Dan Spencer

Royal and Urban Gunpowder Weapons in Late Medieval England

(Boydell & Brewer, 2019), 282 pp. $99.00/£60.00

Although the English were early adopters of gunpowder weaponry (according to Giovanni Villani they were using guns on the field at Crécy), there has been a tendency to see England as rather conservative in its ways of warfare thereafter, wedded to a successful model which English commanders were slow to alter as conditions changed. Added to this is the widespread perception of England as a land of unwalled cities and castles which were increasingly residences rather than military strongholds, and therefore an unfavourable environment for cutting edge developments in siege artillery. Perhaps as a result of these assumptions it is fair to say that the English experience of gunpowder weaponry has been rather understudied until now.

Dan Spencer’s study seeks to fill this gap. Based primarily of accounting records, he examines the artillery of the English monarchy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and also the weaponry at the disposal of English towns and cities (as he demonstrates, there was in practice a very close link between royal and municipal artillery, with the Crown a major driving and facilitating force in the creation and development of urban arms holdings). The one serious omission is the artillery held by major aristocratic families, no doubt due to an absence of usable evidence.

Spencer provides a very thorough overview of the remaining evidence. After a review of the evidence for the use of artillery in land campaigns from the reigns of Edward III to Henry VII, he undertakes a detailed comparison of artillery provision in the campaigns of 1430-2 in France and those of 1497, both in Scotland and as deployed against An Gof’s Cornish rebels. He then considers the use of artillery at sea (both on royal ships and royal weapons placed on impressed merchant vessels). He next looks at the role of guns in the Calais Garrison and in royal castles. Shifting his focus, he then considers urban artillery holdings (though guns can be traced across England, it is perhaps not surprising that the strongest evidence comes from southern coastal sites facing the threat of French raids) with a case study from Southampton, a town which combines good records and a high level of interest in gunpowder weapons. He concludes with a brief analysis of logistical issues like the supply of gunpowder and shot. The volume closes with a series of appendices, including a very useful glossary and taxonomy of the different categories of gun encountered in his sources.

This is a very solid and detailed work, based on close reading of a mass of central government and municipal records. At times it has to be said that the sheer thoroughness makes for heavy going as the reader risks getting lost among listings of pounds of gunpowder, supplies of gunstones and numbers of damaged guns. Even the more rebarbative sections do however contain fascinating nuggets of information. For instance, Spencer’s attention to detail brings out the sheer fragility of much of the ordnance, with several cases where guns are marked down as “broken” after a campaign even though they do not appear to have been fired as no expenditure of powder and shot is recorded. Indeed the financial records throw interesting light on the combat use of artillery. In 1497,for instance, heavy siege guns were transported to the north of England at considerable cost but never fired a shot because the Scottish campaign of that year fizzled out in attacks on a small number of Border towers which could be hammered into submission by light artillery. One is also tempted to wonder whether relatively cheap wrought iron guns were regarded as disposable items, especially since many weapons sent north were not shipped back to the Tower. Even more intriguingly, Henry VII invested substantial effort in moving artillery from Woodstock to Blackheath to face the Cornish rebels but as far as can be told the guns never fired a shot in the rout of the latter. Clearly the presence of artillery on a battlefield does not mean that it was actually used. It is also interesting to find that “broken” guns might be carried on board ship with no certainty that they were going to be repaired (though that might be a matter of sources)- and that by the end of the fifteenth century ships which carried a considerable number of firearms might not have any identifiable gunner among the crew. While gunners appear to have become more professional as time passed (and increasingly focused on shooting the weapons rather than making them), it is striking that Southampton’s municipal gunner was a distinctly low ranking town employee and at times something of a municipal dogsbody.

Spencer’s findings cast some interesting sidelights on the “high” political history of the period. He traces the rise and fall of Calais as a major arsenal, peaking under Edward IV only to be demoted under Henry VII in a reflection of the ups and downs of the Calais garrison in those troubled years. In a slightly earlier period, the short-lived use of Kenilworth as a major arms dump during the 1450’s adds to the evidence that the Lancastrian regime steered by Margaret of Anjou was seeking to create a West Midlands bastion away from London and its pro-Yorkist establishment.

The long term trends identified by Spencer (a shift from bronze to wrought iron and then back to bronze as the favoured material for guns, the replacement of gunstones with iron balls at the very end of the period, a move towards more mobile guns set on wheeled carriages pulled by horses rather than being carried on fixed beds in carts pulled by oxen, experiments in gunpowder fortification) are broadly familiar from elsewhere in Europe. The overall picture emerging from his material, read a little against the grain, suggests that there is something to the stereotype of English conservatism even if that requires qualification. Royal engagement with gunpowder artillery seems to have been rather patchy until the 1450’s- at least in England itself as Spencer argues convincingly that English armies operating in France after 1420 relied on artillery procured locally which was never put through English accounts. Even after the 1450’s the impression given by the accounting sources Spencer relies on is that every new campaign required a major procurement effort with a hint that in some areas the wheel was having to be reinvented each time until well into Henry VII’s reign. While wrought iron guns could be created relatively rapidly by non-specialist smiths, there does not seem to have been an established gun founding industry in England during this period and English monarchs relied heavily on imports of artillery, saltpetre and even gunners to put an artillery train in the field. Clearly matters were becoming increasingly professionalised as the fifteenth century wore on and England was far from the artillery backwater it is sometimes depicted as being; nevertheless, by comparison with its potential foes in France and Burgundy, it does look a shade old fashioned despite Spencer’s advocacy. Perhaps, though, this is a matter of a glass being half full as against half empty! These quibbles in no way detract from the service which Spencer has rendered to historians of late medieval warfare by throwing a flood of light on the English employment of gunpowder weaponry.

Brian Ditcham