Abstract

PRESCOTT, Andrew  and  SOMMERS, Susan Mitchell. Searching for the Apple Tree: Revisiting the Earliest Years of Organized English Freemasonry. REHMLAC [online]. 2018, vol.9, n.2, pp.22-49. ISSN 1659-4223.  http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/rehmlac.v9i2.31500.

The tradition has it that on 24 June 1717 four masonic lodges in London in a meeting at the Goose and Gridiron near St Paul’s Cathedral in London established the first Grand Lodge and elected Anthony Sayer as its first Grand Master is entirely dependent on a narrative by James Anderson in the second edition of the Book of Constitutions in 1773.Anderson’s narrative contains many internal contradictions and inconsistencies. By revisiting such sources as William Stukeley’s account of his initiation in 1721 and an account of the election of the Duke of Montague as Grand Master in the records of the Lodge of Antiquity, it is argued that Grand Lodge was not created in 1717, but rather at the dinner at Stationers’ Hall in London on 24 June 1721 when the Duke of Montagu was elected Grand Master.

Keywords : Freemasonry; 300 years; Grand Lodge; London; Goose and Gridiron Tavern.

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