The Party Line of the Masons

In the middle ages, there were two kinds of masons: rough and free craft. Free stone is like the soft stone that you can actually carve designs into. To protect their wages, to make sure that they were differentiated in the minds of employers, they initiated trade guilds. These trade guilds founded lodges where they store their tools. They ate and basically hung out together. And then after a while, they just went the extra mile and said we're going to come up with secret handshakes, passwords, that kind of stuff. And the masons were born.