Provincial Grand Chapter of Staffordshire

History of the Royal Arch Province of Staffordshire

It is quite possible that the Royal Arch ceremony was worked in the Craft Lodges of Staffordshire without a separate Royal Arch Chapter being constituted. In the rough draft Minute Book of St Martin’s Lodge from 1807 to 1810, it was found that brethren were proposed in the Lodge for exaltation to the Royal Arch and that the Lodge originally ‘worked the Royal Arch as an integral and essential portion of the 3rd Degree’.

Although there may have been Royal Arch Masons who had been exalted in the Craft Lodges, it is quite clear that there were not a great number of duly constituted Royal Arch Chapters working in 1842. In the neighbouring Province of Worcestershire, apparently no Chapter existed until the Chapter of Dudley was constituted with the assistance of St Peter’s Chapter in 1844, and when the Howe Chapter No 857 was founded in Birmingham in 1852 (on the Petition of St Peter’s Chapter), it is recorded that only two Chapters then existed in the Province of Warwickshire, the other being the Chapter of Fortitude No 51.

Wolverhampton – A Masonic Centre

By 1842, there were 13 Craft Lodges in Staffordshire. The oldest was the Etruscan Lodge No 285, Stoke-on-Trent, which was founded in 1803 and erased in 1847, and the next St Martin’s No 115 (now No 98) Burslem, which was founded in 1805 on a Warrant originally granted in 1764 for a Lodge in Wolverhampton. There had also been several Lodges in Wolverhampton before St Peter’s was founded in 1834. The first Wolverhampton Lodge, according to Willmore, was constituted on 28th March 1732, the fourth in 1768, and he says that this town “appears—to have been the local centre of our masonic ‘forefathers’ ”. So it was to be for the Royal Arch Masonry in this Province.

The Earliest Chapters

In 1833 the only duly constituted Royal Arch Chapters in Staffordshire, apparently, were St Martin’s Chapter No 115, Burslem and, possibly, the Charity and Concord Chapter No 182, Longton, founded in 1813. The Chapter of Fortitude No 427, Stafford, was not founded until the following year, 1834.

The other 19th century Chapters still flourishing in the Province are, in order of their date of Consecration:

419	St Peter’s	1842
539	Vernon	1852
418	Staffordshire Knot	1857
624	Abbey	1864
482	St James’	1865
546	Etruscan	1873
1060	Marmion	1875
726	Royal Chartley Chapter of Fortitude	1881
456	Dove	1887
662	Dartmouth	1895
1941	St Augustine’s	1896