The howitzer differs from the mortar, being mounted on a field carriage, like a gun; the chief difference being that the trunnions of the first are at the end, and of the other in the middle. The invention of the howitzer is subsequent to that of the mortar, as from the latter it originated.
The first man who invented the spiking of artillery was Gaspar Vimercalus of Bremen, who thus nailed up the artillery of Sigismund Malatesta.
Rifled cannon are by no means a modern invention, and can be traced far back into antiquity, as the arquebuse-rayée of the French.
No kind of gun has been more universally known and used all over Europe and America than the carronade, or "smasher," as it was called. Cast at the Carron Works in Scotland (hence their name), they were the invention of General Robert Melville, an officer who served under Lord Rollo of Duncrub, at the capture of Dominica in the West Indies. Peculiarly constructed, and having a chamber for powder like a mortar, they were shorter and lighter than ordinary cannon.
Cast in mighty numbers for more than seventy years at Carron, they were employed by the fighting and mercantile marine of all Europe and America, till the time of the Crimean War. The first of them was presented by the Carron Company to the family of General Melville, with an inscription on the carriage, which records that the guns were cast "for solid, ship, shell or carcase shot, and were first used against the French fleet in 1799."
Mr. Smiles, in his "Industrial Biography," tells us that when cannon came to be employed in war, the vicinity of Sussex to the Cinque Ports gave it an advantage over the iron districts of the north and west of England, and for a long time the iron works of that county had a monopoly in the manufacture of guns. The stone balls were hewn from quarries at Maidstone Heath. An old mortar, which lay on Bridge Green, near Frant, is said to have been the first used in England. The chamber was cast, but the tube consisted of hooped bars.
In the Tower are some old hooped guns of the date of Henry VI. The first cast-iron cannon of English make were made at Buxtead in Sussex, in 1543, by Ralph Hogge, master founder, whose principal assistant was Pierre Baude, a Frenchman. About the same time, Hogge employed Peter Van Collet, a Flemish gunsmith, who, according to Stowe, "caused to be made certain mortar pieces, being at the mouth from eleven to nine inches wide, for the use whereof the said Peter caused to be made certain hollow shot of cast iron, stuffed with fyrwork, whereof the bigger sort has screws of iron to receive a match to carry fire, to break in small pieces the said hollow shot, whereof the smallest piece hitting a man would kill or spoil him."
This is undoubtedly the parent of the explosive shell which has been brought to such terrible perfection in the present day. Many of Baude's brass and iron guns are still preserved in the Tower; and perhaps from his foundry came that very beautiful gun which bears the name of Henry VIII., 1541, and is preserved now at Southampton.
Two old English guns are at present in the ducal castle of Blair, whither they had been brought by the Athole family when Lords of the Isle of Man.
One is inscribed thus:—