The Records Of An Ancient Lodge.

sideration can do , and while we regret the position it occupies in , or rather out of , the Masonic world , we cannot but reverence it for its antiquity when we remember that its records date in almost unbroken succession from the year 1674 down to the present time . We are aware that the field which we are now gleaning has been previouslgone over by other Masonic gatherers ; but as we have never seen the

y result of their researches , and believing that there are many similarly situated with ourselves , we now lay before the readers of the Masomc Magazine what we have been able to pick up . Even in a well gleaned field the latest searcher may pick up a few handsful of grain which lay unnoticed by those who had preceded him . That such is the case in the present instance we have strong reason to believe , as , in looking over the old documents of Melrose Lodge , the

first which arrested our attention was a copy of the ancient charges , which appears to have been overlooked by others . A verbatim copy of this charge we had the pleasure of sending to Bro . Hughan , who published it in the last number of this magazine . It is worthy of note that the place of meeting of this old lodge , down to the year 1743 , was not at Melrose , but at Newstead , or Neusteid as it is called

in the old documents . It is situated on the ri ght bank of the Tweed , about a mile east from Melrose , and stands upon part of the Roman station of Trimontium . It was the stead of the abbey founded by David I ., and it was situated about midway between the two reli gious houses of Mailros and Melros . As there is a great similarit y in the names of these two religious houses , and the one is apt to be confounded with the other , we think a short account of the former will not be out of place here .

Mailros was established b y Aidan , Bishop of Lindisfarne , in the year 636 , in the reign of Oswald , King of Northumbria ; Coldingham , Tyningham , and Abercorn , belonging to the same episcopate , were founded not long after . The first Abbot was Fata , selected by Aidan himself , and under him St . Boisil , or Boswell , * was Prior , and it was while these holy men held office , in the year 651 , that the famous St . Cuthbert became an inmate of the monastery of Mailrosin which he succeeded to the office of Prior on the death of Prior

, . Boisil in 664 . The monastery was burned b y Kenneth II ., in 839 , but was rebuilt not long after . From 1098 down to 1136 Mailros continued a dependency of Coldingham , when David I . exchanged the church of St . Mary of Berwick for it , and annexed it to his house of Melros which he had founded about two miles farther up the Tweed . It was at the village of Newstead , which lay half-way between these two reliions housesthat the loclheld its

g , ge meetings . When they first held them there is nothing now to prove , but from the fact that the lodge was large and flourishing in the middle of the seventeenth century , and that reference is macle to former years of which the minute book contains no record , we can safely claim for it the indefinate antiquity of an existence from " time immemorial . " Like most of these ancient minute books , the want of chronological

continuity is very confusing , aud one has to be very careful in the search for a continuous journal of the transactions of the lodge . The minute book , which is a small quarto volume , contains 284 pages , from page 1 to 233 beingnumbered in regular order , but on the last-named page , after the number , we find the following notice : — " Turn to the beginning of this side of this Book , " which being clone by turning the book upside downand beginning at the

, end , we find the first page after the fly leaf numbered as 234 , and then regularly numbered for the following fifty pages , until we come again to the bottom of page 233 , where the break occurred . But although the pages are thus regularly numbered , the minutes are b y no means regularl y entered ; sometimes they are at one end of the book and sometimes at the other , and