Gun Culture in Early Modern England. By Lois G. Schwoerer

Abstract

In this wide-ranging and ambitious book, Lois G. Schwoerer attempts to establish the existence of a “gun culture” in early modern England. The various chapters cover a number of themes which together, on Schwoerer’s account, demonstrate not only that there was a gun culture on early modern England but also that this culture was a phenomenon of considerable importance. She stresses that the government attempted to restrict the possession and use of guns to the relatively wealthy after 1514, which produced a distinctively English gun culture. She argues that the employment of guns for military purposes increased interest in guns and their use among the population at large, suggesting that returning soldiers (and certainly their officers) transferred their knowledge of and enthusiasm for firearms into civilian life. Men, and to a lesser extent women, participated in the burgeoning firearms industry, and Schwoerer is especially interesting when tracing the struggle of The Worshipful Company of Gunmakers to achieve recognition as well as the development of the government’s Ordnance Office. She demonstrates how gunmaking and gunfounding in London developed into an industry which affected the capital’s topography and economy. She also makes original and interesting analyses of guns in contemporary portraiture, guns as an element in gift exchange, and the apparently widespread existence of toy or miniature guns as children’s playthings, which, Schwoerer suggests, modifies our perception of early modern childhood. The closing chapter develops some of the suggestions she made on Article VII of the 1689 Bill of Rights in her 1981 book on the Declaration of Rights. She argues here that Article VII took a very limited interpretation of which of William and Mary’s Protestant subjects had the right to bear arms, and hence, despite claims to the contrary, was of minimal importance to the framing of the United States’ Second Amendment.