ORDNANCE, a general term for great guns for military and naval purposes, as opposed to "small arms" and their equip ment ; hence the term also includes miscellaneous stores under the control of the ordnance department as organized. In England the Master-General of the Ordnance, from Henry VIII.'s time, was head of a board, partly military, partly civil, which managed all affairs concerning the artillery, engineers and materiel of the army; this was abolished in 1855, its duties being distributed. The making of surveys and maps (see MAP) was, for instance, handed over eventually (1889) to the Board of Agriculture, though the term "ordnance survey" still shows the origin.
The invention of guns may be said to date from the first quarter of the 14th century. At this period gunpowder (q.v.), which had been known as an explosive for at least sixty years, appears to have been first used as a propellent. Although incen diary compounds and fire-projecting machines were known to the Greeks, Arabs and Chinese in very early times and were used on the sailing-galleys of Constantine Pogonatus in the year 673 for the destruction of enemy vessels, there is no good evidence that any explosive resembling gunpowder was discovered before the 13th century. Roger Bacon refers, in 1249, to such an ex plosive and may even have been its discoverer. Nothing is known of the man who first applied gunpowder to the projection of missiles for military purposes and the ascription of the inven tion of cannon to a German monk, Berthold Schwartz, has with good reason been discredited by reliable historians. The cannon was probably evolved at the beginning of the 14th century from some such engine as the madfaa referred to in an anonymous Arabic manuscript of that period. This madfaa seems to have been a small wooden mortar-like instrument on the muzzle end of which a ball rested like an egg in an egg-cup until projected by the firing of the charge. Another
primitive machine, from which an arrow-like bolt was shot, is illustrated in the Millemete ms. (1327). The bottle shape of this suggests the name "pot de fer" found in early records. (See fig. I.) It is natural to suppose an evolution by which the narrow neck of this weapon was enlarged until the bottle became a straight tube and the arrow bolt was replaced by a ball. All the early guns were very small and were made of iron or cast bronze ; they fired iron or lead balls and there is evidence of their general use in western Europe from about 1325 onwards. They are reported to have been used at a siege of Metz in 1324 and iron balls and metal cannon are men tioned in a Florentine document of 1326. John Barbour, writing in 1375, refers to the "crakys of war" used by Edward III. in his Scottish campaign of 1327. The same king provided himself with cannon when he invaded France in 1346. Guns were carried in an English ship, the "Christopher of the Tower," as early as 1338 and a "pot de fer" is recorded to have been in one of the French vessels which attacked Southampton in that year. Guns were used in the English fleet at the battle of Sluys in 1340 and in a sea-fight between the Moors of Tunis and the Moorish King of Seville in 135o. The history of guns falls naturally into three epochs; the first being the smooth-bore era, from the 14th century to about 1845; the second, the evolutionary era from about to 1885 ; the third, the high velocity smokeless powder era from about 1885 onwards.