Ordnance Office Research Articles

The Cumae armour group: a South Italic panoply at the Royal Armouries

In 1853, at the sale of the collection of the Count of Milan of Sicily, the Ordnance Office at the Tower of London purchased a South Italic panoply, ostensibly from Cumae, for £200. The set included a winged helmet, a cuirass, a pair of greaves, thigh protectors, a belt, a sword and scabbard, and a spearhead. The Cumae armour, belonging to a high-status warrior, can be broadly dated on stylistic grounds to about 375–25 BC and exhibits a sophisticated interplay of imagery relating to Hermes, Gorgons, and boars. The weapons date to the eighth century BC and are thought to have been added to the panoply in the nineteenth century to make a more attractive and visually ‘complete’ collection for display or sale.

Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. By Priya Satia (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2018) 528 pp. $35.00

<i>Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution</i>. By Priya Satia (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2018) 528 pp. $35.00

Professions and past times: the British ordnance office establishment and the investigation of Mediterranean antiquities, c.1800–1859

The nineteenth century has long been seen as a century where European powers were acquiring antiquities for display in their national museums. At the forefront of this trend was the British Museum which worked in conjunction with the Foreign Office and Admiralty to bring them back to Britain. Yet current historiography of the region has ignored the role played by another leading government department, the Ordnance Office. The establishment of a permanent British military presence on Malta and in the Ionian Islands had a transformative effect on the study and acquisition of ancient, classical and medieval antiquities from the region as personnel from the civil and military establishments were now able to engage with them at first hand.

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

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.

Shaping the Ordnance Office Collections at the Tower of London: The impact of colonial expansion, diplomacy, and donation in the early nineteenth century

ABSTRACTThe Tower of London had a number of different and sometimes conflicting functions in the early nineteenth century. Among these its role as a museum underwent significant development during this period. Moves by the Ordnance Office to improve public access to its historic collections at the Tower as well as providing greater historical accuracy were clear reflections of a wider national trend. Attention has generally been focused on the developments to the historic collections in the New Horse Armoury; yet as this article demonstrates there were other aspects of the Ordnance Office collections at the Tower which were also undergoing noteworthy changes as a consequence of British diplomatic activity, overseas military successes, and continuing territorial expansion.

Greek Armour at the Tower

In the following short notice, the authors tell the story of the appearance of Classical armour in the Tower Armouries in the early and mid-nineteenth century. In the first part, Malcolm Mercer describes the interest surrounding armour from Cumae and the circumstances of its purchase by the Ordnance Office; while in the second Thom Richardson presents a specialist analysis of this group.

Tommy: The Gun That Changed America by Karen Blumenthal (review)

Reviewed by: Tommy: The Gun That Changed America by Karen Blumenthal Elizabeth Bush Blumenthal, Karen Tommy: The Gun That Changed America. Roaring Brook, 2015 [240p] illus. with photographs ISBN 978-1-62672-084-8 $19.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-10 Although the rapid-fire Gatling gun was introduced in the Civil War, the United States military resisted its widespread use on the battlefield: effective, yes, but heavy and somehow not gentlemanly enough for the conventions of war at the time. Eventually, though, a lieutenant and an ordnance officer, John Henry Parker and John Thompson, recognized rapid-fire weaponry as the wave of the future and promoted the Gatling Gun during the Spanish American War. Still, the military balked, and the World War I armistice came and went without significant machine-gun development. Thompson left the military to start his own development company, Auto-Ordnance, to perfect a lighter weight, single-operator gun—a weapon that would become known as the Thompson Submachine Gun, or Tommy gun. In the early 1920s many landed, amid scandal, in the hands of the Irish Republican Army; by the mid 1920s, Tommy became the weapon of choice for Chicago gangsters. Auto-Ordnance’s infamy grew as its carefully cultivated markets expanded to Depression-era crime-spree criminals and corporations threatened by labor unrest. In this fascinating slice of American social history, Blumenthal traces not only the development of the gun itself but also the struggles between pro- and anti-gun control advocates, whose concerns had previously been limited to regulation of concealed weapons. Those who pay even passing interest to the news will find early iterations of current issues throughout Tommy gun’s story: financiers’ narrow interests in sales; gun sales to foreign governments; gun smuggling to paramilitary organizations; licensing and registration policies; evolving interpretations of the Second Amendment. Chapter notes and a thematic bibliography will assist researchers, but expect that many teens will read this simply as a great story well told. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Ordnance Drawing Room 1716–52

