Handguns are first mentioned in Europe in 1338 and by the late fourteenth century they were in widespread use. At least some of were made of brass.³³ There is a broad understanding of their character and evolution during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.³⁴ Sometimes described as hand-cannon, they were fired from above or below the shoulder or, in the case of the hook guns, rested on a rampart wall or other support. The main charge was set-off, via the touchhole, by priming powder in the pan on the exterior of the breech – typically a depression on the top of the barrel. Originally this was ignited by a hand-held match, but by the early fifteenth century a serpent, which was a simple mechanism that lowered the match into the priming pan, had been added making it more practical to aim the weapon. Now the handgunner did not have to take his eyes off the target in order to get the match to the touch-hole.

Further changes took place in the second half of the fifteenth century. This included the introduction of an early-modern type stock, to be held at the shoulder, and a side mounted matchlock mechanism with the priming pan now positioned on the side rather than the top of the barrel. While the early hand-cannon appears a relatively cumbersome weapon, the new design enabled far more effective aiming and firing. Thus, probably by the late 1460s, the basic design of the smooth bore matchlock handgun had been established in a form that would develop into the musket, thus continuning in military use through to the late seventeenth century. Accompanying these developments there seems to have been a significant reduction in the bore of the gun barrels, perhaps in response to improvements in the efficiency of gunpowder, and in the manufacturing of barrels of ferrous metal which may have enabled them to contain greater pressures. These handguns later came to be known by the French term, arquebus. In English records handguns are described by a range of terms including hakeguns, hagbusshes, hackbuts and handgonnes, obscuring a degree of variation in calibre, form and function which is still not fully understood.³⁵ For example, in February 1484 the constable of the Tower issued various supplies including seven serpentynes upon cartes and 28 ‘hacbushes’ with their frames, a barrel of touchpowder, and two barrels of serpentine powder.³⁶ Then on the 16 June he supplied two serpentines, two ‘gonnes to lye on walles’ and twelve ‘hakbusshes’, showing each to have been considered separate guns.³⁷

The range of ammunition documented for early handguns include lead ‘pellets’ and iron-headed arrows. At first sight gun arrows seem still to be in use in 1461, when they were employed by mercenary troops fighting in the second battle of St Albans: ‘arrows of an ell in length with six feathers, three in the middle, and three at one end, with a very big head of iron at the other end, and wild fire, all together’.³⁸ However, these are perhaps more likely to be fire arrows, which certainly continued in use through the sixteenth century.³⁹ It is surely significant that the projectiles supplied throughout the fifteenth century to the Burgundian army for use in handguns were almost exclusively of lead.⁴⁰ Records also exist for handguns and ammunition in use in the English garrison in Calais in the fifteenth century, though this cannot be assumed to be representative of English battlefield use.⁴¹ Even the artillery trains documented for major armies must be viewed carefully, because they will have comprised siege guns as well as field artillery. Hence in 1475 the train of artillery for Edward IV’s French campaign included bombards, fowlers and serpentines of iron as well as serpentines and ‘hakegonnes’ of bronze. Only some of these will have been intended for the field, the rest being siege pieces.⁴²

By the 1470s the arquebus seems to have been in significant use by continental field armies. Thus, for example, in Hungary one-seventh of the infantry were arquebusiers by this time.⁴³ Large numbers of handguns also seem to have been deployed in major battles of the period, such as Grandson and Murten in 1476, where the Swiss Confederation defeated an invasion by the duke of Burgundy.⁴⁴ Yet the chronology of introduction of the new weapon seems to vary significantly, both across Europe and according to military context. Thus we find that handguns were already in use in significant number by the English garrison of Calais where, by 1474–5, there were 25 iron and 243 brass handguns. Handguns appear also to have been in private ownership in England, at least to some degree.⁴⁵ Grummit has argued that the battlefield use of handguns was actually the norm in late fifteenth-century English armies. The lack of reference to them is, he claims, because they were a commonplace and only when something new occurred, as when Warwick used Flemish handgunners at the second battle of St Albans, did chroniclers consider gunpowder weaponry worthy of mention.

