Originally posted by Gemwolf
For example, what would/could I use to translate stuff like this:

They really don't translate into anything. They are Masons Marks.

Stonemasons always chose a symbol for themselves, and marked their stones with that symbol. The stones were later inspected, and they received wages based on the proficiency of their work (through mark identification).

In Freemasonry, this forms the basis of the Mark Master degree, which, in the USA, is the first degree received in a Chapter of Royal Arch Masons.

Light is right again.
The marks you have in the first link are the personal 'marks' oft he mason who was working there. This was a pretty common thing for masons to do when they worked on a building.

Would it be reasonable to ask why those stonemasons chose those marks in particular? It seems like they would have had some sort of meaning or purpose beyond simply being a design the individual mason liked.

I don't mean to suggest that they formed some sort of proto-Masonic code, but the fact that several are actual runes and many are rune-like seems significant, at least to my uneducated mind. Do either of you have a resource you'd recommend that discusses this?

Originally posted by articulus
Would it be reasonable to ask why those stonemasons chose those marks in particular? It seems like they would have had some sort of meaning or purpose beyond simply being a design the individual mason liked.

You're looking into this deeper than you need to. Carving an identifying mark on the block was a lot quicker than carving your name, and given that illiteracy was high in those days much more practical. The mark would probably have been given to them by the Master Mason.

I had a great visit to Kenilworth Castle the other day. In the gatehouse you can see the different masons marks on the blocks. From what I could tell "E" was the most prolific but they all looked pretty well square to me.

Sadly a lot of non-masons have been carving on the stones too. The oldest graffiti I found was 1753 - which made me wonder... when does graffiti become history in its own right?

I don't mean to suggest that they formed some sort of proto-Masonic code, but the fact that several are actual runes and many are rune-like seems significant, at least to my uneducated mind. Do either of you have a resource you'd recommend that discusses this?

No, this is a co-incidence. Some marks are letters, some are geometric symbols and some are more like squiggles. The key attribute of each on is that it should be unique and quick to carve. This is not a code or anything like that - don't forget these are operative masons and they far pre-date their speculative descendants.

Thanks Trinityman, your explanation does make sense. It's easy to over-analyze things that you don't have a complete understanding of. Like I said, I didn't suppose that they had anything to do with any sort of code, and I certainly didn't mean to imply that I saw any connection to modern speculative Masonry.

I was mostly curious about the runic characters. After all, as you pointed out, most stonemasons and other tradesmen in the medieval period would have been illiterate, so I was surprised to see the letters from an alphabet that had not been used in the British Isles for several centuries by the time the cathedrals were being built. But then again, I suppose that that fact would help make the mason's mark more distinctive.

And looking at the list of marks on the first link, I can see about as many that resemble cattle-brands of the western U.S.A.; now that I've made that connection, I'll see if I can connect the dots between 13th-century church builders and 19th-century cow farmers. I'll bet it has something to do with Templar treasure.

So what you guys are saying is if I have a set of characters and/or symbols which I know is from a Mason origin (which doesn't come from a building/site), there isn't a "Secret Translation Book" that could help me figure out what the message says? This is of course hypothetically speaking. In other words there isn't a "secret language" or character set used by Masons?