In this article, we continue reviewing the ancient artillery pieces, covering the period from the XIV to the XVI century. Our story is illustrated by images of the described models in miniature – these are the works by modern masters who have managed to recreate old cannon looking at drawings.
Pot-de-fer gun
If you want a picture of the first cannon that was eve
r drawn, sketched, photographed, or what have you, you are going to wind up with a drawing of the pot-de-fer. In 1325 and 1326, Walter Millimete (or Walter de Millimete, take your pick) wrote two manuscripts in honor of Edward III, King of England, in which paintings of the pot-de-fer are found. It appears to have been cast of brass in somewhat the shape of a vase. In fact, similar ones were also called “vasii” by some historians. Also, others of this type obviously were cast of iron, since “de fer” in French means “of iron”. By most standards, this was a rather crude affair, and yet had several features found in more sophisticated later models.
The area of the breech was strengthened with more metal than the rest of the barrel to help it withstand the explosion of the powder. A hot iron rod was used to fire the powder through a touchhole at the rear. The touchhole was kept, but moved to the top of the barrel. The projectile was an arrow, more than likely because they were familiar with arrows. We presume that they wrapped cloth or leather around the shaft of the arrow to somewhat seal the bore to get better range.
It is presumed that they didn’t have to fire this gun very many times before they concluded that arrows made poor missiles! Even a rock pushed down the barrel would do better than an arrow. But arrow or rock, the noise would frighten the enemy’s horses, and possibly even the enemy, if they had never heard a gun go off before. We can imagine that, to a simple serf (and serfs made up the main body of soldiers at that time) hearing the noise and seeing the flash and smoke, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that the opponents were in league with the devil and were sending Satan himself to take all their enemies to Hell!
Perrier gun
While perriers evolved into fairly sophisticated guns in the next 200 years, this model shows a very early and very crude cannon. The barrel was made of bars of iron, hammered and welded together over a round bar of iron. After these bars had been welded into a homogenous tube, the round iron mandrel was removed and rings were shrunk over the outside to keep the bars from blowing apart because of the powder explosions.
The carriage was made of a large timber with a recess hollowed out of the top front of the timber to hold the cannon barrel, while the elevating mechanism was simply a stick with holes in it that went through a hole in the cannon’s trail. A pin through the correct hole kept the cannon raised to the proper level, as decided by the gunner. The wheels were solid disks and the cannon balls were chipped out of solid stone. The powder was poor and the range was short but it was an improvement (some people wouldn’t call it that) over the old catapults and ballistas. In fact, you could say that the era of the cannon had begun and the rattle and clank and boom of artillery would become louder and its voice would grow in volume and strength through the centuries, right to the present time.
16 Inch English Bombard
This English bombard (the name comes from the Latin, bombus, meaning,’’loud noise”) was found, at least the metal work was found, in the moat of Bodian Castle. The carriage is a reconstruction since the wooden parts had long since rotted away, but by using old prints, it was possible to get what would be a fairly accurate reproduction of the original carriage. The solid wooden wheels would be typical of the times and the quadrant for raising or lowering the barrel would also be the way these cannon were built. The bombard shot a stone ball of about 160 pounds that had a range of 2,000 yards. I can see that if the ball went into a massed group of soldiers, there would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in camp that night. And on the other side of the wall, the castle people would be toasting the brave cannoneers for their deeds. To our eyes, the bombard was a crude affair, but at the time it was the height of the art.
Perrier – Spanish
This is a very interesting model, showing the first crude beginnings of field artillery. The barrel, which in the model is cast of brass, was actually made up of iron staves welded together, after which iron hoops were shrunk over them to give added strength. This barrel was then inset into the trail and held in place with metal bands. The trail also was split horizontally with the bottom portion hinged to the top at the front. At the rear was an arrangement with a metal quadrant and a pin. The quadrant had holes in it to permit the pin to hold up the rear of the trail at various heights so that the gunner could thus set the elevation of the barrel.
