Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

that potential members who were stonemasons or tradesmen left Edinburgh in
search of support from the middling and artisan groups in cities such as Dundee,
Perth, and Inverness.
Just as the “diffusion of freemasonry was regionally based, so there was
no automatic percolation down the [Scottish] urban hierarchy.” 19 Similar to
Edinburgh, other cities manifested the same pattern of high population
concentrations but low masonic lodge representation. For example, by 1800,
only eighteen lodges had been chartered in the city of Glasgow, and its
population exceeded 83,000. 20 The operative centres of Dundee and Aberdeen
represented a meagre 4 per cent of lodges in Scotland. All said, by the
beginning of the nineteenth century, the provincial capitals of Edinburgh,
Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen made up only 17 per cent of the complete total
of Scottish lodges.
Provincial Expansion
Despite the unimpressive urban numbers, provincial Britain and Scotland
proved to be highly successful in establishing masonic lodges and maintaining
them throughout the eighteenth century. Though many clubs and societies
enjoyed pronounced visibility and attracted much social attention, they often
faded into obscurity within several years. During the early 1700s, societies and
organizations were mostly concentrated in urban areas such as London and
Edinburgh. However, the British metropolitan impetus “had a growing, if less
19 Clark, British Clubs, 314.
20 Smout, Scottish People, 356.
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