COWAN : This was originally a Scottish term for a working mason who had not properly joined the fraternity – who had not in fact been admitted into a lodge after serving his time under indentures. It is first met with in the Shaw Statutes of 1598 (the wording has been modernized):
item, that no master or fellow of craft receive a cowan to work in his society or company, nor send any of his servants to work with cowans, under pain of twenty pounds (Scots)
In the next year, according to the earliest Minute of the Lodge of Edinburgh, George Patoun was arraigned for employing ‘one cowan’. In 1707 it was ordained by the Lodge of Kilwinning that ‘No Meason shall employ no cowan which is to say without the word to work’. Omitting the last two important has given rise to the definition of a cowan as ‘a mason without the word’.
The term does not figure in English Freemasonry until introduced by Anderson (a Scot!) in his second Book of Constitutions (1738). Various attempts to fix a derivation includes Mackey’s improbable KUWV (Greek, ‘dog’) in his Encyclopedia of Freemasonry. Davis Murray Lyon prefers the Gaelic cu with the same meaning.
(Brethren – I am not the greatest typist and I try very hard to tap the keys in the proper order; but occasionally when I type items from my reference, it may appear that I have done just that. In many occasions, the word I am coping, such as “Meason” above, is what was indicated in the reference. Occasionally, I have difficulty coping exactly what is printed in the reference. The KUWU, was actually presented with Greek letters. The cu above is supposed to be Gaelic.)
From ‘A Reference Book For Freemasons’ – compiled by Frederick Smyth and published in 1998.
R.W. Bro. Robert South