SCOTTISH FREEMASONRY 1725-1810 ... - Lodge Prudentia

entertainment whether they be present or absent and also an equall proportion of
the Charges of the Grand Lodge.” 60
With the exception of No. 3 Scoon & Perth, these lodges were operative,
a fact which may support Seggie’s conclusion that jealousies were “rife amongst
the old Operative Lodges.” 61 Initially, at the founding of the Grand Lodge,
precedence was determined by the order in which the representatives of the
thirty-three lodges in attendance entered the hall. 62 Whereas this question of
primacy was not particularly significant to the Grand Lodge of England, it was
of paramount importance in Scotland. 63 Freemasons, especially operatives,
intensely coveted their antiquity, and some even viewed the creation of the
Grand Lodge and the emergence of speculative freemasonry in earnest as the
“death-blow given to the operative character of masonry in Scotland.” 64 It is
more likely, however, that the gradual waning of operative freemasonry was due
in large part to population increase and the rising importance of industry and
trading. Indeed, freemasonry gradually outgrew “the narrow machinery of
government which had suited it so admirably two or three centuries earlier.” 65
Uncertainty ruled the events, as the initial ordering of the lodges based
on the sequence of entrance was overturned one year later when the Grand
60
No. 8 Journeymen Lodge Minutes, 27 December 1743.
61
Seggie, Journeymen Masons, 46.
62
Lionel Vibert, “The Early Freemasonry of England and Scotland,” AQC, 43(1930), 217.
63
Ibid. Referring to the founding four lodges of the Grand Lodge of England, Vibert notes that
they “seem from the very commencement to have settled the order by which they were to stand;
possibly they had traditions to go by…In no single instance did a Lodge come forward and make
claim to a higher place on the roll by reason of its having been in existence before its
recognition,” 217. Here again, as the Grand Lodge of England did not have the quandary of
satisfying so many different types of lodges, the numbering process occurred without
controversy.
64
William Hunter, Incidents in the History of the Lodge Journeymen Masons, Edinburgh, No. 8
(Edinburgh, 1884), 63.
65
“The Grand Lodge,” 114, quoting Harry Carr, The Mason and the Burgh (London, 1954), 62.
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