The La Neuveville collection also includes several wrought iron projectiles that, during manufacture, have been flattened in one direction. Such flattening would be compatible with firing as part of a multiple load, in a stack of two or perhaps more rounds (Figure 7.18). It is a practice that is well known from the study of seventeenth-century small arms rounds, but this is the first indication of the practice in the later fifteenth century to increase the effectiveness of small artillery.107
Despite the effects of corrosion, compared to ferrous arrowheads, iron round shot are sufficiently large to have survived in the topsoil as recognisable spheres in most ground conditions. They are also amenable to recovery with a metal-detector, but this will normally require detecting in all-metal mode, with all the implications this has for the rate of coverage in a survey.
While stone was the most common material for round shot, especially for very large guns, and iron was in use to some degree for lesser guns, the second most common type of ammunition in the fifteenth-century Burgundian army, after stone, was lead.108 The flexibility of using lead to produce artillery rounds cannot be over-emphasised. Casting iron requires specialist production facilities, with supplies of round shot having to be provided centrally. Wrought iron rounds could be produced with portable equipment by a blacksmith and those of stone by a mason, both of which might be expected to accompany the artillery train of a major army, but this was time consuming. In contrast, casting lead required no specialist skills, was quick, and only the most basic of equipment was required – appropriate moulds, container, ladle, nippers and a supply of lead. Moreover it produced rounds to an exact specification. Ammunition for individual guns could thus be replenished as needed by staff of the artillery train or even by the gun team itself.109
While most lead ammunition was for small arms there is occasionally documentary evidence as to the calibre of lead artillery rounds. For example, in the Burgundian army in 1444 there were two veuglaires which took projectiles of two livres of lead (979 g), giving a calibre of about 55 mm. In 1473–4 there were 200 projectiles made of lead weighing 505 livres (247.2 kg) for serpentines, giving an average of 1,236 g per ball and thus a diameter of at least 59 mm. However, as some were composite rounds containing iron cubes, so the diameter will have been significantly greater. Such composite rounds contained cast iron ball, wrought iron dice, stone pebbles or flint shards.110 Several hundred composite projectiles were recovered from the Mary Rose, which range in calibre from 26 mm to 85 mm, and these have been discussed in detail.111
As yet it is unclear whether any of these types of projectile, other than lead and lead composite, were used at Bosworth. The survey method applied in the survey, with detectors set in non-ferrous mode, meant that recovery of iron rounds was unlikely. In addition, given that we only found one of the 31 large calibre lead projectiles by eye on the surface, the probability that stone rounds would have been seen is remarkably low. Neither was any attempt made, nor indeed does a methodology currently exist in battlefield studies, for fieldwalking survey to recover stone projectiles. As for ‘fusée’, until we know the materials used for the shell case it is impossible to determine whether they might survive and, if so, how they might be recovered. To address these issues, what is now required at Bosworth is an intensive re-survey in all-metal mode accompanied by an intensive fieldwalking survey, covering a wide transect across the round shot scatter.