"It was great pity, so it was,
That villanous salt-petre should be digg'd
Out of the bowels of the harmless earth,
Which many a good tall fellow had destroy'd
So cowardly; and, but for those vile guns,
He would himself have been a soldier."
Hotspur describing his meeting with a "popinjay" after a battle.
Shakespeare. King Henry IV. Act I, Scene iii.
"Earth and air were badly shaken
By thy humane discovery, Friar Bacon."
Byron. Don Juan. VIII, 33.
"The hand-spikes, sponges, rammers, crows,
Were well arranged about;
And to annoy Old England's foes,
The Great Guns were run out."
—Old Verses.
"Who invented gunpowder?" There is only one definite and reliable answer to this question, and that is that nobody knows. It has been stated, but I think that it may be dismissed as a "galley yarn", that the first mention of artillery is to be found in an account of a naval engagement between the Phœnicians and Iberians in the year 1100 B.C.—just eighty-seven years after the siege of Troy.
The Phœnician war-vessels, it is said, came out of Cadiz—or Gades, as it was then called—with what their opponents took to be brazen lions at their bows. These turned out to be some kind of machine from which enormous flames of fire were projected by explosives, to consume and destroy the ships of the Iberians. But the most generally accepted theory now is that gunpowder was invented in China some centuries before the Christian era and gradually found its way to Europe by way of India, Arabia, and Africa. As for the stories that it was invented either by Roger Bacon (1214-92) or by the German monk, Barthold Schwartz, in 1320, they must be certainly rejected, since there is evidence that cannon of some kind were in use long previous to Roger Bacon's birth. Doubtless he wrote something about the composition of gunpowder, but so might anyone to-day. That would not make him its inventor.
Much less, then, can this invention be attributed to the German monk. It is probably correct that, in pounding certain ingredients in a mortar, he nearly blew himself "into the middle of next week"—as very many would-be chemical investigators have done at a much more recent date—and it may be that the sight of his pestle flying through the ceiling suggested to him that a mortar might be made of military use.[35] He may possibly, on this account, be credited with the invention of the muzzle-loading cannon, for it seems probable that the guns in use previous to 1320 were merely cannae, or tubes open at each end. The famous battery of three guns, which is said by some historians to have been used by the English at Crécy, was probably of this kind. Whether the guns were used there or not, it would not have been the first time such weapons made their appearance in European warfare, as seems to be assumed by some writers.
More than 100 years previously cannon were employed by the Moors at the siege of Saragossa, in 1118. The Spaniards were not slow to adopt the invention, and in 1132 they built what is stated to have been a "culverin" throwing a 4-pound shot. "Culverin", which is a term, belonging to Tudor times, for a special type of gun, is evidently used as a general term for "cannon". Like the "Joe Chamberlain" and "Bloody Mary",[36] manned by the Naval Brigade in the Boer War, and other prominent specimens of the gun-maker's art, this first European cannon received a special name. It was christened "Salamonica". I have said that the Spaniards "built" this weapon. I wrote this advisedly, for all the earlier cannon were "built up" of staves of iron, or even wood, strongly hooped together with wrought-iron rings.
It was a long time before cannon were "founded" or "cast", and now, strange to say, we have gone back to the original method of manufacture, which, thanks to modern science and workmanship, has absolutely ousted what was at its inception considered a wonderful advance in the art of cannon-making. The early guns, open at both ends, were probably loaded at the breech, which was then closed by a block of stone or big stake driven into the ground, close to which the gun itself was fixed in some kind of a framework. Such guns are to be seen in a picture in Froissart's Chronicles representing the siege of Tunis by the Crusaders in 1390, and it is from this that the often-reproduced drawing of the guns said to have been used at Crécy in 1346 would appear to have been taken.
What is said to be the earliest representation of a cannon in England is to be found in a manuscript of 1326 in the Christ Church Library at Oxford. It is of quite a different appearance from those just described. It is in the shape of a fat vase or bottle, and could not well have been a breech-loader. It is loaded with a big "garot" or dart fitted with a wooden haft which seems to fit tightly into the neck of the weird "cannon", which lies on a very rickety looking table. The gunner, clad in what looks like a suit of Crusader's chain-mail, is an unwary person who is holding a lighted match to the touch-hole while standing directly behind the gun. As there is not the slightest indication of anything whatever to stop the recoil, it seems about three to one that the discharge would be more disastrous to him than to the enemy. It is noteworthy that "metal cannons" and "iron balls" were ordered to be made in this same year at Florence, and in 1331 vase appears to have been the usual term for the cannon made in Italy, while in France they were termed pots de fer.
