Post by Tamrin on Aug 9, 2008 16:57:08 GMT 10
The Comacines
[Bernard E. Jones, 1956, Freemasons' Guide and Compendium, pp.47/49]
[Bernard E. Jones, 1956, Freemasons' Guide and Compendium, pp.47/49]
The tradition of the travelling masons takes its most popular form in the story of the Comacines, a story which has been accepted without question by many well-informed Brethren. It is the same story of the organized band of masons travelling under the protection of the Pope, but with a special background of its own. The Comacines are supposed to have taken their name from Como, in Lombardy, Northern Italy. The people of Como were such superior masons that they earned the name of Magistri Comacini, or 'Masters from Como.' Masons who passed through the different fixed stages of apprenticeship became Masters and formed a corporation of masons which built the edifices of Lombardy and then looked abroad for employment. They formed themselves into an association or fraternity, "seeking a monopoly, as it were, over the whole face of Christendom." An early edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica says that the Masters from Como were fraught with Papal Bulls, or diplomas, granting them the right of holding directly and solely under the Pope alone. They acquired the power to fix the price of their labour and to regulate their own internal government, exclusively in their own general chapter,
prohibiting all native artists not admitted into their Society from entering with it unto any sort of competition.... Wherever they came, they appeared headed by a chief surveyor, who governed the whole troop, and named one man out of every ten, under the name of warden, to overlook the nine others. The architects of all the sacred edifices of the Latin Church ... north, south, east or west—thus derived their science from the same central school; obeyed in their designs the dictates of the same hierarchy, and rendered every minute improvement the property of the whole body.It is claimed that from this company of travelling masons is derived "the fraternity of adopted masons, accepted masons or free masons."
Now, as this is one of the most popular legends in freemasonry and passes in the minds of some Brethren the world over as real history, it is worth while to look into the story. The Comacine legend has been investigated by many critical writers, among them Professor Hamilton Thompson, who in The Somersetshire Archæological Transactions, 1920, says:
It is unquestionable that the term comacinus occurs in the early Lombard laws, with reference to masons, and that Como and Comcina are in the district to which those laws refer. But comacinus is not a word which can be derived from either place; an inhabitant of Como is Comensis or Comanus.Professor Thompson believes that the Comacinus was simply a mason working at a job with others, and not a term for a member of any mysterious travelling guild.
"Not a scrap of record evidence has been found to establish the existence of this migrant fraternity," says Douglas Knoop, "and the basis seems to be mainly a mistaken etymology; for comacinus probably meant 'fellow mason' (as comonachus meant 'fellow monk'), without reference to Como or any other place."
The story of the Comacines might possibly have taken its rise from the fact that in the sixth century the Lombards, a barbarous race, overran North Italy, but when their power waned two centuries later there ensued a very considerable revival of building, under the influence of the Popes, assisted by the more settled state of the country under Charlemagne.