The cart, which was drawn by two horses, carried supplies; powder, stones and such, while also serving as a limber for the cannon. The end of the trail could be picked up and dropped over the pin at the rear of the cart, thus making it, in effect, a four wheeled cart. While a stone ball could be, and was, fired from this gun, the range was limited because of the thin, relatively weak walls of the barrel. An early form of shrapnel was a favorite charge and was made (as shown) by tying up a load of stones in a circle of canvas to form a bag of stones. The bag would split, of course, during firing, and the stones would act as a gigantic slug of buckshot – not much range, but deadly when in range.
For accessories, the model has everything needed: a water bucket to soak the sponge in, the sponge, a powder scoop, a rammer, drag ropes, a bucket for stones, canvas and twine for making shrapnel (I shouldn’t call it shrapnel, because Sir Shrapnel wouldn’t have invented the shell named after him for several hundred years yet), two completed shells and a covered powder bucket. The powder bucket has a leather top that can be tied shut so that no sparks can get in to ignite the powder during firing, an occurrence that would have had catastrophic repercussions, (a little joke there) to say the least.
Naval Bombarda – Spanish
The bombarda, or bombard as it would have been called in English, was usually a fairly large bore cannon. The early ones had barrels cast of brass or fabricated from bars of steel welded together over a mandrel. Iron hoops were then shrunk over the bars to give the barrel added strength. The model shows a brass barrel with the hoops cast in place around the barrel more for show than for added strength. This gun shot a ball six inches in diameter, weighing thirty pounds. It was mounted on a relatively crude carriage, wheels or trucks giving the front some mobility, but the rear just slid along the deck. This sliding gave some resistance, and thus cut down on the recoil when firing. The rear of the carriage was split and hinged, so that the barrel could be raised or lowered and held in the desired position by a pin. A look at the photograph will give a better idea of the mechanism than any description. All in all, it was a crude way of elevating the barrel of the gun and made the job of gunner very difficult, considering he was trying to aim and fire the gun from a heaving deck on which nothing stood still. More than likely, he raised or lowered the back of the carriage to the point where he felt the shot would go true.
Then he inserted the pin in the elevating apparatus. Now he was ready to fire. Before firing, he waited for the roll of the ship to bring the barrel up (gunners usually fired on the uproll) to where he felt he had a chance of hitting his target.
But now he had another problem! The powder in those days was not the best, and there was a varying, usually relatively lengthy, period of time between when the gunner put the glowing end of the linstock into the powder at the vent and when the powder in the gun barrel went off. Little things like that made firing a gun more of an art than a science. More than likely, when the gunner hit what he was aiming at, most of the time it was luck rather than art or science that guided the ball.
Parapet Gun
“A little pop-gun,” is the way a present day soldier would describe this parapet gun, and to him it would be true, but to the lighting man who faced it when it was in its prime, it spoke like the voice of a hundred demons. Of course, more than likely, he was an uneducated, superstitious serf under the command of a noble, his master, and when this little gun let go with a blast of fire, smoke and flame, he was willing to believe that it was a demon. While we have no way of knowing its’ range, we can imagine it was in the neighborhood of a few hundred yards. As the name implies, it would be mounted on the parapet of a castle or fort and would be used exclusively in defense work, and never for offensive action.
It could be mounted in a hole in the battlements so that it could be swung in any direction, or it could be mounted, as this one is, in a timber or stump which mounting would also allow it to swing from side to side.
The range was adjusted by pulling the pin out of the metal quadrant and raising or lowering the barrel as the gunner desired, putting the pin back at that place and firing the gun, more than likely by placing a glowing coal to the powder around the touchhole. To our supposedly sophisticated eyes, it was a rude, crude arrangement, but at the time, it was the height of technology and a thing to be feared!
Spingarda
The spingarda is one of a class of swivel or bulwarks guns, so called because of their mounting. They were set in a mounting that resembled a large oarlock, consisting of a yoke that held the barrel at the trunnions and then tapered down to a pin that fitted into a socket. The socket, in turn, was set into the bulwarks of the ship. (The bulwarks were solid, heavy rails that extended up waist high from the deck of the ship). The barrel was thus free to swivel on its mounting pin and to move up or down in the yoke. From this it is easy to see why they would be called swivel guns or bulwarks guns. They were also set in the walls or bulwarks of forts, and were especially popular in the frontier settlements of America, as a defense against marauding Indians.