English Heritage Trust manages many of the buildings erected by the Office of Ordnance, which until its abolition in 1856 was the government department responsible for the construction of fortifications and of buildings for the storage of munitions and weaponry. In the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession this office was re-organized, and it was progressively enlarged in response to the demands made by the succession of 18th-century wars. A branch dedicated to architectural drawing was formed, with a room allocated for its use in the Tower of London. Besides the Office of the King’s Works, which was smaller, the Ordnance Drawing Room was the only permanent public body of professional architects in 18th-century England, and it evolved its own practices, style and architectural education. With few exceptions, the staff of the Drawing Room are rarely considered as architects, only as military engineers; few of their names are known except to military historians. This article identifies them and describes their working environment, the Drawing Room itself, where they designed buildings in Scilly, Pendennis, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Dover, Upnor, Tilbury, Landguard, Scarborough, Tynemouth, Berwick and Carlisle, which are now in the care of English Heritage Trust. As an aid to attribution of the numerous drawings produced by the office in the period between 1716 and 1752 (when the Drawing Room moved premises), the article is succeeded by a catalogue of drawings for the buildings within the Tower itself, and by a transcription of a Register of Drawings for the Tower made by the author from what may be a unique copy in Historic England’s archives. The author’s concordance of the Register with the drawings identifies many of them, and lays the foundation for the attribution of many more.

Book Review: Arming the Royal Navy, 1793–1815: The Office of Ordnance and the State

Book Review: Arming the Royal Navy, 1793–1815: The Office of Ordnance and the State

The Authority of Practice in the Alchemy of Sir John Heydon (1588–1653)

The social, ideological and personal contours of Lieutenant-General John Heydon’s alchemy provide a case study of how philosophical questions and solutions arise from intertwined practice, theory, and scientific persona. The development of Heydon’s alchemical theory in an unpublished manuscript, A Synopsis of the Universall Entity of Ideas or of ye Systemes of the Maeteriall and Immateriall World, illuminates theories concerning generation and the maintenance of life through aerial nitre theory, which links the early seventeenth-century investigations of Michael Sendivogius and Cornelis Drebbel with later writers such as Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. It also provides the context for the early use of thermostatically controlled ovens. Practical concerns within the Ordnance Office could help to explain such interests in saltpetre and efficient ovens. Such practical concerns, however, do not determine the shape that Heydon’s theories took. Rather, theory also shaped Heydon’s notions of practice. Heydon’s particular strand of vitalism granted philosophical authority to experimental practitioners, whether or not they were learned in a traditional sense.

The Concise Encyclopedia of the Revolutions and Wars of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1639-1660 (review)

Reviewed by: The Concise Encyclopedia of the Revolutions and Wars of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1639–1660 Mark Charles Fissel The Concise Encyclopedia of the Revolutions and Wars of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1639–1660. By Stephen C. Manganiello. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. ISBN 0-8108-5100-8. Maps. Illustrations. Appendix. Bibliography. Pp. ix, 612. $95.00. Stephen Manganiello writes, "My goal in writing this book was to create the book that you would pick if you had space on your shelf for just one book on the topic" (p. ix). An authoritative single-volume reference work on a complex period in British history ought to be well-organized, reliable in the scholarship it distills, and helpful in guiding the enterprising reader toward further study. Considering that there are already in print numerous dependable reference works on the British civil wars, the tome should also offer something new that justifies its purchase by institutions and individuals. Encyclopedias are not like dictionaries in that the subject matter is dictated by an inherent organizational framework. In this volume, there is no guiding principle that explains why the particular topics, events, and people are presented. Similarly, there is little uniformity within the entries themselves. Biographical entries range from anecdotes to life histories. Manganiello conveys little sense of proportion, scale, or degree of historical importance in his motley assortment of entries. The Covenanters, who precipitated and perpetuated the conflicts to which this book is devoted, are allotted sixty-seven words. The differences between the Gregorian and Julian calendars receive twice that coverage. The Ordnance Office, the central institution in the logistics of English war-making, is dismissed in forty-nine words. There is room enough, however, for forty-six lines of poetry to the coy mistress of Andrew Marvell. Unwieldy (and sometimes irrelevant) extracts from unidentified sources are inserted into the text with little integration, sometimes incorporating quotations that are missing words. The occasional sentence breaks off unexpectedly (p. 87). Solitary sentences, unconnected to the preceding paragraph, are cast adrift (p. 112). The aggregate effect of this casual, sometimes careless, formatting makes the tome seem designed for browsing rather than for consultation. [End Page 223] Buyers might balk at purchasing this work on the basis of its organization or because of perceived hints of sloppy scholarship. However, the greatest factor working against the marketability of this volume is that what it offers is archaic and recycled. Many of the biographical entries resonate portions of the old (now superseded) Dictionary of National Biography, though they are not as comprehensive. The appearance of a second edition of the Dictionary of National Biography in printed and online formats renders the biographical dimension of this work obsolescent. Rarely if ever does one encounter syntheses or effective summarizations of recent scholarship in the entries. "Newsbooks" and "firelocks" mirror the identically titled entries in Martyn Bennett's 2000 historical dictionary of the British and Irish civil wars. Manganiello's definition of the "grandees" owes much to Newman's Companion to the English Civil Wars (1990). Compare the entry for Sir Jerome Zankey with pp. 505–6 of Ruth Spaulding's 1990 work on the contemporaries of Bulstrode Whitelocke. A pattern of information-gathering emerges. Further, the presentation and reliability of the scholarship amassed are shaky, first because no sources are cited for any of the entries (in contrast to the practice in the Dictionary of National Biography), and second because when information was incorporated into the encyclopedia the author sometimes got it wrong. Take for example the maps on pages 61–62. They are taken, without attribution, from a work by this reviewer that was published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. Manganiello has made minor modifications but unfortunately he has got his additions wrong (p. 62, the two battles of Newbury are confused with Newburn). Haphazard arrangement and carelessness are reflected in a strange inconsistency with the maps, as if specimens from several different sources were amalgamated. Variations in artistic style, legends, and resolution do not dispel that impression. The unreliability of the scholarly content of the book is exemplified by a twelve-page appendix on the Royal Navy. Internal evidence suggests it is derived from printed...

