Presentation to Grand Lodge on 8 September 2004 by Professor Andrew Prescott, 'The Centre for Research into Freemasonry at the University of Sheffield'

Gentlemen,

I am delighted and honoured to have the opportunity to talk briefly to you today about the work of the Centre for Research into Freemasonry at the University of Sheffield. I hope that as many of you as possible will take the opportunity while you are at Great Queen Street to visit the exhibition which I have prepared with the Library and Museum of Freemasonry on John Pine, the celebrated eighteenth-century engraver. This exhibition conveys more vividly than any words of mine the importance of the research in which the Centre at Sheffield is engaged.

John Pine was responsible for some of the most famous images of the eighteenth century. He produced the frontispiece of the first edition of Robinson Crusoe. His edition of Horace is one of the finest achievements of English book design. Pine also engraved Rocque's remarkable map of London, which provides an A-Z of the Georgian city. I was familiar with all these aspects of Pine's work before I started my work at Sheffield.

However, there is another major aspect of Pine's work which you will not find mentioned in any of the standard reference books which describe his life. Pine was a freemason, engraving the frontispiece of the first Book of Constitutions and producing the engraved lists of lodges between 1725 and 1741. Pine's masonic output was a significant part of his work, and helps in understanding the rest of his life, but has been completely overlooked by scholars.

Again and again in my work at Sheffield, I have found examples of major figures whose masonic interests have been overlooked by scholars. The most remarkable example is probably a major biography of the Duke of Connaught, which makes no mention of his work as Grand Master. This situation reflects the surprising way in which professional scholars in Britain have neglected freemasonry as a field of study. As long ago as 1969, the Oxford scholar John Roberts published an article in a prestigious historical journal pointing out that, while freemasonry has been a major subject for historical research in Europe, professional historians in England have taken little interest in the subject. Freemasonry is of great relevance to many major historical themes from the development of national identity to the cultural history of the British Empire. Nevertheless professional historians in Britain have been slow to take an interest in freemasonry, and Professor Roberts's criticisms remain as valid today as they were thirty years ago.

The Centre for Research into Freemasonry was the first centre devoted wholly to the study of freemasonry to be established in a British university. Its mission is quite simply to encourage British scholars to recognise the potential of freemasonry as a field of research and to put the study of freemasonry firmly on the academic map in Britain. Many people have played an important part in ensuring the successful development of the Centre so far. Funding for the first three years was provided by United Grand Lodge, Yorkshire West Riding Province and by the Pro Grand Master. Since last year, Supreme Grand Chapter has joined with United Grand Lodge in continuing the funding. I would first like to thank you gentlemen for your very generous contribution to the work of the Centre. My friends in Yorkshire West Riding have made immense efforts to ensure the success of the Centre, and I would like to thank in particular the Provincial Grand Master, Trevor Broadley, for his enormous efforts on behalf of the Centre.

Since the Centre was publicly launched in 2001, a very active programme has been established. We hold regular public seminars at Sheffield, which have presented a wide range of work by scholars from a variety of disciplines working on subjects related to freemasonry. Our speakers in the past year have examined the masonic connections of, for example, subjects as varied as James Joyce, unitarianism and medieval guilds. The audience for the seminars consists of a mixture of local freemasons and interested academics and students, and a fascinating aspect of the seminars has been the lively discussions between masonic and academics. Those of you living within striking distance of Sheffield are welcome to join us at these seminars, details of which appear on our web site and elsewhere. Those of you unable to join us at Sheffield might be interested to know that in the next couple of months recordings of some of the seminars will be mounted on our web site.

The Centre is also organising bi-annual conferences at Sheffield. Our first conference was held in 2002 and was organised with the University's Centre for Gender Studies in Europe. The theme was the role of fraternal organisation in shaping the respective roles of men and women in society, and the various papers presented at the conference described a great deal of exciting and innovative research. The papers from this conference will be appearing in print next year. On November 18-20 this year we are organising another conference, about which I am particularly excited because it is being organised with the Society for the Study of Labour History and its theme is Freemasonry in Radical and Social Movements. The programme includes some of Britain's most distinguished social historians, and any of you who would like to join us will be extremely welcome.

Teaching is not a major focus of the work of the Centre at present, but nevertheless I have three postgraduate students at present working on M.Phil degrees (which they hope to upgrade to Ph.D.) and others will be enrolled shortly. The students include at least one person you know very well, James Daniel. A particularly exciting recent development has been the establishment of two studentships which will pay the fees of two postgraduate students. These studentships have been generously funded by the Regular Grand Lodge of Italy (through the good offices of my colleague John Wade) and by Freemasonry Today, and I would like to record my thanks to both these bodies for these imaginative initiatives. While working with postgraduate students is extremely stimulating, I have found particularly satisfying my occasional work with undergraduates. Among the interesting exercises we have undertaken were a project with some students from the School of Architecture which focussed on an old masonic hall, and some work with media studies students from Salford and Newcastle who were making student films about freemasonry.

