grows from the barrel of a gun
I’ve been at not one but two conferences in Adelaide, for documentary makers and screenwriters – not a lot of overlap, except for me – and spent time with my family, so this time last week I could barely speak English. Or remember that England is a small island off the coast of Europe which did very well (in its own terms) to spread its language around the world.
In May 2008, one part of the reason for this was pulled out of the English Channel off Alderney, cleaned up, measured, copied and fired for the BBC.
The first wreck of an Elizabethan warship ever located has now yielded a grand total of three guns, of the same size and weight. What is more, there are several types of ammunition, but they are all made for the same calibre of gun. Big deal, I can hear you think clear across the interwebs. But comparisons with the Mary Rose, a Tudor ship first sailed in 1511 and sunk in 1545, reveal that this very fact is a massive military advance and a triumph in organisational methodology.
The guns raised from the Mary Rose, lost almost fifty years earlier, have a huge variety of calibres and lengths. With no standardisation of ammunition, fighting the ship must have been a marine version of the Keystone Cops with real exploding people. “Ahem, sir, have you seen any 5 inch balls in that pile? Actually, they are not 5 inches as in the 5 inches on the second mizzen gun, because ours actually fires 5.32 inch balls.. Oh look, is that your brain blasted out of your nose?”
The idea that they were not standardised is extraordinary from our point of view. Not only did they need individual stocks of ammunition, and specific amounts of powder, but the loading rates, the recoil physics and the range must have all differed. Maybe the master gunners just knew the characteristics of each weapon, and treated them individually.
Completely conditioned by the benefits and mindset of an industrial civilisation, I wondered why those early warships contained such a motley collection of ordnance. Perhaps the effort and systems required to get each foundry to produce the same product was too hard. Or the Tudor Lord High Admiral simply bought what guns he could on the open market.
According to The Times, the Tudor guns were bronze, and the material itself was “in short supply”. Later in the century, cannon makers learnt to use iron, which was more readily available.
“So instead of a system of “making do” that had prevailed under her father, Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth’s fleet had sets of smaller, uniform cannon, all cast identically and taking the same size shot.
They could be fired reliably, by trained gunners, in unison, creating a deadly and devastating broadside barrage that could penetrate the oak hull of the enemy. The gun carriages were innovative too: the muzzles could be pushed through the gunholes, minimising the risk of fire, and the recoil kicked the cannon back far enough for reloading — which was consequently two or three times faster than previously.”
Suddenly our standardisation story becomes a good deal less central. We have added changes in ship design, and – surely important – a simple increase in the total number of cannon, prepared by more industrial processes.
Geologist turned historian Richard Cowen has an extensive account of changing foundry practices and their economic and social implications. He agrees that the English were indeed short of bronze, unlike European gunmakers. What is more, bronze guns were lighter and easier to handle, so iron guns had to be a lot better before they could take over.
The English iron-making business was concentrated in the forests of The Weald, in Sussex, near local ore deposits. In the early years of the sixteen century, the ironmasters learnt to deploy the blast furnace, and used blobs of iron to replace the bronze hearts of cannon balls, which were then coated with lead to create a standardised sphere.
“In 1541, William Levett was the royal “gunstone maker”, that is, he made cast iron cannon-balls at a foundry in the Weald built by his elder brother in 1534. Levett is not a normal English name, and the brothers may have originally come from an immigrant family. Certainly Levett was an innovator, and in 1543 he built a new blast-furnace at Buxted, to try to cast iron cannon. He brought in another foreign expert, Peter Baude, who had been casting bronze cannon for the King in London.
Levett and Baude were successful, and the Buxted works produced the first one-piece cast iron cannon in 1543. Their early cannon went into fixed positions in coastal forts, where weight did not matter much. Progress was rapid. A foundry with two furnaces was built in 1546, so that enough molten iron could be supplied at one time to pour into larger molds and produce larger cannon. By 1549, 53 forges and blast furnaces were operating in the Weald – not all for military iron, of course, but a dramatic increase. And the industry more than doubled over the following 25 years. By 1574 there were 110 furnaces and forges in the area, producing several thousand tons of iron, including several hundred tons of cannon.
The new iron cannon were excellent guns, and in particular they were excellent value for money. They were not only cheaper than bronze, and harder and stronger, so had more hitting power. Their only disadvantage was weight.
For a hundred years, English iron cannon were the best in the world. It’s not clear why, because cast iron was widely produced in Western Europe. The historian Ernest Straker thought that the secret may have lain in the mold-making from the local Sussex clay. Whatever the reason, iron cannon became important strategic weapons, comparable to modern fighter aircraft. The English supplied iron cannon to friendly powers, as we do today with our fighters, and they tried to keep them out of the hands of potential enemies, as we do.”
