FREEMASONS’ GUIDE AND COMPENDIUM BY BERNARD E. JONES WITH THIRTY-ONE PLATES IN HALF-TONE AND MANY LINE ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT WITH A FOREWORD BY J. HERON LEPPER LIBRARIAN AND CURATOR FREEMASONS” HALL MACOY PUBLISHING AND MASONIC SUPPLY COMPANY NEW YORK 1950Chapter Twenty-six FLOOR-DRAWINGS, CLOTHS, CARPETS, AND TRACING-BOARDS As long ago as 1730 there were emblems in the English lodges of three particular qualities—Freedom, Fervency, and Zeal—and those emblems were chalk, charcoal, and clay! In the early lectures is one version of a catechism relating to them: Q. How long should an Entered Apprentice serve his Master? A. Seven years... Q. How should he serve him? A, With Freedom, Fervency and Zeal. Q. Excellent qualities! What are their emblems? A. Chalk, Charcoal and Clay. To the modern mason the question as to why these three messy sub- stances should be present, or should even be represented, in a speculative lodge might prove a poser, but they are the undoubted forerunners of a part of lodge equipment with which at first sight they have nothing whatever in common. Floor Lines delineating the Lodge From early days in the speculative lodges—so early, probably, that the custom is lost in the mists of antiquity, unless by chance it came from the French lodges quite early in the seventeen-hundreds—Brethren used to mark out on the floor the actual form of the lodge, and at the end of their meetings they effaced the marks. With the passage of time the custom gave way to the use of painted cloths on floor or on wall, which in their turn were generally discontinued in favour of the tracing-board more or less as we have it to-day. An exposé, which might truly date from 1727, asks, ‘‘What’s the square pavement for?” and answers it with, ‘‘For the Master Mason to draw his ground draughts on.” This sufficiently indicates that our Brethren of old were draughting a symbolic building when they laid out, in temporary and easily erasable lines on the floor, the particular form of their lodge, a form which frequently varied with the degree in which they were working. 394FLOOR-DRAWINGS 395 The use of chalk, charcoal, and clay, in delineating the symbolical lodge, led to some forced and rather misapplied symbolism, as already made plain. For example, Oliver tells us that these three materials have ever been esteemed symbolically emblems of freedom, fervency, and zeal. Nothing is more free for the use of man than chalk, which seldom touches but leaves its trace behind. Nothing is more fervent than charcoal, for when well lighted, no metal is able to resist its force. Nothing is more zealous than clay, our mother earth, which will open her arms to receive us when forsaken by all our friends. Whether the ‘earthen pan’ mentioned in one version of the catechism is the container in which the chalk and charcoal were kept, or whether it refers to a packed, or rammed, floor of earth (in which sense we still use the word, as, for example, ‘hard pan’) is hard to say, especially when we remember that the drawing of the lodge in effaceable lines might well be the survival of an ancient custom. It is extremely difficult to see why such a curious and inconvenient method should ever have been invented by our Brethren of the early eighteenth century, either French or English, meeting in the rooms of inns. There is no doubt that it was closely related to the idea of secrecy, which accounts for the great hostility offered in some quarters to the introduction of the painted floor-cloth. Mayhe it was an odd survival of the age-old practice of drawing a working design with chalk on a board or stone, or scratching a design with a pointed tool in some yielding material. We can only conjecture, but we have to assist us the record of a German writer, Berlepsch, who described how the smiths of Magdeburg, Prussia, meeting as a medieval trade guild, opened their meeting by drawing on the floor a ring in chalk, the officer who drew it being responsible for rubbing it out with his hand when the meeting was over. The badge, or mark, of the guild was an incomplete circle. For much of our information on the ancient methods of delineating the symbolic lodge we have to fall back upon the irregular prints published during the eighteenth century. One of them, dated 1766, says: The drawing is frequently made with chalk, stone-blue and charcoal inter- mixed... . At the time of making [a mason], the room is very grandly ilhuminated; and, in some lodges, powder’d rosin, mixed with shining sand, is strewed on the floor, which (together