Nowadays, whenever we publish a new book, I like to write a small piece for my own personal blog just to let people know why we published the book, and what value I see in it. In this case, it’s a rather interesting circumstance: Often when books which are extremely well researched, but very niche in subject matter, come to the Lewis Masonic publishing committee, often they are unfortunately declined on grounds of lack of commercial appeal. So, when a book was presented which was a comprehensive study of the information that can be found from the returns of lodges that were registered under the Unlawful Society Act, I thought this may well be the case, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
For anyone unaware, the Unlawful Society’s Act was a ruling passed by the English government in the 1799, as part of a Crackdown on the various groups that they thought may well be plotting to overthrow or disrupt the government, From memory, I seem to recall that Freemasonry was made an exception after direct negotiation with the then Prime Minister, Pitt the Younger, when after consideration, it was decided that Freemasonry was in fact a support to society. The government of the time still wanted details as to who was meeting, when and where, so as part of this compromise Masons needed to register themselves and lodges needed to send governmental returns.
Please don’t take anything I’m saying in this blog to be the most wonderfully historically accurate assessment, I’m just the publisher. The main point here being; the advantage with this act is that you and I can meet with the early Freemasons via these records, we can discover what they did, where they lived, how often they went to the meetings, and what they’re lifestyles and interactions were.
My vision of an 18th century Freemason? He’s a gentleman in a tricorn hat, and of course at the time there were many of these, but this new book by Paul Calderwood shows us the great diversity of membership at the time, and teaches us many valuable lessons from the past; one of the main reasons why it was approved in this case. The academic excellence and value to Masonic research overrode any commercial consideration and our publishing director’s enthusiasm became contagious.
I agree that this is an extremely valuable work and I believe it’s going to open up other lines of research as people search out the records from the Unlawful Society’s Act in their area.