The assemblage includes 34 lead or lead composite projectiles with a calibre of 20mm and above. These all came from a discrete area of a little over one square kilometre (Figure 7.2). They were almost certainly all fired during the 1485 battle. The 29 with a diameter greater than 27 mm were probably fired from artillery pieces and are thus described here as round shot. The two, possibly three, with a diameter of between 20 mm and 23 mm may also have been fired from mounted guns of some type, but it is also possible that they were intended for handguns.

There are various reasons why the large calibre projectiles must be from the 1485 battle. First, artillery is only likely to have been fired by military forces. It is true that a Civil War skirmish took place on the same location as the 1485 battle, and lead round shot did remain in regular use for the smallest classes of artillery in the mid-seventeenth century. However, the skirmish in 1644 was an action between detachments of cavalry and no artillery would have accompanied either force.²⁶ Neither is it likely that the round shot was fired during training by militia or other forces during the early modern period, for the scatter spreads across the Fenn Lane, which has been in use since the Roman period. The definitive evidence, however comes from the projectiles themselves. While solid lead round shot were in later use, lead composite rounds, where stone or iron has been included within the lead sphere, were not. The latter were common in the magazines of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but, with one exceptional type, they had gone out of use by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Such projectiles appear only to have been found on late medieval fields of conflict or in magazines of the period – most commonly on wrecks of the early to mid-sixteenth century.²⁷ Finally there is the evidence preserved on the surface of the projectiles, some of which is shown below to have resulted from firing from stave- and gutter-built gun barrels. With the exception of swivel guns, typically used on board ship, field artillery with barrels of this construction went out of use during the sixteenth century. Thus, the only reasonable context for the deposition of the round shot from the Bosworth survey is that they were fired from gunpowder weapons during the 1485 battle.