Properly Prepared

If there is one thing connected with Freemasons, it is the epithet the ‘rolled-up trouser brigade’. The reason behind it lies in our medieval operative origins, when the dress of a working craftsman was an open-necked shirt, pants that came to just above his knees-over woolen stockings, and slip-on leather shoes. That is more or less how a candidate enters a Lodge. Today, that requires considerable rearrangement, either discarding our jacket and tie, opening our shirt, rolling up shirtsleeves and trouser legs and changing our shoes, or re-dressing in special ‘pajamas’. When Free & Accepted Masonry began, there was just one ceremony. You did not enter as an Apprentice, and then advance to become a Fellow-craft, but entered as a ‘fellow of the local town or borough’; becoming a Master Mason when you had passed through the Chair. So, you came into the ceremony with both knees and your chest bare. The reason why we have one knee bare for one ceremony and another for the next is an invention to distinguish different degrees. What is more, in the early days of Freemasonry, the handing of a slipper to a new candidate, was to remind him of the Bible story of Boaz handing a slipper to an elder at the city gate, so as to transfer Ruth into his family; in the same way as a new brother became a member of his new Lodge family. That is why we are slipshod