with the extraordinary illumination of the room) has a pretty effect. Another well-known exposé of the same period says that ‘‘as soon as the ceremony of Making is over, the New-made Mason (though ever so great a Gentleman) must take a Mop from a Pail of Water, and wash it out.” ‘The same publication tells us that the candidate is also learnt the Step, or how to advance to the Master upon the Drawing on the Floor, which in some Lodges resembles the grand396 FREEMASONS’ GUIDE AND COMPENDIUM Building, termed a Mosaic Palace, and is described with the utmost exactness, They also draw other Figures, one of which is called the Laced Tuft, and the other the Throne beset with Stars. There is also represented a perpendicu- _ lar Line in the Form of a Mason’s Instrument, commonly called the Plumb- Line; and another Figure which represents the Tomb of Hiram, the First Grand-Master, who has been dead almost Three Thousand Years. ,.. The Ceremony being now ended, the new-made Member is obliged to take a Mop out of a Pail of Water brought for that Purpose, and rub out the Drawing on the Floor, if it is done with Chalk and Charcoal. There is reason to believe that even so late as 1808 and 1811 the mop was used for erasing floor lines in the Dundee Lodge, No. 9, at Wapping. In the 1808 and 1811 accounts the Tyler was paid for tobacco, for a mop, for a pail, and for forming one lodge. In 1798 he was paid twelve shil- lings and sixpence for forming five lodges and one shilling for a mop. We can more readily believe the entries to indicate that the old custom was still in use when E. H. Dring tells us in a paper delivered in 1916 that he was informed that in the 1860’s a Cornish lodge was still delineated by drawing lines in a sanded floor! Some customs, however inconvenient, diehard, and by becoming sacrosanct unite a body of conservative opinion in their favour. We see in the engraving Night (made by the great William Hogarth in 1738 and reproduced on Plate X) what might well be evidence of the custom of using a mop for erasing the floor design. Hogarth was a freemason, one of his lodges being at the Hand and Apple Tree, Little Queen Street, London (close to the site of the present Freemasons’ Hall). His scurrilous print portrays a night scene, grimly sordid, but not lack- ing in humour, probably set in Northumberland Street, Strand, formerly Hartshorne Lane. It is thought to contain masonic allusions, one of which is the mop carried by a figure on the right of the print. Two figures in the foreground wear leather aprons reaching to within a few inches of their buckle-shoes, and round the neck of one of them is a collar from which is suspended a square. Some lodges evidently replaced the chalk and charcoal lines with tapes nailed to the floor. One of the exposés says the floor lines are of “red tape and nails... which prevents any mark or stain on the floor, as with chalk.” The change gave rise to ridicule, for we find a mocking advertisement of 1726 (quoted by Henry Sadler, the well-known masonic historian) alluding to the ‘‘innovations . . . introduced by the Doctor [probably Desaguliers] and some other of the Moderns, with their Tape, Jacks, Moveable Letters, Blazing Stars, etc., to the great Indignity of the Mop and Pail.” The floor lines in chalk, tape, etc., delineated ‘the form of the lodge,’FLOOR-DRAWINGS, CLOTHS 397 which seems to suggest that to our ancient Brethren the lodge was not so much the room in which they met, but the space—the ‘holy ground’ enclosed within the outline drawn on the floor. A Candidate took up a position relative to those lines, particularly during the Obligation, when he may have had one foot on a step indicated by certain of the lines, although, in some cases, a real step, or possibly a rough ashlar, may have been used. There is reason to suppose that at one time the circum- ambulation of the lodge meant merely walking round the lines drawn on the floor and, later, round a lodge board lying on the floor. Tt was the custom for the old lodges to be ‘prepared’ by the Tyler, who was paid a small fee for his work. Many references could be quoted; in the Jerusalem Lodge, late in the eighteenth century, the Tyler was paid two shillings and sixpence for forming either a Fellow Craft or a Master’s Lodge. Obviously one lodge was not the same as the other, for on one occasion, the Tyler having made the mistake of forming an Entered Apprentices’ Lodge when a Master’s Lodge was wanted, the raising was deferred. The Lodge of Felicity, in 1738, likewise paid the Tyler two shillings and sixpence ‘‘for drawing ye Lodge.” The Grena- diers Lodge, in 1753, “agreed that Bro. Lister be a free member for Drawing the Lodges” (if there were “‘no making or raising them he is under obligation to pay”), In an old French lodge two members drew the lodge on the floor, leaving it to the Candidate or other junior mem- bers to erase it. A French lodge at Bordeaux had a Brother Grand Architect who was responsible for drawing the lodge “‘in the appointed place and with the necessary precautions”; so he evidently had to do a fresh drawing for each meeting. The Floor-cloth The system of drawing the lodge on the floor of the inn room must have had many inconveniences, and must have led at times, it may be imagined, to some differences of opinion between the lodge and its land- lord. It was inevitable that the floor lines should be replaced sooner or later by a floor-cloth of some sort. We find reference to floor-cloths in the 1730’s. In that decade the Old King’s Arms Lodge, No. 28, was presented with a painted cloth representing ‘“‘the severall forms of mason’s Lodges”—further evidence that lodges of the three degrees were formed in different ways. The floor-cloth was apparently a painted canvas, and in it we see an innovation which led eventually to the original purpose of the flooz- drawing being quite overlooked and forgotten, for in course of time the painted cloth, which cost money and probably did not wear particularly398 FREEMASONS’ GUIDE AND COMPENDIUM well as a carpet, developed into a wall-cloth, or into a cloth covering a table (often a trestle table, from which it is likely that such old and curious terms as ‘trasel,’ ‘tarsel,’ etc., were corrupted). The painted cloth developed into a composite picture of symbols, and to-day in every lodge we find it in the form of the well-known tracing-board, or lodge board, in which we do not easily see the old masons’ draughting-board, but from which, nevertheless, it has descended in a very roundabout way. The floor-cloth, whether spread on the floor, covering a table, or possibly carried on a roller for display on a wall, kept its name until somewhere near the end of the eighteenth century, when the tracing- board (itself, sometimes, the old cloth framed) began to come generally into use. But more than one lodge continued to work lectures “‘on the floor-cloth ”—actually the tracing-board. E. H. Dring, the well-known historian of the floor-cloth and tracing- board, tells us of a cloth in the possession of the Lodge of the Marches, No. 611, Ludlow, the only one known to him in which the hand of the Master is depicted drawing on the true Tracing-Board. This cloth originally belonged to the Silurian Lodge, Kington, Herefordshire, which ceased to exist about 1801, after only ten years of life. It must not be supposed that any such innovation as a painted cloth, whatever convenience it offered, would be received without hostility in some quarters. If the whole purpose of the temporary floor lines was sectecy, then undoubtedly that purpose was completely undone by the use of a painted cloth. There was always the risk that a lodge might have to dispose of its property, and we can well understand, without sympa- thizing with it, the point of view of the lodge of Edinburgh (a head lodge in operative days) when it instructed the Lodge St Andrews, in 1759, to cease the use of a “‘painted cloth containing the flooring of a master’s lodge.” Evidently a commission had been given to a painter to produce the cloth, and in his pride of achievement he had left it in his painting- shop for all to see. Tessellated Pavement In the absence of all the links of evidence, we are left to conclude that, with the passing of the painted floor-cloth or even much earlier, the need arose of a carpet, and that this was ultimately met by the chequered or mosaic-pattern carpet, woven with its own tessellated border, with which we are all familiar, and which traditionally, but hardly historically, repre- sents the pavement of King Solomon’s Temple. The black and white alternating squares are said to symbolize the chequered life of man. The tessellated pavement of square dies, or tesserae, of tile or stone, was common in ancient buildings. The remains of Roman buildings provideFLOOR-DRAWINGS, CLOTHS, CARPETS, TRACING-BOARDS 499 many beautiful examples, in some of which the tesseree were arranged to form geometric figures. Pavements of this kind were much in vogue at Damascus. We read in the Book of Esther that ‘‘the couches were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and white, and yellow, and