Last summer a family with East Midlands’ origins donated an exciting document to the Museum. It’s a new Old Charges manuscript, which has been named the Barret-Hallam Ms. Known collectively as Old Charges, there are about 130 known examples of these documents located in Britain and overseas. The two oldest, the Regius Poem (c.1390) and the Cooke Ms (c.1425), are held by the British Library. The Museum cares for 47 of these manuscripts, dating from 1583. All the Old Charge manuscripts are now catalogued, with record entries available for each on the Museum’s on-line catalogue.
By the end of the 17th century, Old Charges had a standard format. They started with a prayer, then a legendary history of the seven liberal arts with the historical legend of stone masonry or operative freemasonry, rules (known as ‘charges’) for a lodge of stonemasons and rules for apprentices. The format and wording within Old Charge documents differs slightly and a complex hierarchy has been developed, based on groups of manuscripts with similar features. The new Old Charge falls into a group where the wording can be traced back to a manuscript written in 1646. These documents are important resources for the early history of freemasonry. This particular Old Charge was written when stone masons’ lodges were attracting members who were not always working with stone or involved in building construction. The rules and regulations created by stone masons in the Old Charges were adopted to shape the Charges that appear in The Constitutions of the Free-Masons by the Rev James Anderson in 1723. The historical section of Anderson’s Constitutions also drew heavily on the Old Charges. Four Old Charge manuscripts are on display currently in the North and South Galleries of the Museum.
Unusually, this new Old Charge includes the name of its scribe, Joseph Hallam of Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, who wrote the text for a William Barret. It also includes a date, 20 July 1718, revealing that it was written at the same time as Freemasonry was emerging as an organisation at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Research in Nottinghamshire archives by Mark Dorrington, former University Archivist, has unmasked Joseph Hallam as the parish clerk of Mansfield, explaining his fine penmanship. The identity of William Barret is less certain, as several individuals with this name lived in the locality at this time. There is no contemporary stone mason with this name identified in the area but other individuals with this name were crafts or tradesmen.
On arrival, the top section of this Old Charge was much thicker, made up of several layers of glued papers and was detached from the main document, a narrow scroll almost 12ft long. The back of the manuscript was repaired in places using different types of paper, which caused additional cracks and damage. On the left and right sides of the document inappropriate repairs were made using adhesive tape, which has now been removed after drying out but this has left brown stains. A successful grant application to the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust funded the conservation of the Old Charge, which is now repaired and accessible by researchers by appointment in the Museum’s Library and Archive under the reference GBR 1991 OC 1/48. One of the paper layers removed from the top section turned out to be a fragment of a personal letter from Joseph Hallam to his wife.
Work on the document by the conservator, Graeme Gardiner, also revealed that the text is written on paper with the Pro Patria, Maid of Dort, Dutch watermark. Andrew Prescott, former head of the Centre for Masonic Research, Sheffield, now Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Glasgow, is compiling research on this unique document. His forthcoming article aims to reveal more about the document and its significance at a time of transition from operative masonry to the provincial development of modern Freemasonry.
