ORIGIN OF THE ARTILLERY COMPANY.
Stowe tells us—"About the year 1585, certain gallant, active, and forward citizens, having had experience abroad and at home, voluntarily exercised themselves, and trayned uppe others, for the readie use of warre, so as within two years, there was almost three hundredth marchants, and others of like quality, very sufficient and skillful to traine and teache common souldiers, the managing of their peeces, pikes, and holberds, to march countermarch, and ring; which said marchants, for their owne perfection in military affairs and discipline, met every Tuesday in the year, practising all usual points of warre, and every man by turn bare orderly office, from the Corporall to the Captain: some of them in the yeare 1588 had charge of men in the great Campo at Tilbury, and were generally called Captaines of the Artillery Garden."
After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the association soon fell to decay. The ground they used was at the north extremity of the city, nigh Bishopsgate, and had before been occupied (says Ellis) by the "fraternity of artillery," or gunners of the Tower.
From the company's register, the only book they saved in the civil wars, it appears that the association was revived in the year 1611, by warrant from the privy council; and the volunteers soon amounted to six thousand. In the year 1640, they quitted their old field of discipline, and entered upon a plot of ground in Bunhill-fields, leased to them by the city.—(See Ellis's History of Shoreditch, and Nicholson's London Artillerie.)
In the thirteenth year of the reign of Henry VII. "All the gardens which had continued time out of mind without Moorgate: to wit, about and beyond the lordship of Fensberry (Finsbury) were destroyed: and of them was made plain field for archers to shoote in." This was the origin of what is now called the Artillery Ground. P.T.W.