When was the Freemasons movement started and where did it originate

The precise origins of Freemasonry remain unclear, but modern scholars generally trace its roots to medieval stonemasons who constructed castles and cathedrals, as the United Grand Lodge of England states.

The oldest surviving document of the Craft, the Halliwell Manuscript or Regius Poem (c. 1390), attributes the origin of English Masonry to the reign of King Athelstan 12. According to the traditional "York Legend" preserved in early manuscript Constitutions, Athelstan's prince convoked a General Assembly of Masons at York in the year 926 to form a Constitution, though modern Masonic research views this early date as tradition rather than authenticated history 2.

By the seventeenth century, the fraternity began transitioning from an operative trade guild to a speculative movement. The earliest documented initiation of a speculative mason in an English lodge is that of Elias Ashmole at Warrington in 1646, with increasing records of gentlemen joining throughout the 1660s, as the United Grand Lodge of England states. During this mid-seventeenth-century period, manuscript evidence indicates the Order had largely severed its dependence on the Church while remaining broadly Christian in character 1.

The formal institutional organization of modern speculative Freemasonry began on June 24, 1717, when four London lodges met at the Apple-Tree Tavern and cemented under a Grand Master to form the Grand Lodge of England 1. This 1717 union in London marks the dividing line between the older operative traditions and the modern speculative Grand Lodge system 1.