1755, the Ancients exhibited a small
proportion of elite members and a high percentage (72.9) of major trades,
comparable to the significant representation of tradesmen in the Dundee lodge.
Allowing for the limited samples, the evidence suggests that provincial Scottish
lodges were more akin to the trends present within the Ancients; the greater
elitism present among Modern English lodges is reflected among some Scottish
lodges, but only in Edinburgh. Indeed, such findings “raise general questions
about the pace and extent of social and class segregation in [Scottish] society” 189
in the eighteenth century, a point which will be discussed and contextualized
within the broader patterns of voluntarism in Enlightenment Scotland in Chapter
3.
Conclusion
The upsurge of masonic popularity and prominence during the mid-
1700s closely parallels the cultural achievements of Scotland after 1740.
Individual lodges ultimately contributed to the erection of the Grand Lodge of
188 Ibid, 321.
189 Ibid, 323.
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