Origins & history

The conventional date for the start of organised “speculative” Freemasonry is 1717, when four London lodges federated as the Premier Grand Lodge of England. Operative stonemasons’ guilds, the documentary precursors, are attested in Scotland from at least the late sixteenth century in the so-called Schaw Statutes.

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the system spread across continental Europe and the Americas, often along trade and military routes. National schisms followed, most notably the 1877 Convent of the Grand Orient de France, which removed the requirement to profess belief in a Supreme Being and triggered a still-unresolved breach with English-recognition Freemasonry.