Along with the spingarda, there are examples of similar guns – a falconet and a servador (which see) in the collection. Just as it was with the larger cannons of earlier times, the names of these little bangers were legion: base, port-piece, sling-piece, pateraro, Portugal-base, drake, stock-fowler and murderer, just to mention a few. To me, it seems difficult to improve on the name of a cannon called a murderer! These swivel guns were for close work, to repel boarders, or to clear the ground in front of a fort. Some, such as the murderer, had a barrel whose bore expanded as it got to the muzzle, to give the charge a chance to expand so as to cover more territory. These charges could be anything handy, from the regulation iron ball, to a bag of rocks, to lead pellets, to a handful of rusty nails or bits of iron.
Servador
Webster says: swivel gun – a gun mounted on a pedestal so that it can be turned from side to side or up and down.
The servador was just such a gun. It was mounted on a wall or the rail of a ship where it could cover anything approaching the side of the ship or it could be swiveled around to cover its own decks, if need be. Also, in common with others of this class, it had a handle, or tiller, sticking out of the breech, so that the gunner could aim and steady the gun while firing. However, the servador was interesting because of the loading method used. The powder and wad were rammed into a heavy breech cup that fitted into an opening in the top of the breech. It was dropped into the breech, pushed forward and held in place with a wedge driven in behind it so that the cup was tightly forced into the barrel’s taper. A ball was dropped down the barrel and the gun was ready to shoot. One man held the tiller and aimed it, while a second fired it with a glowing fuse in a linstock.
This was one of the first attempts to develop a quick firing gun and was, up to a point, quite successful. With one man loading extra breech cups and two men charging and firing the piece, a fairly rapid rate of fire could be main-tained. There were two drawbacks to keeping up a steady, fast rate of fire. One was the fouling of the barrel by the crude, impure powders of the times. The second and main trouble was the difficulty in getting a tight fit in the two tapers, especially with the poor machining methods that were used in those days (essentially hand filing). This resulted in a great deal of the gases coming out the breech, rather than pushing the ball out of the muzzle of the gun. This caused a loss of power and the hot, corrosive gases eroded the tapered joints, causing still greater loss of power while making servicing and aiming the piece more difficult.
For the purposes for which they were built, however, they served very well. For a short range, quick-firing weapon, they were hard to beat.
Serpentine – Italy
This is a fascinating model as to operation and a beautiful one as to appearance. As you can see by the date, 1480, it is a model of one of the earlier guns but its builders were trying out some advanced ideas. They knew that a breech-loading gun had a lot of advantages so that is what they made. Their machining techniques were behind their design ideas, however, and they had problems with too much of the explosion going out the breech and too little pushing the shot out the barrel. As a result, good breech-loading designs didn’t come into use for four hundred more years.
When firing this gun, the gun’s crew would take one of the breech cups, or “thunder mugs”, and, using the powder scoop, put in the necessary amount of gunpowder. This was rammed tight by putting a wad on top of the powder and then putting the rammer down the mouth of the mug and hammering the end of the rammer with the wooden mallet (wood so no sparks could be struck). The thunder mug was then put in the breech opening of the barrel and tightened in place by hammering the brass wedge between the base of the mug and the rear of the carriage. This was done with the brass hammer (again, brass so no sparks could be struck). When the two were firmly wedged together, a ball was rolled down the barrel; powder was put in the vent hole and touched off, firing the cannon.
You will notice, there is no method of elevating the barrel – to get the proper aim it was necessary to wait for the roll of the ship to bring the barrel to the proper angle before firing. After the gun was fired, the wedge was knocked out, the empty mug was lifted out and a loaded one was wedged in place. While that was being fired, the first one was sponged out to drown any sparks left in it, and the loading process was repeated.
Accessories include four thunder mugs, a leather covered powder bucket (to keep out sparks), two mallets, one wood and one brass, a rammer and a sponge. These last two were short, since they only had to reach down into the mug, not down the full length of the barrel. There was also a water bucket for wetting the sponge and a powder scoop. There were ball racks built into the bulwarks on each side of the gun port to hold the round shot needed for the gun. The fancifully painted bulwarks make an especially good looking model.
Resourse: “The Wonderful, Wacky, Terrible World of Artillery in Miniature” by Ralph Koebbeman