Book Reviews

Broad, John and Hoyle, Richard, eds. BernwoodAdams, S. ed. Household accounts and disbursement books of Robert Dudley, Earl of LeicesterBackhouse, Marcel The Flemish and Walloon communities at Sandwich during the reign of Elizabeth IStewart, Richard W. The English Ordnance Office, 1585–1625Wrigley, E.A., Schofield, R.S., Davies, R.S., &amp; Oeppen, J.E. English population history from family reconstitutionGrell, Ole Peter Calvinist exiles in Tudor and Stuart EnglandDobson, Mary J. Contours of death and disease in early modern EnglandLane, Joan Apprenticeship in EnglandFloud, Roderick The people and the British economyMandler, Peter The fall and rise of the stately homeDavis, John R. Britain and the German ZollvereinCrafts, Nicholas Britain's relative economic declineHendrick, Harry Children, childhood and English societyShort, Brian Land and society in Edwardian BritainWebster, P The health services since the war, IIDigby, Ann and Stewart, John, eds. Gender, health and welfareVan Ark, Bark, &amp; Crafts, Nicholas, eds. Quantitative aspects of post‐war economic growthOliver, Michael J. Whatever happened to monetarism?Bonneuil, Noel Transformation of the French demographic landscapeShapiro, Ann‐Louise Breaking the codesKranakis, Eda Constructing a bridgeGroote, Peter Infrastructure and Dutch economic developmentPatriarca, Silvana Numbers and nationhoodMuir, Edward Ritual in early modern EuropeCrossick, Geoffrey, ed. The artisan and the European townAldcroft, Derek H. Studies in the interwar European economyPaquette, Robert L., &amp; Engerman, Stanley L., eds. The Lesser Antilles in the age of European expansionJohnson, Howard The Bahamas from slavery to servitudeBernstein, Paul American work valuesBeab, Jonathan J. Beyond the broker stateMuirhead, Stuart Crisis banking in the EastSako, Mari, &amp; Sato, Hiroki, eds. Japanese management and labour in transitionFrederico, Giovanni An economic history of the silk industryTodd, Jan Colonial technologyAusubel, Jesse H., &amp; Langford, H. Dale, eds. Technological trajectories and the human environmentSteckel, Richard H., &amp; Floud, Roderick eds. Health and welfare during industrialisationCunningham, Andrew &amp; Andrews, Bridie eds. Western medicine as contested knoledge

The English Ordnance Office, 1585-1625: A Case Study in Bureaucracy.