However, it is wrong to simply assume that such weapons were in use on the battlefield, for tactical considerations vary dramatically when fighting in open battle as opposed to attacking or defending a fortified site. In fact, Gregory’s Chronicle is quite specific in its comments on the handguns used in the second battle of St Albans II in 1461:

‘And as the real opinion of worthy men who will not dissemble or curry favour for any bias, they could not understand that all these devices did any good or harm, except on our side with King Henry. Therefore they are much neglected, and men betake themselves to mallets of lead, bows, swords, glaives, and axes.’⁴⁶

While English kings were happy to employ handguns in the defence of and perhaps also the assault upon garrisons, artillery may have been the only gunpowder weapons they brought into their field armies.

If so, then this was not a matter of short-sighted commitment to the warbow, as a traditional battle-winning weapon. From the cover of a fortified position the handgun’s slow rate of fire was more than compensated for by the greater kinetic energy it delivered on impact, achieving far greater penetration.⁴⁷ In contrast, on the battlefield it had always been the rate at which projectiles could be launched which was the dominant issue. This is the main reason why, for centuries, the English archer had been able to outperform the continental crossbowman on the battlefield. The rate of fire of a handgun was no worse than that of a crossbow but was far inferior to that of the warbow. During the last quarter of the fifteenth and first quarter of the sixteenth centuries, it seems likely that it was a hard-headed tactical decision about the relative capabilities of the two weapons which saw the warbow retained for battlefield use by English commanders. Thus, while continental armies were already in a phase of transition in the 1470s, with handgun and crossbow deployed side by side on the battlefield, in English armies the change seem not to have happened until the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Interestingly, the latter period is the very time when there was a vast increase in the scale of handgun use by the Calais garrison.⁴⁸

Around 1540 we find Audley’s military manual calling for a balance of handgun and bow in the infantry, with the strength of each weapon balancing the weaknesses of the other.⁴⁹ Unlike some detail provided by military manuals, we can see that this theory was also being put into practice on the battlefield. Thus at Ancrum Moor, fought on the Scottish Borders in 1545, Pitscottie describes two English battles: a vanguard to the fore, comprising 1,000 spears in the centre with a right wing of 500 hagbutters and a left wing of 500 archers; then, seconding it, the main battle had 1,000 spears in the centre with a right wing of 1,000 hagbutters and a left wing of 1,000 archers.⁵⁰ Similar evidence is given in the contemporary illustrations of the much larger Anglo-Scottish battle fought at Pinkie in East Lothian in 1547.⁵¹ When the archaeology of such battles is fully explored, this distinctive deployment of the handgunners will mean that bullets have a skewed distribution across the battlefield. This will also need to be considered when continental battlefields of the late fifteenth century are surveyed, where handgun and crossbow may perhaps have been used in similar assymetrical fashion. The impact of such unique tactical deployments in the poorly documented transitional period, when military manuals are little more than copies of Vegetius, is an issue that we must keep in mind when we consider the distribution of round shot at Bosworth.

While English troops were not, apparently, using handguns on the battlefield in the fifteenth century, the documentary record does reveal companies of mercenary handgunners in action in at least two battles. In the second battle of St Albans in 1461, of the hundreds of continental handgunners present, 18 were burned and killed by their own fire. This battle also provides one of the earliest records of a battlefield injury from a handgun. In an early sixteenth-century medical treatise, there is mention of a ‘gentyllman that was shot at Barnarde or Bozard feld which was hurt in the thye with a hackebushe’.⁵² This is clearly Bernard’s Heath, on which part of the second battle of St Albans was fought in 1461.⁵³ The casualty was wearing a coat of mail, three links of which were driven into his flesh by the blow, remaining in his left buttock even after the skin healed. They stayed there for 20 years moving down into his ankle which swelled up and gave great pain, until a surgeon operated and found the links ‘as bryt as cowed be’. A company of mercenary handgunners also fought at Barnet in 1471. ⁵⁴ Such troops were not used in every battle of the period and at Bosworth, even though continental forces formed a substantial part of the rebel army, there is no evidence to suggest any were equipped with handguns, but it is a possibility to be tested.