nothing but a servile imitation of an ancient
and useful _confrerie_ of real masons whose headquarters was formerly at
Strasbourg and of which the constitution was confirmed by the Emperor
Maximilian in 1498."[271]

As far as it is possible to discover from the scanty documentary
evidence the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries provide,
the same privileges appear to have been accorded to the guilds of
working masons in England and Scotland, which, although presided over by
powerful nobles and apparently on occasion admitting members from
outside the Craft, remained essentially operative bodies. Nevertheless
we find the assemblies of Masons suppressed by Act of Parliament in the
beginning of the reign of Henry VI, and later on an armed force sent by
Queen Elizabeth to break up the Annual Grand Lodge at York. It is
possible that the fraternity merely by the secrecy with which it was
surrounded excited the suspicions of authority, for nothing could be
more law-abiding than its published statutes. Masons were to be "true
men to God and the Holy Church," also to the masters that they served.
They were to be honest in their manner of life and "to do no villainy
whereby the Craft or the Science may be slandered."[272]

Yet the seventeenth-century writer Plot, in his _Natural History of
Staffordshire_, expresses some suspicion with regard to the secrets of
Freemasonry. That these could not be merely trade secrets relating to
the art of building, but that already some speculative element had been
introduced to the lodges, seems the more probable from the fact that by
the middle of the seventeenth century not only noble patrons headed the
Craft, but ordinary gentlemen entirely unconnected with building were
received into the fraternity. The well-known entry in the diary of Elias
Ashmole under the date of October 16, 1646, clearly proves this fact: "I
was made a Freemason at Warrington in Lancashire with Col. Henry
Mainwaring of Karticham [?] in Cheshire. The names of those that were
then of the Lodge, Mr. Rich. Penket, Warden, Mr. James Collier, Mr.
Rich. Sankey, Henry Littler, John Ellam, Rich. Ellam and Hugh Brewer."[273]
"It is now ascertained," says Yarker, "that the majority of the
members present were not operative masons."[274]

Again, in 1682 Ashmole relates that he attended a meeting held at Mason
Hall in London, where with a number of other gentlemen he was admitted
into "the Fellowship of the Freemasons,"