Culross, a small Scottish town on the Firth of Forth, is unusual in possessing two graveyards where almost every tombstone bears the symbol of a craft guild.
    The more recent of these two graveyards is that of Culross Abbey, on the eastern edge of the town, which holds many graves from the 18th century. The other surrounds the older, and ruined “West Kirk”, which lies across fields to the north-west. Here, the graves date mostly from the 17th century.
    While trade guilds were common in ancient Greece and Rome, in medieval England the first evidence of their existence is found in the early 12th century. In Scotland, the first documented evidence dates from Perth, 1209, but no one pretends that organised guilds had not already existed for some time.
    The guilds were set up to regulate their own activities, to protect the standard of workmanship, the wages obtained, the rights to practice or trade and, revealing a charitable concern, to aid those members who were too elderly to work or visited by difficult circumstances.
    Their members would aspire to becoming not only masters of their craft, but also burgesses of their town, which would give them a civic as well as a trade role. Records in Edinburgh reveal that in the late 17th century it had 2,200 burgesses, of whom 57% were guild members – but only 1% were masons.
    The guilds grew in wealth and influence, and in their heyday owned substantial halls, which served as administrative headquarters as well as the home for their regular great feasts. Their power and influence was maintained until the Reformation in the 16th century.
    In Scotland it can be shown that operative lodges gradually converted into non-operative, or speculative, lodges. The Lodge of Edinburgh, Mary’s Chapel, has minute books surviving from July 1599, when it was an operative mason’s lodge. The first non-operative member is recorded in 1633. This was John Mylne (the younger), whose father was master mason to the king.
    In 1636, John Mylne himself was promoted to that office. By 1721-1730 the non-operative masons outnumbered operative; by 1740 they predominated, the lodge held nine operative members and 64 non-operative.
    The argument over whether modern English Freemasonry arose directly out of the mason’s guild has not yet been resolved. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Craft has inherited – or absorbed – much guild symbolism.
    But the fact remains that none of the “Old Charges” – manuscripts detailing the legends, rules and regulations of operative masons – which were composed prior to the 18th century, mention the story of Hiram Abiff, whose tragic end is so fundamental to modern speculative masonic symbolism.
    The earliest hint that the story was in circulation comes from an advertisement in 1726, which referred to the widow’s son being killed by a blow; the earliest full version of the story appears in the famous exposure of Samuel Pritchard, Masonry Dissected, in 1730.
    The mystery confronting any researcher is why – and how – did the organisation of operative Free-masons become the vehicle for the highly tuned moral and spiritual system we know today?
    Why, for example, were there no speculative shipwrights or speculative wheelwrights?
    For the ship or the wheel could both readily lend themselves as symbols from which moral and spiritual allegories could be drawn: the ship guided by its pilot over unpredictable seas; the wheel’s strong rim drawing strength from spokes radiating from the centre.
    History does record that other guilds, apart from the masons, did moralise by means of allegories illustrated by their craft symbols. Prior to the Reformation, each year during Whitsun week, or on the feast of Corpus Christi in early summer, all the guilds performed plays – their pageants – on specially constructed wagons which could be driven on a circuit of prearranged performance sites in the town.
    The audience would remain in position, while all through the day the guilds would, one after another, arrive, perform and move off to the next site.
    Each guild presented a drama drawing from Biblical figures and events that were often symbolic to their craft. Examples abound: the Norwich Grocer’s company, for example, presented a play about the creation of Eve and the expulsion from the garden of Eden. Elsewhere, the Shipwrights and the Master Mariners both performed plays about Noah and his Ark, and the Vintners, somewhat inevitably, dramatised the wedding of Cana.
    In Chester, it was the water-leaders and drawers who performed the drama on Noah’s flood, while the cooks chose one called the “Harrowing of Hell”.
    Coventry’s Shearmen and Tailors performed the Annunciation and the Nativity. In York, the Tanners performed “The Creation and the Fall of Lucifer”, the Coopers played “The Fall of Man”, the Pinmakers chose “The Crucifixion” and the Mercers and Weavers “The Last Judgement”.
    Despite this evidence of a general use of symbolism in the trade guilds to teach morality, only the Freemasons were to give rise to a worldwide brotherhood founded upon a morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.
    This is strong evidence that there was always something special and mysterious about the trade of Freemason and the secrets it preserved; something which was evidently not shared by the other craft guilds.