Sir William Dugdale told me, many years since, that about Henry the Third’s time the Pope gave a bull or patents to a company of Italian Freemasons to travell up and down over all Europe to build churches. From those are derived the fraternity of adopted Masons. They are known to one another by certain signes and watch-words: it continues to this day. They have severall lodges in severall counties for their reception, and when any of them fall into decay the brotherhood is to relieve him, &c. The manner of their adoption is very formall, and with an oath of secresy. Memorandum. This day, May the 18th, being Munday, 1691, after Rogation Sunday, is a great convention at St. Paul’s Church of the fraternity of the adopted Masons, where Sir Christopher Wren is to be adopted a brother, and Sir Henry Goodric, of the Tower, and divers others. There have been kings of this sodality. At Pottern, a great mannour belonging to the Bishop of Sarum, is a very faire strong built church, with a great tower in the middest of the crosse aisle. It is exactly of the same architecture of the cathedrall church at Sarum, and the windowes are painted by the same hand, in that kind of Gothick grotesco. Likewise the church at Kington St. Michael’s, and that at Sopworth, are of the same fashion, and built about the same time, sc. with slender marble pillars to the windowes; and just so the church of Glastonbury Abbey, and Westminster Abbey. Likewise the architecture of the church at Bishop’s Cannings is the same, and such pillars to the windowes.