THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

[71] _The Hole Craft and Fellowship of Masonry_, by Conder. Also
exhaustive essays by Conder and Speth, _A. Q. C._, ix, 29; x, 10. Too
much, it seems to me, has been made of both the name and the date,
since the _fact_ was older than either. Findel finds the name
_Free_-mason as early as 1212, and Leader Scott goes still further
back; but the fact may be traced back to the Roman Collegia.
[72] He refers to Herodotus as the _Master of History_; quotes from the
_Polychronicon_, written by a Benedictine monk who died in 1360; from
_De Imagine Mundi_, Isodorus, and frequently from the Bible. Of more
than ordinary learning for his day and station, he did not escape a
certain air of pedantry in his use of authorities.
[73] These invocations vary in their phraseology, some bearing more
visibly than others the mark of the Church. Toulmin Smith, in his
_English Guilds_, notes the fact that the form of the invocations of
the Masons "differs strikingly from that of most other Guilds. In
almost every other case, God the Father Almighty would seem to have
been forgotten." But Masons never forgot the corner-stone upon which
their order and its teachings rest; not for a day.
[74] Such names as Aynone, Aymon, Ajuon, Dynon, Amon, Anon, Annon, and
Benaim are used, deliberately, it would seem, and of set design. _The
Inigo Jones MS_ uses the Bible name, but, though dated 1607, it has
been shown to be apocryphal. See Gould's _History_, appendix. Also
_Bulletin_ of Supreme Council S. J., U. S. (vii, 200), that the
Strassburg builders pictured the legend in stone.
[75] _The Cathedral Builders_, bk. i, chap. i.
[76] See the account of "The Origin of Saxon Architecture," in the
_Cathedral Builders_ (bk. ii, chap. iii), written by Dr. W.M. Barnes in
England independently of the author who was living in Italy; and it is
significant that the facts led both of them to the same conclusions.
They show quite unmistakably that the Comacine builders were in England
as early as 600 A.D., both by documents and by a comparative study of
styles of architecture.
[77] _Maestri Comacini_, vol. i, chap. ii.
[78] _Story of Architecture_, chap. xxii.
[79] Gould, in his _History of Masonry_ (i, 31, 65), rejects the legend
as having not the least foundation in fact, as indeed, he rejects
almost everything that cannot prove itself in a court of law. For the
other side see a "Critical Examination of the Alban and Athelstan
Legends," by C.C. Howard (_A. Q. C._, vii, 73). Meanwhile, Upton points
out that St. Alban was the name of a town, not of a man, and shows how
the error may have crept into the record (_A. Q. C._, vii, 119-131).
The nature of the tradition, its details, its motive, and the absence
of any reason for fiction, should deter us from rejecting it. See two
able articles, pro and con, by Begemann and Speth, entitled "The
Assembly" (_A. Q. C._, vii). Older Masonic writers, like Oliver and
Mackey, accepted the York assembly as a fact established (_American
Quarterly Review of Freemasonry_, vol. i, 546; ii, 245).
[80] _History of the English Constitution._ Of course the Guild was