It was a great honour to be asked to contribute to two beautiful and quality publications that celebrate the tercentenary of the Grand Lodge of England; the first was the United Grand Lodge of England’s own book The Treasures of English Freemasonry 1717-2017 which was launched in April, and the second is a work entitled Exploring Early Grand Lodge Freemasonry – Studies in the Honor of the Tricentennial of the Establishment of the Grand Lodge of England, which is an excellent volume put together by the Philalethes Society that includes papers by some of the leading Masonic scholars of our age, including Shawn Eyer, Chris Murphy, Ric Berman and myself. The work is meticulously put together and beautifully presented and each paper examines not only a history of the early Grand Lodge, but an examination of how early Freemasonry operated under the Grand Lodge system. For example my particular paper covers the York Grand Lodge, or the Grand Lodge of All England Held at York, to give it its full title, and Berman examines ideas surrounding the Antients.

All the papers in the volume work extremely well together and weave together various themes of early Grand Lodge Freemasonry, making the book a unique volume of historical analysis during a fertile period for Freemasonry. This work should be on every Masonic researcher’s book-shelf and is available in limited edition hardback and paperback. It is available on amazon by clicking here.