While lodge records show a gradual development of mixed lodges in Scotland, it is evident that the lodge which initiated Elias Ashmole at Warrington on 16 October 1646 was mainly or entirely composed of speculative or accepted masons. In 1686 Robert Plot's "Natural History of Staffordshire" contains a passage about persons of quality being admitted to the society of free-masons, whose history Plot finds invented and ridiculous. At the start of the Grand Lodge period, there appears to have been a predominance of purely speculative lodges in the south of England, with operative and mixed lodges still in the majority in the north and in Scotland.