Dear Brethren,
In presenting our working tools we refer to ourselves as speculative masons, separating us from the operative masons. This puts us in a unique position of all being speculative masons.
When did this separation of operative and speculative masons occur? As is usual in masonry, no one knows for sure. But there are a multitude of theories and ideas, one of which believes that we are directly descended from the medieval stone masons who date back to the 1300's.
These early stone masons formed craft guilds and set up their individual rituals and requirements for admission into their society, including in many cases, a long apprenticeship. These stone masons were well known for the closeness of their organization and for the type and quality of their work; specializing in the building of churches, cathedrals, and various monumental buildings.
However, it must be noted that in the building of such monumental works, other people were involved, i.e., the people or organizations with money enough to support this work. This led to a working association of the masons and the providers. Then, as the need for these huge buildings declined, the stone masons' work also declined and their associate sponsors grew until all that remained was the name masons and the lodges or associations that had been formed.
Thus, "through a succession of ages" the rituals and requirements of the original masons were slowly revised, added to, and assimilated into the new order of lodges and new meanings were attuned to the symbols and tools of the craft. A study of the present working tools bears this out. We still give a name to these tools, but their meaning and use has been adapted to what we know as modern masonry.
This, of course, is a very simplistic explanation, but in the view of the many theories of this chance from operative to speculative masonry, it may be just as relevant and perhaps just as true as all the others.
Fraternally,
Robert James Rawding
Woshipful Master
