y the bond of
fidelity. They readily became connected with the exercises of trades,
with training of apprentices, and the traditional rules of art."
Guild-masons, it may be added, had many privileges, one of which was
that they were allowed to frame their own laws, and to enforce
obedience thereto. Each Guild had a monopoly of the building in its
city or town, except ecclesiastical buildings, but with this went
serious restrictions and limitations. No member of a local Guild could
undertake work outside his town, but had to hold himself in readiness
to repair the castle or town walls, whereas Free-masons journeyed the
length and breadth of the land wherever their labor called them. Often
the Free-masons, when at work in a town, employed Guild-masons, but
only for rough work, and as such called them "rough-masons." No
Guild-mason was admitted to the order of Free-masons unless he
displayed unusual aptitude both as a workman and as a man of
intellect. Such as adhered only to the manual craft and cared nothing
for intellectual aims, were permitted to go back to the Guilds. For
the Free-masons, be it once more noted, were not only artists doing a
more difficult and finished kind of work, but an intellectual order,
having a great tradition of science and symbolism which they guarded.

Following the Norman Conquest, which began in 1066, England was
invaded by an army of ecclesiastics, and churches, monasteries,
cathedrals, and abbeys were commenced in every part of the country.
Naturally the Free-masons were much in demand, and some of them
received rich reward for their skill as architects--Robertus
Cementarius, a Master Mason employed at St. Albans in 1077, receiving
a grant of land and a house in the town.[81] In the reign of Henry II
no less than one hundred and fifty-seven religious buildings were
founded in England, and it is at this period that we begin to see
evidence of a new style of architecture--the Gothic. Most of the great
cathedrals of Europe date from the eleventh century--the piety of the
world having been wrought to a pitch of intense excitement by the
expected end of all things, unaccountably fixed by popular belief to
take place in the year one thousand. When the fatal year--and the
following one, which some held to be the real date for the sounding of
the last trumpet--passed without the arrival of the dreaded
catastrophe, the sense of general relief found expression in raising
magnificent temples to the