NON-MASON DISCOVERS RARE MASONIC DOCUMENT

James O. Halliwell-Phillips, and English antiquarian and librarian, was not a Mason.

While engaged in his work, he came across a manuscript in the British Museum catalogued as A Poem of Moral Duty. It was really a statement of the "Old Charges" in poetic form.

It is believed to have been prepared in 1390, thus making it the oldest known Masonic document.

Now called the Regius Poem, or the Halliwell Manuscript, it was published in 1840 in a brochure entitled On the Introduction of Freemasonry into England.