Hand-held weapons
Five dagger handles with bulbous guards with the badly corroded remains of a few steel blades against a white background
Some of the bollock daggers found on board the Mary Rose; for most of the daggers, only the handles have remained while the blades have either rusted away or have been preserved only as concretions.
To defend against being boarded, Mary Rose carried large stocks of melee weapons, including pikes and bills; 150 of each kind were stocked on the ship according to the Anthony Roll, a figure confirmed roughly by the excavations. Swords and daggers were personal possessions and not listed in the inventories, but the remains of both have been found in great quantities, including the earliest dated example of a British basket-hilted sword.[36]
A total of 250 longbows were carried on board, and 172 of these have so far been found, as well as almost 4,000 arrows, bracers (arm guards) and other archery-related equipment.[37] Longbow archery in Tudor England was mandatory for all able adult men, and despite the introduction of field artillery and handguns, they were used alongside new missile weapons in great quantities. On the Mary Rose, the longbows could only have been drawn and shot properly from behind protective panels in the open waist or from the top of the castles as the lower decks lacked sufficient headroom. There were several types of bows of various size and range. Lighter bows would have been used as "sniper" bows, while the heavier design could possibly have been used to shoot fire arrows.[38]
The inventories of both 1514 and 1546[31] also list several hundred heavy darts and lime pots that were designed to be thrown onto the deck of enemy ships from the fighting tops, although no physical evidence of either of these weapon types has been identified. Of the 50 handguns listed in the Anthony Roll, the complete stocks of five matchlock muskets and fragments of another eleven have been found. They had been manufactured mainly in Italy, with some originating from Germany. Found in storage were several gunshields, a rare type of firearm consisting of a wooden shield with a small gun fixed in the middle.[39
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