Fellow Craft (Freemasonry)

Fellow Craft is the second of the three Craft degrees of Freemasonry, conferred after Entered Apprentice and before Master Mason. It is the one degree of the three that is worked identically, in substance, across every regular Masonic jurisdiction: where the many appendant and higher degrees of the York Rite and the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite vary considerably by rite and by country, the basic Lodge system of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason is the common floor beneath all of them.

As with Entered Apprentice, the name has an operative origin. A stonemasons' guild recognized a fellow of the craft as a worker who had completed an apprenticeship and could practice the trade independently, a distinction speculative Freemasonry carried forward as its middle degree once the modern three degree system settled into its familiar form in the decades following the 1717 founding of the Grand Lodge of England, a development covered in the wider historical scholarship on early organized Freemasonry.

Fellow Craft occupies a transitional structural position rather than a terminal one. A candidate does not stop at this degree in ordinary practice; it exists to be passed through on the way to Master Mason, which is why Masonic literature discusses it chiefly in terms of what precedes and follows it rather than as a destination grade in its own right, unlike several of the higher degrees built on top of the Craft system.

The working tools generally associated with Fellow Craft in published Masonic reference literature are the level, the plumb and the square, each drawn, like the tools of the other two Craft degrees, from an operative stonemason's practical kit and given a moral reading as part of the degree's publicly taught symbolism. The square in particular carries forward into the wider square and compasses emblem that represents Freemasonry as a whole.

Fellow Craft's degree lecture is also widely described, in general encyclopedic accounts of Freemasonry, as covering the liberal arts and sciences at a symbolic level, an educational theme consistent with the degree's historical operative association: a fellow of the craft was a worker who had moved past basic apprenticeship into fuller practical competence.

As with Entered Apprentice, the published record here covers only the tools' names, their operative background and their general thematic association; the specific content of the degree's ceremony, its words and its modes of recognition, remains outside what any Masonic body publishes and outside what is described in this atlas.

General encyclopedic treatments of Freemasonry present this same tool by tool progression across all three Craft degrees as a deliberate teaching device, each degree's kit building on the one before it, which is why Fellow Craft's tools are consistently discussed alongside Entered Apprentice's rather than in isolation.