1599, the oldest Masonic lodge

From http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20161209-secret-history-of-the-freemason...

19 Hill Street, Edinburgh Mary’s Chapel isn’t a place of worship. It’s a Masonic lodge. with its records dating back to 1599, the oldest  Masonic lodge still in existence anywhere in the world.

By the late 1500s, there were at least 13 established lodges across Scotland, from Edinburgh to Perth. But it wasn’t until the turn of the 16th Century that those medieval guilds gained an institutional structure – the point which many consider to be the birth of modern Freemasonry.

The oldest minutes in the world, which date to January 1599, is from Lodge Aitchison’s Haven in East Lothian, Scotland, which closed in 1852. Just six months later, in July 1599, the lodge of Mary’s Chapel in Edinburgh started to keep minutes, too. As far as we can tell, there are no administrative records from England dating from this time.

“There’s an old saying that wherever Scots went in numbers, the first thing they did was build a kirk [church], then they would build a bank, then they would build a pub. And the fourth thing was always a lodge,” said,Robert Cooper, curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland