Gun Culture in Early Modern England by Lois G. Schwoerer (review)

Schwoerer’s history of the introduction and use of firearms in Tudor and Stuart England mixes business, political, legal, constitutional, and social history. Readers interested in business history will find much of interest in the detailed account of the development of the gun industry and the Crown’s role in promoting it. The book presents new information about firearms manufacture in England and adds to current information on the use of guns by various social classes.

Unfortunately, despite claims to the contrary, scholars of legal and constitutional history will find nothing new, and, worse, a skewed account in this book of the statutes and practice. Schwoerer presents basic safety measures prohibiting firing guns in crowded areas and laws that lapsed from lack of enforcement as proof of serious restrictions on the public’s use of firearms. Such measures would not have been necessary if only a few Englishmen owned and used those firearms. Schwoerer cites Henry VIII’s statute of 1541 limiting ownership of handguns and crossbows—concealable weapons popular with robbers—to those with an annual income from land of £100. She ignores, however, the law’s assurances to yeomen; servingmen; and the inhabitants of cities, boroughs, and market towns, as well as those living outside of towns, that they could “have and keep in every of their houses any such handgun or handguns, of the length of one whole yard.”¹ Nevertheless, in the book’s conclusion, Schwoerer claims a “striking feature” of England’s early modern gun culture was that “subjects whose socioeconomic standing was below a certain level (usually an annual income of £100) were legally disallowed to possess or use a firearm” (171). Her estimate that this group comprised 98 percent of the population is a regrettable inaccuracy.

The religious and social limitations of the firearms article in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 that she presents are well understood.² The problem with Schwoerer’s focus is her timeframe. She fails to track the evolution of the English right to bear arms through the critical eighteenth century to the drafting of the American constitution and bill of rights. During that period, the 1689 limitations on the English right fell away. In 1765, for instance, Blackstone wrote that “the subjects of England” are entitled to “the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence.”³ In 1820, an English judge ruled, “A man has a clear right to arms to protect himself in his house. A man has a clear right to protect himself when he is going singly or in a small party upon the road where he is travelling or going for the ordinary purposes of business.”⁴

Schwoerer’s disappointing failure to trace the evolution of the right to have arms distorts the English legacy. Other authors have accurately followed that evolution, and the U.S. Supreme Court even took account of it in its two landmark opinions affirming the individual right of Americans to be armed as a pre-existing right from the English legacy.⁵ Schwoerer points out that she participated in writing amici curiae to the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark cases Heller v. District of Columbia (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010). She does not add that in both cases, her dismissal of the English legacy of the American right to be armed did not persuade the majority of justices.