Great stuff, Michael. Somehow a specific subject, and perhaps not reaching the interest of other than hand cannon (and similar) lovers. No doubt Matchlock, if he was with us, would be the first one to react and offer his thoughts about your thesis.
I would risk to say that part of your conclusions find relation with discussions already exchanged here. When you assume that böllers (noise makers to put it simple) and their familiarity with gonne barrels have their origin in the mountains of Austria and Germany, am i silly to suggest that these devices also played a role in other nations ?. I have a number of those in my little collection and i would venture that their provenance is not Germanic or from such neighborhood.
It would also be fair to subscribe Marcus assumption in that, despite böllers derive from gonne barrels, they found their own path by adopting a form more according with their upright firing position, with their wider base, something not so propper to find in gonne barrels.
Also i would not be so restrict in assuming that these 'tubes' only had one purpose; one would accept that they were not powder testers or cannons, but it is rather plausible they were also used for (navy) signals and certainly as defence traps. But i admit i never studied these things in depth and may be talking a lot of nonsense.
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