Gun Culture in Early Modern England

Lois G. Schwoerer

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813938608
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Guns had an enormous impact on the social, economic, cultural, and political lives of civilian men, women, and children of all social strata in early modern England. In this study, Lois Schwoerer identifies and analyzes England's domestic gun culture from 1500 to 1740, uncovering how guns became available, what effects they had on society, and how different sectors of the population contributed to gun culture.

The rise of guns made for recreational use followed the development of a robust gun industry intended by King Henry VIII to produce artillery and handguns for war. Located first in London, the gun industry brought the city new sounds, smells, street names, shops, sights, and communities of gun workers, many of whom were immigrants. Elite men used guns for hunting, target shooting, and protection. They collected beautifully decorated guns, gave them as gifts, and included them in portraits and coats-of-arms, regarding firearms as a mark of status, power, and sophistication. With statutes and proclamations, the government legally denied firearms to subjects with an annual income under £100—about 98 percent of the population—whose reactions ranged from grudging acceptance to willful disobedience.

Schwoerer shows how this domestic gun culture influenced England's Bill of Rights in 1689, a document often cited to support the claim that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution conveys the right to have arms as an Anglo-American legacy. Schwoerer shows that the Bill of Rights did not grant a universal right to have arms, but rather a right restricted by religion, law, and economic standing, terms that reflected the nation's gun culture. Examining everything from gunmakers' records to wills, and from period portraits to toy guns, Gun Culture in Early Modern England offers new data and fresh insights on the place of the gun in English society.

NOTES

Abbreviations

BC	Burney Collection of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Newspapers (digitized), British Library
BL	British Library
CJ	Parliament, Great Britain, Journals of the House of Commons, 11 volumes
CSPD	Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1553–1714
DNB	H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 volumes
HEHL	Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California
HMSO	Her or His Majesty’s Stationery Office
NA	National Archives, London
OED	Oxford English Dictionary
SP	State Papers
SR	Alexander Luders et al., eds., Statutes of the Realm, 11 volumes

Introduction

1. A gun founder worked in a gun foundry casting artillery (cannon). A gunmaker (either a man or a woman) put together the parts of a firearm—the barrel, the stock, and the lock—to make a gun.

2. Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 99. Howard L. Blackmore, Hunting Weapons from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2000), 217.

3. SR, 3: 132. A mark was worth about two-thirds of a pound (OED, s.v. “mark”).

4. Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1965), 239–40.

5. The word “gunner” means two things: first, a man who fires a cannon; second, a man who fires a handgun (OED, s.v. “gunner”).

6. Abigail Kohn, “Their Aim Is True. Taking Stock of America’s Real Gun Culture,” Reason Magazine Online, May 2001. http://reason.com/archives/2001/05/01/ their-aim-is-true.

7. Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chaps. 1, 3, 8, and 11.

8. J. R. Hale, “Gunpowder and the Renaissance: An Essay in the History of Ideas,” in From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, ed. Charles H. Carter (New York: Random House, 1965), 113–44.

9. Lisa Jardine, The Awful End of Prince William the Silent (London: Harper Collins, 2005), 85–92.

10. I presented a paper on this material at the Renaissance Society of America meeting in 2008 and hope to publish it in the future.

11. Henry J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science: The Books and the Practice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965) is the classic study.

12. Lady Sherley’s name is spelled variously. I have followed the spelling preferred by Sheila R. Canby, Shah ‘Abbas The Remaking of Iran (London: British Museum Press, 2009), 57.

13. Howard L. Blackmore, Gunmakers of London 1350–1850 (York, PA: George Shumway, 1986). Blackmore, Gunmakers of London, Supplement 1350–1850 (Bloomfield, Ontario: Museum Restoration Service, 1999).

14. Charles Ffoulkes, The Gun-Founders of England: With a List of English and Continental Gun-Founders from the XIV to the XIX Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937); J. F. Hayward, “The Huguenot Gunmakers of London,” Journal of Arms and Armour Society 6, no. 4 (1968): 117–43; A. N. Kennard, Gunfounding and Gunfounders (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1986); R. E. G. Kirk and Ernest F. Kirk, eds., Return of Aliens Dwelling in the City and Suburbs of London (Aberdeen: University Press for the Huguenot Society of London, 1902); W. E. May, “Some Board of Ordnance Gunmakers,” Journal of Arms and Armour Society 6, no. 7 (1969): 201–4; W. Keith Neal and D. H. W. Back, Great British Gunmakers 1540–1740 (London: Lund Humphries, 1984); and Richard W. Stewart, The English Ordnance Office 1585–1625: A Case Study in Bureaucracy (London: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 1996).

15. Natalie Deibel, then a graduate student in History at the George Washington University, first constructed the spreadsheets, and Adrienne Shevchuk, then a staff member of the Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, maintained and expanded them.

16. David Cressy, Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Jack Kelly, Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

1. Re-creating and Developing a Gun Industry

1. Neither J. S. Scarisbrick (Henry VIII [London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970]) nor John Guy (Tudor England [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]) mentions the matter. David Starkey (Henry: Virtuous Prince [London: Harper Press, 2008], 314, 316) and Lucy Wooding (Henry VIII [London: Routledge, 2009], 69) note Henry’s concern. Howard L. Blackmore credits the king with advancing the gun industry in Gunmakers of London 1350–1850 (York, PA: George Shumway, 1986), 11–12.

2. Their choice of name shows that the word Gunmaker was descriptive of a craft and also bore a generic ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One: Re-creating and Developing a Gun Industry
• Two: Economic Opportunities for Men and Women
• Three: Regulating Domestic Guns with “Good and Politic Statutes”
• Four: Domestic Gun Licenses Issued “As if under the Great Seal”
• Five: Military Service: A Pathway to Guns
• Six: London: The Gun Capital of England
• Seven: “Newfangled and Wanton Pleasure” in the Many Lives of Men
• Eight: Guns: A Challenge to the Feminine Ideal?
• Nine: Guns and Child’s Play
• Ten: An Individual Right to Arms?: The Bill of Rights (1689)
• Conclusion: Defining Gun Culture in Early Modern England
• Appendix A What Is a Gun?
• Appendix B Naming the Gun
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index