Though David Hume, writing in the 1750's, claimed the cast-iron cannon, along with shipbuilding, as the great specialty of English manufacturers, the weapons of war taken as a whole provide a good illustration of the uses to which Europe put its metallurgical skill. Up to about 1700 the main infantry weapon was the pike, a steel head mounted on a shaft which might be as much as 18 ft long, an effective protection against cavalry. It was superseded by the bayonet, first employed by the musketeers in the armies of Louis XIV. The sword, which the pikemen carried for hand-to-hand fighting, could then be dispensed with by the rank and file, though it continued as the thrusting (and dueling) weapon of their officers. The standard cavalry weapon was now the saber, designed for a slashing downward stroke, and there was also a lighter and shorter version of the medieval knight's lance. It is perhaps evidence of the minor part now played by all these weapons, at least in warfare between civilized nations, that the steel of which they were made was apparently inferior in average quality to the best products of the earlier age, when immense care had been taken because faulty metal might spell disaster.

Yet the first thing to be said about early hand-guns is that they were inaccurate, being designed only for short-range warfare between close formations; the incentive to the gunsmith to improve them came rather from the popular demand for a superior sporting piece. Leaving aside the stock, which was the wood-worker's concern, to produce a successful hand-gun required the means of forming a reasonably true barrel and the device of the lock to fire the charge. The barrel was commonly made from strips of iron: either a single strip was bent round a cylinder and then welded at the edge, or a number of short strips were rolled into tubes and welded end to end, one advantage of the second method being that the metal could then easily be tapered towards the muzzle, where relatively less strength was needed. In either case the roughly-formed barrel was then bored by means of a bit turning on the end of a long shaft pushed gradually into the barrel; by the eighteenth century such machines were commonly driven by water-power. How the value of spiral grooving of the barrel was discovered is uncertain: experience would show that the spinning projectile has both a longer and more accurate flight. Nevertheless, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century a writer in the great French Encyclopaedia still thought that the object of rifling a gun-barrel was simply to procure a tight fit for the ball, not to cause it to spin, though the physics of a spinning projectile were expounded to the Royal Society by B. Robins in 1747. At all events, rifles were well known by 1525 and may have come into existence half a century earlier, to judge by armory records at Turin and Nuremberg. They do not appear to have been used for military purposes until the Thirty Years War; their vogue was chiefly among wealthy sportsmen, who could afford to pay for accuracy, a quality which mattered much less for troops fighting in close formation and firing at short range. The difficulty of loading a rifled barrel from the muzzle was met by using a lead bullet a little large for the bore; this, when hammered home with a ram-rod, would fit the rifling exactly. That this was necessarily a slow process must have been a strong deterrent to its military use.

The early hand-gun was fired with a slow match applied to a touch-hole in the barrel so as to ignite some fine priming-powder on the firing-pan. The matchlock which superseded it had an arm which, when the trigger was pulled, brought the match down on to the priming; but the firing still depended upon keeping the match alight --a feat not always easily achieved in field conditions with a piece of coarse twine, however heavily impregnated with saltpetre to secure a steady glow. For the horseman it would be particularly difficult, which is one reason why the wheel-lock, which is believed to be an Italian invention made about the middle of the Franco-Italian wars of 1494-1559, was a favored device for the horse-pistol. In this a key was used to wind a spring, the release of which turned a rough edged wheel against a piece of pyrites; the resulting sparks touched off the priming. The winding made this a weapon that could not be fired twice in quick succession, and its use was therefore confined chiefly to the cavalryman, who would fire once and then charge in. It had important rivals from about 1580 onwards in the Dutch snaphance and the Spanish lock, which survived to the time of the Peninsular War, when it was known as the miquelet. The next decisive change was the introduction of the flintlock, perfected in France by 1630. The flint was pulled back (cocked) and, on the release of the trigger, was driven by a strong spring against a roughened metal plate over the firing-pan, into which the sparks fell. The mechanism was stronger than that of the wheel-lock and could be fired more rapidly. The flintlock was essential for the novel French sport of shooting birds on the wing, but was at first deemed a luxury for the infantryman. Louis XIV re-equipped his army with it in the 1660's; in England the change was in progress at the Revolution of 1688.

An improved flint-lock was fitted to Brown Bess, the 10-lb, 62-in. weapon that served the British Army from Blenheim to Waterloo. A percussion-powder, patented by a Scottish clergyman, A. J. Forsyth, in 1807, brought about its eventual replacement, but flintlock guns are still to be found in parts of Africa, where Norfolk flints continue to be exported from what is in a sense Britain's oldest industry.

The standard cannon of the sixteenth and following centuries were smooth-bore muzzle-loaders cast in bronze, brass, or iron. Iron was cheapest, but bronze was considered to be best because least liable to corrode or burst. The development of the blast-furnace made it possible to make large iron castings, but for three centuries the general method continued to be the same as had been used in the making of the great bronze cannon, one of which weighed almost nineteen tons, employed by the Turks against Constantinople in the siege of 1453. To a large extent, too, it was, as we have already seen, a continuation of the art of the medieval bell-founder.

Cannon-founding involved three distinct processes. The first was the making of a tripartite clay mould. One part was an exact reproduction of the outside of the cannon, including its decorations and the gudgeons on which it would be pivoted; the second part was the model of the breech; the third was the core representing the space to be occupied by the barrel. The clay model was then reinforced with iron bars, assembled, baked, and lowered into a pit. The second process was the filling of the mould in the pit by tapping a furnace of molten metal; the mould had then to be broken to extract the casting, which meant that each barrel must be made individually. The third main process was the boring, necessary because the casting could not give sufficient precision; this was done with a bit mounted on a long shaft, usually driven by a water-wheel, supported at one end only--an inaccurate method which would not correct, and might even exaggerate, any misalignment of the core in the original mould. It was only the Dutch who, by 1747, had made it their universal practice to bore from a solid-cast gun-barrel; in Britain this development awaited the invention of Wilkinson's boring-engine.

There was a remarkable increase in the use of artillery about the middle of the eighteenth century, when the field-gun really came into its own; but long before this, in the time of Marlborough, fortress warfare had turned upon the slow assembly of the heavy siege batteries. But the impact of artillery upon naval warfare was still more incisive. In place of the immemorial tactics of boarding and ramming, success in a naval battle came to depend upon the weight of fire which could be brought to bear upon the enemy line. Thus the ability of the founders to provide heavier guns played a considerable part in those exchanges of broadsides by which the fate of Europe from the days of de Ruyter to those of Nelson was so often determined. . .