The contents of these documents are explicitly Christian. You should serve God, the (Roman Catholic) Church, your Master, and the members of your lodge. You should behave properly, that is, bury the dead, support widows, go to church regularly, and so on. The Craft and its tools are interpreted symbolically (Prescott 2005).

In 1598 and 1599, William Schaw, the King's Master of Works and General Warden of the Craft, signed new 'statutes' for the lodges of the Masons in Scotland. Three existing lodges are named explicitly: those of Edinburgh St Mary's Chapel, Kilwinning, and Stirling. From the information these texts give there can be no doubt that these are masonic lodges, more or less in the modern sense. Their members are called Masons, and there is at least one ritual reception, namely when, after one has passed his examination as a Master Mason in the Incorporation, one is brought into the lodge and 'made' a 'Brother and Fellow in the Craft. Such a lodge was presided over by a Warden and his two Deacons. The candidate paid an entrance fee, with which the dinner at the occasion was financed, and presented gloves to the members. In the statutes of 1599—which are a complement to, rather than a replacement of, those of 1598—Schaw confirmed that the lodge of Edinburgh was the oldest one. The lodge of Kilwinning did not agree. It took some years before a successor to Schaw decided that both would get the status 'time immemorial', meaning that there was no longer anyone alive who could remember when one of them did not yet exist. Thus we must assume that at least these two lodges existed around the middle of the sixteenth century, but possibly already much earlier (Stevenson 1988; Snoek 2002).

The archives of the Mason's Company of London go back a long time. After a gap, probably resulting from the Great Fire of London in 1666, they continue from 1619 onwards. New terms, which were not there before the gap, appeared: 'the making of Masons' (1621), masons are 'accepted' (1630), or the 'acception' (1645-1647, 1649-1650). There is no reason to assume that the phenomenon to which these terms refer, the 'acception', was an invention of 1621 only, much rather it was in existence at that moment for some time already. In 1646 Elias Ashmole wrote in his so called diary: "I was made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire. . . ." And in 1682 he noted: "I rec[eive]d a Sumons to appe[ar] at a Lodge to be held the next day, at Masons Hall London.... I was the Senior Fellow among them (it being 35 years since I was admitted). . . ."