The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy 1363-1477 (review)

Robert Douglas Smith, former head of conservation at the Royal Armouries, Tower of London, and Kelly DeVries, professor of history at Loyola College in Maryland, have essayed to integrate all types of written, pictorial, and material sources in order to provide a well-rounded discussion of the artillery of the Valois dukes of Burgundy from 1363 to 1477. In four sections of unequal length, the authors first provide a brief history of gunpowder weapons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, through which they demonstrate, by the failures of previous scholars, the need for the use of all types of sources. This is followed by a highly truncated summary of several dozen campaigns during which the four Valois dukes of Burgundy deployed artillery in various military operations. These two sections provide a sort of historical background for the more technical discussions that follow. They are not sufficiently developed, however, to be of great value to those readers who are not thoroughly acquainted with this period, its sources, and its scholarly controversies.

The heart of the volume, from the perspective of readers of Technology and Culture, consists of section 3, which is an "Analysis of the Documentary Sources for the Gunpowder Weapons," and section 4, which is an "Illustrated Catalogue of the Surviving Guns." The volume is rounded out with six appendices. The first of these is a summary of the gunpowder weapons that are mentioned in the documents published in L'Artillerie des ducs de Bourgogne d'après les documents conservés aux archives de la Côte-d'Or (Paris, 1895) by Joseph Garnier, an archivist at Dijon. It should be noted that Smith and DeVries do not provide citations either to the document number or page number in Garnier's text where the information regarding these guns is to be found. The other five appendices are transcriptions and translations of individual documents dealing with Burgundian artillery.

The major contribution of this work to the historiography of gunpowder artillery is the exploitation of the documents published by Garnier. L'Artillerie is an exceptional resource, which runs to 296 pages and includes many hundreds of texts. Smith and DeVries regarded this collection as sufficiently comprehensive that they felt it unnecessary to search out additional unpublished materials at Dijon or any of the several other Burgundian fonds at Lille, Brussels, and The Hague, and the Collection de Bourgogne at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where many hundreds of thousands of original documents still survive. While it is likely that Garnier's published transcriptions are to be trusted implicitly, Smith and De-Vries do not discuss his criteria for the selection of documents and thus leave the reader wondering about what was not included. Of course, what subsequent researchers may learn from the materials not published by Garnier—and how these either support or call into question the authors' views—remains to be seen.

There are a number of small but annoying lacunae that perhaps a second and much-expanded revised edition, based upon direct archival research, could include. Among these are a discussion of weights and measures and the values of various types of money. One hopes that further work will provide additional information on engineers, workers, foundries, transportation costs, sources for raw materials, and their prices. In short, the wealth of the Burgundian archives, like those of the English kings, provides information on a vast spectrum of subjects closely related to The Artillery, as it now stands, which can be treated in a quantitative manner. Investigations of these topics may provide a potential corrective to the narrative sources, which are notoriously biased, upon which the authors rely very heavily—perhaps even too heavily. Nevertheless, Smith and DeVries have provided a useful introduction to some important aspects of Burgundian artillery, and...