12/06/2026
“Here begin the constitutions of the art of Geometry according to Euclid.”
Would you agree, that’s a cracking title for a poem with 794 verses?
It dates back to somewhere between 1390 and 1425 - apparently written by an English cleric and referred to as the Regius poem or Halliwell Manuscript. In the verses are a mix of the duties and moral conduct expected of Masons, as well tracing Masonry back to Euclid.
Euclid was a Greek mathematician known as the Father of Geometry, he lived in Alexadria in Egypt around 300BC, and the Regius goes on to say the arrival of the craft of Masonry into England happened in the time of King Athelstan, who was the King of the Anglo-Saxons and the first King of the English in 927.
There is a physical copy of this small book in the British Museum, it’s hand written on 64 pages of animal skin, about 4 x 5 inches
The other oldest thing we know of is the ‘cooke’ manuscript, circa 1450 -
Rather than a long poem, this is set out in prose and contains specific references to things that are in our ritual today, such as the 7 liberal sciences that we’ll come back to,
Though I’d stress, these documents were about the craft and lodges of operative masons.
These stonemasons, had spent the previous three centuries raising the great cathedrals of Europe -
Picture Paris and the French countryside, just below it gives you Notre-Dame and Chartres Cathedrals; cross the Channel to London and head southwest to Westminster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral; then east to the Rhine in western Germany for Cologne Cathedral.
A rough triangle - northern France, southern England, and the German Rhineland - this is the heartland of Gothic architecture, built by Masons.
And at this time, free travel was a restricted privilege - if you were a serf or peasant bound to a Lord, you couldn’t simply pick up and leave, where as the Master Masons could travel and ply their trade.
This was highly prized, and the best way to know if a Brother was a Mason, even if it was dark and you couldn’t see them, was to have a.. Secret handshake. Yup they are real!
Now let’s skip ahead to ahead to 1598, we get a thing called the Shaw Statute, the real version, is at the Lodge of Edinburgh, Mary’s Chapell.
These statues were written by William Schaw, appointed by King James sixth of Scotland as ‘Master of the Work and Warden General’ and they set out the duties of the brethren of Masonic Lodges that spread across Scotland, and their obligations to the public.
The statutes include very practical things like penalties for unsatisfactory work or inadequate safety, and that brethren should have their memory tested and gloves must be purchased.
Jump ahead another generation or two, and we begin to the transition from operative, to speculative Masons
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Q. Who knows what I mean by speculative vs operative?
A… Essentially it’s about men who do not work with physical stone, but instead use the tools and practices of operative masons as philosophical metaphors for personal growth, morality, and building character.
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So it’s 1641, and Robert Moray, is getting initiated by Members of the Lodge of Edinburgh, where those original statutes are kept, except they weren't in Edinburgh, they were in Newcastle, why? Because Scotland had successfully invaded Northern England after King Charles tried to force Anglican reforms on them.
You can look that up yourself, though the point here is this was the first time a Scottish operative lodge admitted a gentleman who was not a working stonemason, away from home, in a military setting.
Moray was a soldier, statesman, and natural philosopher, though not a craftsman, and we also have another gent Elias Ashmol, writing about his initiation into a Lodge in Warrington, an English town in Chesire, in the year 1646.
Ashmol was an antiquarian, politician, astrologer and student of alchemy, and Robert Moray was also a serious intellectual - a chemist and mathematician. Neither of these two were operative freemasons, they were speculative -
Q. Who’s heard of the Royal Society of London? Or Victoria?
Robert Moray was one of its founders In 1660, it’s the UK’s national academy of sciences, and Ashmol joined as a Fellow shortly after.
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Think about the world back then - before the 1600s, people inherited their knowledge, preserved and passed on by the Church for centuries: Aristotle on nature, Ptolemy on the heavens, and Galen on the body.
Humans believed the earth was at the centre of the cosmos, enclosed by perfect crystalline spheres.
Truth was deductive, you reasoned things down from first principles rather than testing against observation.
Then everything changed.
Copernicus began our shift in thinking from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe, meaning earth wasnt the centre of everything, our sun was - an idea continued by Galileo and Kepler over the century. Then Newton showed the universe obeyed predictable mathematical laws.
Isaac Newton also became president of the Royal Society in 1703, who’s motto was “nullius in verba”, roughly “take no one’s word for it”.
And to wrap up this historical jaunt, this period set the scene for the foundation of the first Grand Lodge of England, in 1717.
