m144!

man-at-arms. A mason took at least half a day to make one cannon bali, using a template cut in a wooden board to the exact borę of the gun. Burgundian documents do not mention the use of lead balls until 1443, and iron balls first appear only in 1474.

Something of the ratę of artillery fire may be judged from contemporary accounts. During the siege of Maastricht, from 24 November 1407 to 7 January 1408, the town was bombarded with 1,514 large stone balls, an average of 30 a day. At Calais in 1443 the bombards were fired only once a day. At the battle of Brustem, the Liege rebels’ artillery fired 70 shots¹. Incendiary missiles were in common use: at the siege of Vellexon quantities ofcamphor were ordered, and with the use of pitch, sulphur and alcohol such projectiles were probably quite effective. John the Fearless, fighting the Liege rebels in 1408, carried 300 incendiary rockets. Towns-people covered their roofs with earth as a protection from these missiles.

Whefe an army could not be billeted in a town, camps were set up, and 10,000 or 12,000 men in a camp must have required colossal organisation. The chronicler Chastellain described the Burgundian camp at Eclusier Vaux in 1468: ‘It was the

This archer, from a I5th century northern Burgundian manuscript, wcars a visored sallet, a mail collar and a brigandine. Brigandines, of which a surviving example is shown here, consisted of numerous smali metal plates attached by ’rivets to thick fabric. Lavish materiał such as velvet was used as the outer covering on superior examples, and the rivet heads were often gilded. (Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and Musee de 1’Armee, Paris)

^lThis is inconsistent, ho\vcver, with another contemporary report giving the nutnbcr of guns in the Liegeois’ hands as one hundred.