This industrial process required great quantities of wood, which enraged the local timber merchants who ran an important export business. This also threatened the Royal Navy, which needed a huge amount of mature wood to build the very ships to carry the guns.
The iron- making companies, run by families like the “Boleyns, the Sidneys, the Howards, the Nevilles, the Dudleys, and the Sackvilles” also had a nasty habit of selling their guns to any ready buyer, which meant the European governments with which England was at war – including the Spanish Armada, though this accounts says that “most of the guns” in the invading ships were bronze.
Can I use these piles of ammunition on the ocean floor to explain why you and I are puddling around in English right now, as opposed to French, or Portuguese or Mandarin? Did it all start on the Weald, with an industry stimulated by a shortage of Bronze for Tudor armies?
This is television logic, of course, and typical of the kind of thing that comes from populist history in England, which owns 70% of the world’s “factual” market as a consequence of subsidy, the peculiar nature of English audiences, and the power of the aformentioned English language. The breathless claims of secrets revealed are nonsense – “Until now, it was thought Queen Elizabeth was using the same cannon technology as her father, Henry VIII”. Historians already knew that the Elizabethan navy used iron guns; that many different design developments made the flag of St George a symbol of marine death; indeed its true supremacy only developed much later.
However, there is nothing intrinsically superior about English, and the reason for its supremacy is nothing more than brute imperial power. Even though there is no decisive revelation about military technology in this particular wreck, it remains the only Elizabethan ship ever found, and it provides concrete corroboration that her navy did indeed use standardised guns.
The BBC did support some research which seems to be important – Timewatch recording the firing of replica guns, which enabled the military historians to calculate the actual destructive potential of the weapons.
Despite the dodginess of the claims, I want to rescue the general thesis. Other technical reasons are advanced for the evolution of the Royal Navy, but that concept of standardisation goes far beyond the wooden walls of its ships.
We can deploy a much more general understanding of British social mechanisms over the centuries in which the Empire slowly developed and then collapsed in fast motion. If the empire was built on ideas, then standardisation was surely one of them – and just as surely crucial.
That is why our rusting cannon help to explain the primacy of English. Our rotting banks may help to explain its fall.
This started from Cronaca, which is full of goodies at the moment.
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Richard Cowen wrote the above as a chapter in a book. Though he had already written A History of Life, which went through several editions, this tome never made it into print.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Of course, gunpowder, which propelled those canon balls, and the compass, which prevented the English from tacking in circles till they ran aground, were invented by the Chinese. Still, the English navy’s advances on basic Chinese inventions is astounding.
I still don’t fully grasp how the English managed to set themselves apart on the sea. Under Prince Henry, the Portuguese were excellent navigators and sailors in the early 15th Century, and had access to the spice trade after they invaded Malacca. What holed them? The reliance on slavery? Catholicism? Spain?
What I am amazed to learn is how armament manufacturing was not a monopoly of the throne in the 16th Century. I would have thought that the throne would want to control the most dangerous weapons in their arsenal. Perhaps this was a feature of feudalism, where individual lords were originally responsible for raising armies and weaponry for the throne, and the rise in wealth of the craftsmen and traders the lords used.
On the issue of the variety of calibre and ammunition in Henry VIII’s ship arsenals, it is worth remembering that victors in battles may have siezed canons from those they defeated and added them to their arsenals, likely because they were difficult/expensive to build, leading to the hotch-potch.
Again, a masterly exploration, David.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
When I say, “Perhaps this was a feature of feudalism”, I am, of course, referring to the early days of English feudalism, and not implying that Elizabethan England still had this structure.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
[...] grows from the barrel of a gun [...]
March 16th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
One thing I think we need to remember was that what we now consider as English was once a province of the French. The first time English was used in Parliament (a French word) was in 1363. French was the language of lawyers until 1600.I would also suggest the Royal Navy really came of age with James II, when Pepys was Secretary to the Admiralty. He left the Navy with 173 warships -including 59 ships of the line-and 6930 guns. The Dutch had blockaded the Thames in 1666-7. In 1690 the Navy and the Dutch were beaten by the French at Beachy Head (Battle of Bévéziers), but thereafter the French abandoned the sea to others and concentrated on the hexagon, realising that they had three major land borders to defend. The Royal navy and Trade, the mercantile mistress of empire, took over the world.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
BTW the Battle of Bévéziers was fought the day before the Battle of the Boyne, and the two are linked via James II attempting to regain his throne from William and Mary (daughter of Jas II) who had invaded England and seized the throne. The French had attempted to invade Ireland to support James, been beaten back, and they lost control of the Channel by the end of 1690.
Fernand Braudel has a different explanation for why the English Channel is so called, and why the French abandoned the sea. But that requires too much background to explain here, and is not related strongly to the Royal Navy and iron cannon.