[Matchlock]

Hi Guillaume,


I was among a very small group of people to first get notice of that barrel in the 1990's:


A unique “hand cannon” – measuring less than 10 inches long and dating to the late 14th or early 15th Century – has been gifted to the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds.

Rob Stevens
Royal Armouries Museum
Leeds
Tel: 0113 220 1978
Email: rob.stevens@armouries.org.uk

and

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ims/news/hand_cannon.html

Gift to the Royal Armouries of an exciting rarity - a medieval gun

A small 'hand cannon', late 14th or early 15th century, has been offered as a gift to the Royal Armouries. The wrought-iron gun was made by forming a tube of gutter-shaped iron staves reinforced by a series of hoops and bands heated and shrunk on over it. It has a total length of only c.240mm (about 9½ inches) and weighs 550gm (just over a pound).

The gun was found on the foreshore of the Thames at London in the mid 1990s. The original mudlark passed it on to Mr Tony Pilson, a mudlark celebrated among other things for his collections of medieval and early-modern toys and buttons (both are now in the Museum of London).

The Royal Armouries have bought 45 finds from Mr Pilson over the last 25 years. They range from 14th century gauntlet fragments to 18th century miniature cannon. The acquisitions are as diverse as an eel spear, a child's sword, arrowheads, a shield boss and toy pistols.

The Royal Armouries tried to acquire this hand cannon not long after it was found but was unable to raise the funds required. Mr Pilson decided not to sell it and has kept it ever since. He has now decided to make an outright gift of it to the Royal Armouries. (This was negotiated by Karen Watts together with Geoff Egan of the Museum of London).

The Royal Armouries is home to the United Kingdom's national collection of arms and armour, including artillery, and is based in Leeds. Karen Watts is the Senior Curator of European Armour at the Royal Armouries, Leeds, and both teaches on the MA in Medieval Studies and co-supervises a number of IMS PhD students. For information see here.


At first glance,
I basically disagreed with the timeline of dating assigned to it by the Royal Armouries Leeds,
"late 14th or early 15th Century".
Today, I still do - and even more so - , after becoming older but wiser a quarter of a century later.

According to the strict dating criteria set up for the first time everby Michael Trömner,
and found proven in hundreds of instances,
as well as on carefully comparing that item with a number of very similar barrels,
some of them showing the same characteristic staging represented by a number of reinforcing rings,
the author is convinced of the fact that that little barrel in discussion should be
correctly dated 'ca. 1450',
give or take a span of ten years,
which isthe mid 15th c.,
AND
corectly defined as the main portion of a fragmented former tiller gun.

Neither can it be called 'singular' by any means, nor is it a complete piece.
Actually their barrel is nothing but a fragment missing either
its originally long rear socket for a wooden tiller stock,
or
its originally long wrought iron tiller.
Anyway, whatever rear handle or kind of buttstock that barrel was fitted with some 560 years ago - it was crudely replaced by a barrel tangwhich, for its shape as well as for obvious reasons, dates from the second half of the 1640's, the later years of the Thirty Years War! - a period of time when, out of sheer emergency, many older barrels were re-used and 'modernized'.

Among experts, this is well-known fact and has been stated and proven by the auhor several times in his threads and posts, and by many hundreds, if not thousands of surviving guns still preserved in Old Austrian and German arsenals, e.g.
the Landszeughaus Graz,
the Veste Coburg,
the Západočeské muzeum v Plzni/Pilsen
and
the Rüstkammer Emden.


Eventually:
As the value of that item seems to be regarded literally immense, it actually would not sell for more than about 1,000 GBP at any arms & armor auction.

For close comparison, please cf.
my thread on a group of finely preserved!
tiller guns of
ca. 1450,
one of them,
without reinforcing rings but with reinforced octagonal breech,
in
THE MICHAEL TRÖMNER COLLECTION.

Please cf.
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...ontjuic+castle

and, for basic reading, cf. my thread
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...light=montjuic
The reinforcing rings were fire-welded and addedby the barrelsmith while the iron was still in red heat, allowing it to cool down, thus tightly merging with the surface of the barrel.

All of them were offered as a lot to Ed for 4,000 USD by a dealer in 2009 ...
Both their general form and the actual length of their barrels ware almost identical to the Leeds fragment thought to be unusually 'tiny'.

All surving samples from that period, starting with the earliest forerunners known as the
Bohemiam pipe guns (German: Böhmische oder Hussiten-Pfeifen) dating from the later years of the Hussite Wars, ca. 1430-40, and not fitted with reinforcing rings yet.
Please note attachments,
the one at the bottom, and all following photos, depicting Bohemian pipe guns from the 1430's, preserved at the Museum of Tabor, Czechia.
They all retain their rear original sockets, the hafts are modern replacements.
The socketed barrel shown on all images from the 2nd is 42 cm long, its bore measures 20 mm.

Best,
Michael