The Templars, the Francs Metiers, and Freemasonry 83This right of franchise allowed any craftsman to exercise any craft or
commerce within the domain of the Temple, despite any rules or regu-
lations promulgated by the sovereign authority of the nation or the city.
The inhabitants of the Templar commanderies were also exempted
from the majority of tariffs and taxes imposed by the king, the lord of
the area, or the municipality. In Paris this is how they were able to avoid
the tallage, the corvee,* and a very unpopular kind of servitude, the
watch, something in which the bourgeois residents of Paris were com-
pelled to participate. The trades that benefited from such franchises
were known as the francs metiers [free craftsmen].
Francs Metiers and FreemasonryIt is perhaps within these privileged francs metiers that we should place
the origin of operative or traditional freemasonry. Apparently, the term
freemason was imported from England. In that country there are texts
from 1376 and 1396 in which the word ffremasons or ffreemaseons
appears for the first time. In reality, however, the English had borrowed
the term from the French language, as is evidenced by its etymology. We
should not forget that under the Norman monarchs and for three cen-
turies following William the Conqueror's victory at Hastings in 1066,
the official language of England was French. The oldest statutes of
English workers to have come down to us (from 1351 and 1356) were
still written in French. Throughout the Middle Ages on into the
Renaissance, French was also the international language of crafts and
the esoteric language that craftsmen used. Thus it is in France where we
actually must look to find the origin of this term.^1
In the Middle Ages the word franc served not only to qualify what
was free—in opposition to that which was servile—and what bore the
mark of purity and high quality, but it also and more specifically desig-
nated every individual or property that was exempt from manorial
servitudes and laws. Thus a franc-alleu was a land completely owned as
property and owing no lord any right, faith, homage, or investiture.
Opposite the franc-alleu were the servile status and the fief that made
* [Corvee is the unpaid labor owed by peasants and bourgeois to their sovereign lord.
—Trans. ]