88 THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE MIDDLE AGES
that has often been overlooked given that many French authors (such
as Martin Saint Leon, Olivier Martin, and E. Coornaert) generally stud-
ied only the corporate regime of the oath-bound and regulated crafts.
Certain English authors, however, such G. W. Speth and Lionel Vibert,
noted the distinction among crafts on this point. Speth writes: "The
masons were free of restrictions, free of the ordinances of corporations,
for the same reason that their employers were not citizens ... but eccle-
siastics who lived outside the cities and were their own masters."*
In his splendid book Les Chantiers des Cathedrales, Pierre du
Colombier pertinently raises this question:
How were religious or feudal ties compatible with the migratory
nature of the manual laborers who worked on the cathedrals? Not
only were these manual laborers free, but in a good number of
cases we have proof that they were independent; they were not
bound to the corporative organization of the towns where they
were employed. While French documents are not very explicit in
this regard, the German ones are much more detailed. Quarrels
were common between the city workers and those of the cathedral
in fourteenth-century Strasbourg. Should this lead to the conclu-
sion that the cathedral builders had their own organization?We should recall that at the time craft communities were being
formed, brotherhoods existing under the protection of monasteries
transformed quite naturally into lay brotherhoods whose sole tie with
the abbeys remained a feudal bond. But these brotherhoods, whose eco-
nomic and social evolution had transformed them into distinct and
autonomous entities from the monastery, nevertheless continued to
enjoy exemptions from the Church from which they had emerged and
which remained the sole institution to which they remained subordi-
- G. W. Speth, "Free and Freemasonry: A Tentative Inquiry," Ars Quatour Corona-
torum (1897). L. Vibert, La Franc-Maconnerie avant l'existence des Grandes Loges
(Paris: Gloton, 1950), 36. "The oldest free masons were free of any company or any
kind of guild," writes Bernard E. Jones, who does not specify, however, that such an
exemption could result only from affiliation with the Church ("Le mot 'Franc' dans
Franc-Macon," Le Symbolism, July/August, 1954, 340).