But I spend the bulk of my time in active research, chiefly exploring the amazing collections of the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, and my greatest privilege over the past four years has been the opportunity to work very closely with Diane Clements and her splendid team. The main focus has been an exploration of membership records and the information they contain about social networks, but this work has brought a great deal of other interesting information to light, and I would like to single out three examples to illustrate the range of the Centre's work. Hitherto it was thought that the earliest appearance of the word freemason in English was in 1376, but I recently found a much earlier use of the word in a record dating from 1325, which described the role of one Nicholas le Freemason in a prison escape. Nobody has previously examined the parliamentary debates which led to the passing of the 1799 Act which required the registration of masonic lodges. It was an electrifying experience to read the passionate debates about the act, and in particular the dramatic speech of the Duke of Athol, which effectively saved freemasonry from being outlawed. I have pursued my researches right up to the twentieth century, finding remarkable newsreel film of masonic stone-laying ceremonies in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the flavour of the research is conveyed in the last annual report of the Centre.

In the past four years, I have made over sixty talks and presentations, which have provided a showcase for this new research. My audiences have ranged from large international scholarly conferences to local masonic lodges. My first presentation was to a conference at the British Library which had an audience of about 300 scholars from all over the world. I was very struck by the enormous interest taken by all these scholars in the potential of freemasonry as a subject of research and by their enthusiasm for the objects I showed them. This experience has been repeated time and time again - scholars who hear something about the history of freemasonry for the first time are immediately struck by the many interesting aspects which the subject presents. These various talks and papers are now gradually being published, not only in the existing masonic journals, such as Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, but also in specialist scholarly journals. I am also working on drawing these essays together into a book, whose working title is 'Tales from Great Queen Street'.

The Centre has also laid stress on the use of the World Wide Web as a means of disseminating its work. Our web site already contains a wealth of information for all seeking information about freemasonry. Copies of presentations by me can be downloaded. There is also an introductory bibliography of the history of freemasonry. An achievement of which I am particularly proud is that, together with the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, we have made available in database form John Lane's remarkable historical directory of all lodges warranted by the English Grand Lodges between 1717 and 1894. A major aim of the Centre is to update Lane's work, and applications have been submitted to academic funding bodies for funding for this work. The Centre has also published a CD-ROM of William Preston's Illustrations of Masonry, which allow different editions of this famous work to be easily compared.

I hope you will agree that a great deal has been achieved over the past four years, but our plans to 2009 are I think even more exciting. The major aim is to work with my colleagues in the History Department to develop an MA in Historical Research with special modules on the history of freemasonry. MA students in the History Department will be able to follow a series of modules which will allow them to focus on the history of freemasonry. This will be the first course of its sort anywhere in the world. If all goes well it will be launched in October next year. Initially it will be available only to students based in Sheffield, but eventually we will make it available to students further afield, using the Internet and other tools. We will also be developing short courses leading to diplomas, including a course on 'Writing a Lodge History'. In developing these courses, we will be working closely with our friends in the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, Quatuor Coronati Lodge and the Canonbury Masonic Research Centre. I hope the first of these courses will take place next year.

At the end of 2005, the Humanities Research Institute, in which the Centre is based, will be moving to new premises at the heart of the University's expanded campus. This gives us a once-in- a lifetime opportunity to give the Centre physical presence and to give concrete expression to the vision that research into freemasonry should play a pivotal role in humanities research at Sheffield. We are hopeful that we will shortly secure a major charitable benefaction for the Centre, which will enable us to create a wonderful new home for the Centre as part of the development. The new premises will include a purpose-built extension incorporating a lecture theatre, seminar room, a library for our rapidly growing collection of masonic books and space for visiting masonic scholars. We hope to call this extension the 'Knoop Centre' in honour of Douglas Knoop, a former Professor of Economics at the University and a Past Master of Quatuor Coronati Lodge, who in the 1940s published some of the most influential studies of freemasonry so far produced. The Knoop Centre will provide marvellous facilities for our public and teaching programmes.

Let me conclude by sharing with you one final dream. Some of you may be familiar with the magisterial history of broadcasting in Britain by the great historian Asa Briggs, which is effectively a history of the B.B.C. Briggs's great work took nearly thirty years to write and runs to five volumes. If a relative newcomer such as the BBC warrants a comprehensive history like this, there is an even greater need for a similar history of Grand Lodge, especially as it approaches its 300th anniversary. 2017 is only thirteen years away, and if we are to honour the 300th anniversary of Grand Lodge with a work of similar stature to that of Asa Briggs, we need to start thinking about it now. It would be marvellous if we could envisage a tercentenary history of Grand Lodge which would provide what Professor Roberts called for all those years ago, a history which provides a social anthropology of English freemasonry. My dream would be that the Sheffield Centre might play the leading role in producing such a history. This is a dream which I hope that you gentlemen might perhaps be willing to help me achieve.