YORK MYSTERIES REVEALED Neville Cryer, pub. Rev. Neville Barker Cryer, York, 2006. Paperback, 493 pages, £16.95. ISBN 0 95531 77 03.

Neville Barker Cryer is one of the most assiduous and knowledgeable researchers into the history of English Freemasonry. He is best known to Freemasons for masonic educational publications such as I Just Didn’t Know That (1999), but his more detailed works such as The Arch and the Rainbow (1997) are major achievements of masonic research, packed with fresh information gleaned from local lodge records and full of original insights. Neville’s most recent work, York Mysteries Revealed, is no exception, and is perhaps Neville’s crowning achievement. He provides a sweeping review, beginning with the Anglo-Saxons and ending with the establishment of the Provincial Grand Lodge of Yorkshire, of York’s connection with the craft of stonemasonry and the emergence of social Freemasonry from stonemasons’ organisations.

The character and origins of the Grand Lodge of All England active in York during the eighteenth century have fascinated students of Freemasonry from the time of William Preston onwards. Neville sheds vivid light on this subject by clearly describing and analysing the remaining records of the Grand Lodge of All England, mostly held by the York Lodge, No. 236. This material is of fundamental importance for understanding the early history of Freemasonry and has never before been fully reported; in electing Neville as an honorary member after he retired to York, York Lodge did the wider world of masonic scholarship a great service.

In describing the importance of York in the history of Freemasonry, Neville also reinterprets many aspects of its early history. He suggests how masonic ritual in York may have developed from earlier guild practice, he shows how the development of Freemasonry in the eighteenth century was bound up with the political conflict between Hanoverian Whigs and Jacobite Tories, and he offers new interpretations of the development of masonic degrees and the origins of orders such as the Royal Arch and Knights Templar.

The publication of Neville’s book is one of the most important recent events in masonic scholarship. It is essential reading for all those interested in the early history of Freemasonry.