black marble.” (i, 6, Revised Version.) Tiles and stones of square shape, as commonly used in pavements for thousands of years past, naturally lent themselves to the formation of geometric designs. In a work written by William of Malmesbury about 1129~39, we are told, concerning the ancient church of Glastonbury, seventh century, that there was a floor inlaid with polished stone. “‘In the pavement may be remarked on every side stones designedly interlaid in triangles and squares, and figured with lead, under which if I believe some sacred enigma to be contained, I do no injustice to religion.” The Tracing-board, or Lodge Board The tracing-board is an emblem whose history goes back indirectly to the tracing-board, or drawing-board, of the medieval mason, even though its name was reacquired in speculative times. The tracing-board of the old operative Master Mason was his draughting-board, upon which he worked out plans and details of a building. ‘The Fabric Rolls of York Minster include in the inventory of stores for 1399, ““ij tracyng bordes,” the modern meaning being ‘drawing-boards.’ A building contract of 1436 mentions a ‘trasyng ona parchement skyn,’ The board with parchment; a flat stone or slate; even the floor, on which the Master Mason designed and laid out his details for the instruc~ tion of craftsmen—any of these was his tracing-board, or drawing-board, We must not be misled by a modern application into supposing that the old-time tracing-board meant simply a piece of transparent paper laid upon a drawing attached to a board, so that a copy could be made by tracing over the lines. ‘To trace’ means much more than ‘to copy’; fundamen- tally, it means ‘to trace out,’ or, in other words, ‘to scheme,’ ‘to devise,’ “to plan,’ ‘to draw,’ ‘to sketch.’ The word comes down to us from the original Latin traeeus through the Italian, Spanish, and French languages, and in doing so has acquired all these many meanings, The beautiful ‘tracery’ of the Gothic windows is an application of the same word. Tt would be quite wrong to conclude, as many masonic authors have been prone to, and even as the foregoing might possibly suggest, that all medieval drawings were inevitably rough and elementary. Some of them are of surprising quality. To study a working-drawing prepared in 1370, giving details of part of Prague Cathedral; to note the finished draughts- manship, and to appreciate the knowledge of geometry essential to the400 FREEMASONS’ GUIDE AND COMPENDIUM production of the design—to do this will sweep away once and for always the idea that the medieval masons—at any rate, the later ones—designed as they went along, and put down in black and white only those details immediately required by the craftsmen (see pp. 40, 41). Records show us that parchment was bought in 1377 for the making of drawings at Exeter Cathedal, and a skin was bought in 1389 on which to make the working drawings of the east window of that building. It has already been shown at the above reference that special buildings were used as drawing-offices, although not then so called. As has been indicated, the speculatives’ tracing-board is not the equiva- lent of those old draughting-boards, its original purpose having been lost in the course of its long and indirect descent; it is now an emblem, no longer a board on which work is done. We have seen how the lodge cloth in many eighteenth-century lodges replaced the old system of out- lining the lodge in chalk or tape. It was at this point in the descent that the original idea of the tracing-board was lost. The floor-cloth of canvas, specially painted, had cost money; there was a natural objection to seeing it defaced by wear; the purpose served by the original delineation was possibly already becoming obscured; there was a tendency to drape the cloth over a table or to hang it on the wall, when of course it became purely and simply an emblem. The cloth in turn was replaced by the more convenient board—smaller, handier, and lending itself more easily to lodge procedure. But by the time the board had arrived the original pur- pose was completely forgotten or, to say the least, ignored. The board had become a picture representing various masonic emblems, and no longer purported to be the working drawing or the layout of a lodge or other building, however speculative. E. H. Dring believes that probably the earliest dated tracing-boards in existence in Great Britain are the set belonging to Lodge Faithful, founded in 1753, at Norwich, now meeting at Harleston, Norfolk. The boards of this set are dated 1800. In the First Degree board there are in addition to the usual emblems a beehive, a sundial, a trowel, and a cornucopia. On the base of the Third Degree board is an arcade of columns, in front of which are five columns representing the five orders of architecture. The French lodges apparently had tracing-boards long before the English lodges had them. The planche d tracer is known as far back as 1745. Some French lodges refer to the board as the tracé only, this meaning literally ‘outline,’ what we should in modern language call ‘layout.’ If we translate planche a tracer we get ‘tracing board,’ and it is reasonably certain that our term came about in that way, so reintroducing a term common in English operative lodges hundreds of years before.FLOCR-DRAWINGS, CLOTHS, CARPETS, TRACING-BOARDS go! It is probable that the French planche 4 sracer was an actual drawing- board, a plain board on which the Master of the lodge drew certain out- lines, and it is equally probable that much earlier than the first known reference to the French planche a tracer some of the English boards were of this kind, and for use in one of the degrees had a ‘ground plan of King Solomon’s Temple’ drawn upon it. So it might well be that here and there the English tracing-board did represent the true draughting- board, but that its purpose was lost during the 1700’s. There is strong support for the idea in a minute of Old King’s Arms Lodge (founded 1725), which in the year 1733, when meeting at the King’s Arms, Strand, London, bought a copy of ‘‘de Clere’s Introduction on the Principles of Architecture,” a drawing-board, and tee square for the use of the Master and his Lodge. In some lodges in the early 1700’s it was customary for Brethren to de- liver lectures on subjects not strictly speculative, and in the case of the Old King’s Arms Lodge it is likely that a qualified Brother gave lectures on architecture from time to time, and illustrated them on the drawing-board. At some time in the 1700's some lodges had mosaic marble boards, or stones, but such boards were too expensive to come into general use. Some of the old lectures agree that as the tracing-board is an im- movable jewel for the Master to lay lines and draw designs on, the better to enable the Brethren to carry on the intended structure with regularity and propriety, so the Volume of the Sacred Law may justly be deemed the spiritual tracing-board of the G.A.O.T.U. How did the tracing-board come to be regarded as an ‘immovable’ jewel? Was it by way of contrast to the lines of chalk and tape which had to be effaced at the end of every lodge meeting? ‘Immovable’ had an ordinary as well as an abstract or spiritual meaning in those old lodges. The ‘jewels’ and the ‘immovable jewels’ of a lodge were loosely used terms and meant different things at different times. In the old catechisms we find such odd terms as ‘trasel board,’ ‘tresel board,’ ‘tarsel,’ ete., which are just possibly corrupt forms of the term ‘tracing board,’ but are much more likely something quite different. Undoubtedly many old lodges supported the tracing-board on a trestle, or on a trestle table, a collapsible table being more suited to the limited conveniences of the tavern room in which the lodges met. It is extremely likely, too, that a great many lodges knew the term ‘trestle board,’ or some variant of it, long before they had ever heard of the tracing-board. The board was just the “lodge board’ in a great many cases. Grand Lodge has never authorized any particular design of tracing- board, nor has it attempted to define its nature, although, of course, it countenances its use, for in the course of consecrating the lodge—a402 FREEMASONS’ GUIDE AND COMPENDIUM ceremony usually worked by Grand Lodge officers—the tracing-board is anointed. Cecil Powell tells us that in the Moira Lodge of Honour, Bristol (founded in 1809 as the Moira Lodge), there is a centre table, covered with a blue cloth, on which the tracing-board of the First Degree is sup- ported by four old brass figures, one denoting Faith, one Hope, and two of them Charity. At its western end stand two small brass columns, the one Corinthian and the other Ionic. For the other degrees, a smaller board, having the Fellow Craft design on one side and the Master Mason's on the other, is placed on that of the First Degree. On the table are also set the two ashlars with the particular working tools required during the evening, and for an Initiation three cutlasses lie on each side. For a raising there stands between the ashlars a ‘triangle,’ or derrick. Round