The Ordnance Office - officers, artificers, management and finances administrative tensions, corruption and reform ordnance supplies and suppliers - the great ordnance gunpowder and saltpetre handguns, habilliments of war and the arms merchants the wider ordnance establishment. Appendixes: Ordnance Office personnel and salaried artificers, 1585-1625 craftsmen and suppliers to the Ordnance Office, 1593-1603 and 1620-5 sample supply lists - army and navy ordnance supply items - prices 1574, 1593, 1625 estimated Ordnance Office expenses in selected years.

Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe

Frontispiece Preface List of illustrations Notes on contributors Abbreviations Introduction J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James 1. Greek science in the sixteenth-century Renaissance Vivian Nutton 2. 'With the rules of life and an enema': Leonardo Fioravanti's medical primitivism William Eamon 3. The cutting edge of a revolution? Medicine and natural history near the shores of the North Sea Harold J. Cook 4. Science and technology during the Scientific Revolution: an empirical approach Richard S. Westfall 5. Mathematics and the craft of painting: Piero della Francesca and perspective J. V. Field 6. Johannes Hevelius and the visual language of astronomy Mary G. Winkler and Albert van Helden 7. Mathematical sciences and military technology: the Ordnance Office in the reign of Charles II Frances Willmoth 8. Between ars and philosophia naturalis: reflections on the historiography of early modern mechanics Alan Gabbey 9. The conscience of Robert Boyle: functionalism, 'dysfunctionalism' and the task of historical understanding Michael Hunter 10. Clandestine Stoic concepts in mechanical philosophy: the problem of electrical attraction Gad Freudenthal 11. Alchemy in the Newtonian circle: personal acquaintances and the problem of the late phase of Isaac Newton's alchemy Karin Figala and Ulrich Petzold 12. Newton's subtle matter: the Opticks queries and the mechanical philosophy R. W. Home 13. Huygens's reaction to Newton's gravitational theory Roberto de A. Martins 14. The reception of Newton's Opticks in Italy Paolo Casini 15. Marsigli, Benedict XIV and the Bolognese Institute of Sciences Giorgio Dragoni Afterword: retrospection on the Scientific Revolution A. Rupert Hall Bibliography Index.

Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History by Loren R. Graham

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 725 visual language for astronomy, a language necessitated by the tele­ scope. They argue that his contributions as elaborated in Selenographia (1647) were accepted so quickly by his successors that they have been invisible to modern historians. In “Mathematical Sciences and Military Technology: The Ord­ nance Office in the Reign of Charles II,” Frances Willmoth discusses in welcome detail the organization of the office, the duties and requi­ site skills of the principle officers, and the important role played by mathematics and mathematicians. She contrasts Ordnance Office attitudes with the increasing disinterest in practical mathematics by members of the Royal Society, especially near the century’s end. Alan Gabbey’s “Between ars and philosophia naturalis: Reflections on the Historiography of Early Modern Mechanics” concerns the changes in the meaning of the term “mechanics” from antiquity through the 17th century. He elaborates that ancient mechanics re­ ferred to the construction and operation of machines. It was an art that worked contra naturam and thus was quite separate from physics (which concerned nature). Following the rediscovery of (pseudo-) Aristotle’s Mechanics in the Renaissance, the term came to occupy a middle ground, a scientia media—“the treatment was mathematical, dealing with bare quantity separated from natural body, while the subjects treated were physical and sensible” (p. 134). Finally, within natural philosophy, mechanics acquired its modern meaning as a part of physics involving the analysis of the action of forces on matter. This is an essay that should be read by all students of early modern technology. Pamela O. Long Dr. Long’s publications include a paper on Renaissance humanism and science, as well as studies of openness, secrecy, and intellectual property in pre-17th-century tech­ nical and military literature. Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History. By Loren R. Graham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xxvii + 321; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). The book under review is a wide-ranging survey of the history of science in Russia and the Soviet Union from before the time of Peter the Great in the early 18th century until the present. Loren Graham focuses his attention on the interaction of political, economic, and social forces with science, scientists, and scientific institutions. The result is a fascinating look at a scientific environment that is at once both similar to and yet very much unlike that of the West with which we are most familiar. The author does not attempt to provide a comprehensive treatment of Russian and Soviet scientific developments. Instead, he concen­ 726 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE trates on several themes and topics, some of which he returns to at various times throughout the book. One important theme is the cen­ tral role of the Academy of Sciences, both before and after the Rus­ sian Revolutions of 1917. The book is organized for the most part in a chronological manner, with the Soviet period receiving considerably more attention than the prerevolutionary Russian period. Graham begins with a discussion of why a scientific tradition did not develop in Russia before Peter the Great. He then briefly exam­ ines the main features of Russian science in the 18th century with a closer look at the most famous native Russian scientist of the era, Mikhail Lomonosov. For the 19th century, the author focuses on two of the century’s leading scientists: Nikolai Lobachevsky (the creator of non-Euclidean geometry) and Dmitrii Mendeleev (the developer of the periodic table of the elements). Graham makes the interesting point that both of the conceptual breakthroughs made by these scien­ tists occurred while their discoverers were engaged in writing a text­ book. The author concludes his survey of prerevolutionary Russian science with a chapter examining the attitudes of Russian intellectuals toward Darwinism. For the postrevolutionary era, the author concentrates his attention on the institutional development of science and the response of scien­ tists to the political and ideological influences of the communist state. Graham has addressed many of these topics in previous publications, but it is good to have a synthesis and summary of these and other studies. In particular, he examines how the Academy...

