Practice · Orders · Masonic and Rosicrucian
The Premier Grand Lodge of England
1717 – 1813 · England
Four London lodges met at a tavern and constituted a Grand Lodge. Not an occult body and not trying to be one — but the shape every body below inherited was settled here: a lodge, a set of degrees taken in order, an initiation, an obligation of secrecy, and a printed constitution saying who may belong.
Is anything of the name working now?
Ended
It did not fail; it merged. In 1813 it joined with the rival Antients Grand Lodge to form the United Grand Lodge of England, which is still working. This is the only clean ending on the page, and it is clean because a corporate merger leaves paperwork.
What can be gleaned from it
Its constitution, printed in 1723, is the earliest document in this section and still the most consequential. Read it for the form rather than the content: the machinery it describes is what the Rosicrucian, Theosophical and Thelemic bodies all borrowed, usually without borrowing anything else.
Founding
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Founded 1717
The date organised Freemasonry gives itself and the one its own governing body publishes. The four lodges met; what they constituted was a Grand Lodge over lodges that already existed, not Freemasonry.
- The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, The History, pp. 47–48 — The 1723 printing, scanned
What it came out of, and what came out of it
Bodies this study records as coming out of it: Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia.
A descent is a claim in this database and never a column, so every line above and below carries a source. See Evolution for the whole chain and for what the five kinds of descent mean.
On the record
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What it fixed lodge, degree, obligation, printed constitution this study's reading
This study's own reading, and the reason a Masonic body opens a section about occult ones: what the later orders took was the machinery, not the doctrine.
- The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, The Charges, I–VI, and the General Regulations — The 1723 printing, scanned Locator only. The 1723 blackletter does not survive OCR: the first Charge comes back as ‘is dblig'd;by Meer to o tie modittfaw’.