‘Some background on Ashmole’s Free Mason Acception’

    

John Riley’s portrait of Elias Ashmole, c.1681-82, hangs in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, a gift from Ashmole personally. (Prints, in various sizes, available from the gift shop here.) That book under his right hand is Ashmole’s The Institutions, Laws, and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (1672), a 1693 edition of which is displayed at the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia.

On this date in 1646* Elias Ashmole was made a “Free Mason.”

You probably knew that even if you’re not in the habit of noting the anniversary when it arrives. And what has it to do with us today? I don’t know, except I think it proper to remember the early Free Masons despite the tantalizingly little we know about them.

This edition of The Magpie Mason takes a quick look inside The Diary and Will of Elias Ashmole, in which pages we locate the source of that blurb which appears in so many Masonic history and reference books. After the date and time (“Oct. 16. 4:30 p.m.”), there is only this single sentence:

I was made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire, with Colonel Henry Mainwaring of Karincham in Cheshire; the names of those that were then at the lodge, Mr. Richard Penket Warden, Mr. James Collier, Mr. Richard Sankey, Henry Littler, John Ellam, Richard Ellam, and Hugh Brewer.

Title page of the aforementioned Ashmole book on the Order of the Garter displayed at the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia.

It’s an interesting diary that frustrates through omission of details, like the exact place of this acception into Free Masonry; and alternately serves odd points, such as Ashmole being named Elias, rather than the agreed upon Thomas (after his father’s father), because his godfather at the christening blurted out “Elias” for a reason he couldn’t explain afterward. And then there are circumlocutions, like referring to the Civil War as “the troubles in London.”

Anyway, what I mean to share here are the footnotes the editor of this 1927 printing added to give some biography to those names. To wit:

  1. Colonel Mainwaring, b. 1608, a scion of the younger branch of the Mainwarings of Peover, succeeded to the Karincham estate in 1638.

  2. Richard Penketh, son of Thomas P. of Penketh Hall, d. 1652.

  3. James Collier held lands at Newton-le-Willows, d. 1674.

  4. Richard Sankey was the father of Edward S., b. 1621, who was evidently the copyist of a Sloane Masonic MS.

  5. The Ellams were of a yeoman family then long resident in the parish of Winwick, Cheshire.

  

  

Gosh, I wonder what the lodge meetings back then were like. Service club activities? 50-50 tickets?

Title page.

In time, I will look into the life stories of these men. They do not sound like obscure English countryfolk. I have to believe each is biographized in early AQC volumes.

*They used a different calendar back then, so just play along.