War in the Ordnance Office: the Essex connection and Sir John Davis

War in the Ordnance Office: the Essex connection and Sir John Davis

The office of ordnance and the instrument-making trade in the mid-eighteenth century

Summary Records of certain Government Departments known to have purchased scientific instruments from designated suppliers over long periods are potentially important sources of information on both instruments and their makers. The Office of Ordnance was one such Department. Investigation of its financial and administrative records has shown that the appointment ‘Mathematical Instrument Maker to his Majesty's Office of Ordnance’ brought the holder a substantial trade in instruments for drawing, surveying, and military purposes. Detailed entries in the Bill Books enable not only types, quantities, and prices of instruments supplied to be determined, but also the purposes for which they were required. In many cases the actual users of the instruments are named, with their locations in Great Britain and overseas. The records of the Office of Ordnance are extensive, covering the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century in over ten thousand volumes or bundles. This paper provides an introduction to what is available, and examines in particular the period 1748–1772 when George Adams senior (1709–72) was Mathematical Instrument Maker to this Office. It is shown that during this period Adams supplied over 1500 instruments, ranging from drawing pens to theodolites, detailed in 148 bills amounting to a total value of £2425. Some other well-known instrument makers, such as Thomas Wright, Benjamin Cole & Son, and Jesse Ramsden, were also occasional suppliers of instruments in the same period, while from 1765 onwards the records include bills for instruments purchased by the Office of Ordnance for the Royal Observatory from makers such as Dollond and Bird. The total number of instrument makers' bills located and examined in the period searched, including the 148 by Adams, was 166. In addition, though not within the scope of this paper it was observed that the records contain numerous bills by William Deane before, and by Jeremiah Sisson after, the period of Adams' appointment respectively.

The Refortification of the Tower of London 1679–86

SummaryBetween 1679 and 1686 the Office of Ordnance sought to strengthen and modernize the defences of the Tower and to reorganize the accommodation of the garrison within. Rather than undertaking a massive programme of reconstruction, the Office simply equipped many of the existing, essentially medieval, defences with artillery platforms, though on the north-west and south-east corners of the outer enceinte a considerable amount of rebuilding was carried out. Despite the compromising nature of much of the work, these measures represent the last major attempt to refortify the castle. By 1714, however, the greater part of the improvements was deemed worthless and in the following year artillery reductions were set in motion.

Rock slope stability and remedial measures for a residential development at Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong

Summary The Buildings Ordnance Office of the Hong Kong Public Works Department stipulates minimum requirements for site formation plans submitted where rock slopes are involved. In particular, design assumptions and evidence upon which they are based must be clearly stated and verified during excavation by means of engineering geological drawings, showing salient features and details of proposed support and drainage measures. Examples from rock slope construction records for a residential development at Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong, are presented. The site formation involved excavation of benches into an existing hillside, resulting in the formation of rock faces up to 15 m in height in slightly weathered granodiorite, both beneath and behind the residential blocks. A rapid system of logging the rock faces by means of subjective surveys using photographic overlays is outlined, and remedial measures employed after final scaling are briefly described. A potentially unstable rock face was identified at an early stage, and geological conditions are presented in the form of a detailed Face Log. A further investigation of this slope by orientated rotary drilling was carried out, and design parameters are assessed by a combination of back-analysis and laboratory testing. A method of designing active support systems using a computer program is outlined, and ‘as-built’ construction records are presented.

Guns and Government: The Ordnance Office under the Later Stuarts

Guns and Government: The Ordnance Office under the Later Stuarts