the table, upon the floor, are three handsome candlesticks in the east, west, and south, with seven, five, and three steps forming the foot of each respectively. Formerly a ‘pot of manna,’ ‘Aaron’s rod,’ and ‘tables of stone’ were used, suggestive of the ‘Ark of the Covenant,’ and these articles are still in existence. In the working of the lodge the ‘north-east corner of the /odge’ means the north-east corner of the rable. The survival of certain metal emblems in the form of templates— pillars, working tools, etc—has given rise to the conjecture that in some of the ‘Antient’ lodges the actual emblems were placed on the floor or on a tracing-board. The tracing-board used in most lodges nowadays harks back to those designed for the Emulation Lodge of Improvement about 1846, and to those published three years later by the noted designer John Harris, the miniature-painter and architectural draughtsman, who, initiated in 1818, published five years later sets of tracing-board designs. He went blind when sixty-five years of age and died about 1872, when over eighty years of age. E. H. Dring, attributing to Harris a mistake in the Hebrew letter- ing of the Third Degree boards, believes that Harris transcribed the Hebrew letters which he found on an earlier board designed by Bowring and converted them into cryptic letters, but overlooked that Hebrew was written from right to left. Further, says E, H. Dring, in an earlier design Harris, instead of writing | > for TC, wrote 1 <, an error to be found in many boards since his day. The general practice of conferring the First and Second Degrees on the one evening during the 1700’s confirms the belief that those two degrees were originally one, and the belief is given considerable support by the existence of tracing-boards which carry on the one face the emblems of both those two degrees. In some of the American lodges the tracing-board is not used; instead,FLOOR-DRAWINGS, CLOTHS, CARPETS, TRACING-BOARDS 403 the symbols which customarily are found on it are separately projected on to a scteen by an optical lantern as and when required. In lodges where this is done it is usual for illuminated signs over the Master’s and ‘Wardens’ chairs to show the emblems associated with those chairs. Not only the Royal Arch, but the Mark Degree and some of the allied degrees, occasionally use tracing-boards, more generally so in Ireland, it is thought, than in England. The Chapter of Sincerity, No. 261 (Taun- ton), has used a tracing-board almost all the time since it was founded in 1819. The ‘Lodge’ meaning a ‘Board’ or ‘Ark’ ‘Old minutes provide many examples of the tracing-board being referred to as the ‘Lodge.’ Thus, we read of “a very handsome Lodge being presented,” of the Candidate having ‘the Lodge explained to him,’ etc. and we have the phrase in the consecration ceremony, ‘‘I now anoint the Lodge”; and so forth. In 1771 a famous Bath lodge, No. 41, in- structed Nicholas Tucker, a former Senior Warden, to “paint a Lodge,” and the board that he painted has since passed into the possession of Loyal Lodge, Barnstaple; from this there can be no doubt that the ‘Lodge’ in old days often meant the lodge board or, as we call it to-day, the tracing-board. But the nature of many references in old reports leads us to wonder whether the ‘Lodge’ sometimes took the form of an ark, chest, or box. Preston’s Illustrations of Masonry (1772) indicates a space in the centre of the temple for the ‘Lodge,’ and a later edition (1781) speaks of the “Lodge’ being “covered with white satin” and ‘‘placed in the centre on a crimson velvet couch.” Was this lodge an ark, or just the horizontal lodge board, here used in the sense of an altar, the white satin being in the nature of a veil to cover the face of the altar? In one ‘Antient’ lodge, founded in Windsor in 1813, the working tools were displayed on a box 4 feet from east to west, 29 inches high and 28 inches wide, covered with red material, and surmounted by a white satin cloth having a gold fringe. Tr the dedication of the new Grand Lodge Hall, in London, in May 1776, four Tylers carried the ‘Lodge’ as part of a procession which passed round the hall three times; they placed the ‘Lodge’ in the centre on a crimson yelvet couch, and at the close of the ceremony carried it away. Tn consecrating a new lodge in the United States about 2867 the ‘Lodge,’ consisting of an oblong box covered with white linen, was placed upon the table in front of the Grand Master, and was surrounded by three candles and vessels of corn, wine, and oil. In commenting on