I'm Axel Müller, I'm working at the University of Leeds as the Director of the International Medieval Congress, but I'm also working on
early gunpowder and the development of early gunpowder and gunpowder artillery.
The manuscript that I'm looking at is the Royal Armouries I.34 manuscript which is a very rare
copy, the only one that exists in the UK and there's only about 70 copies of it in existence in the world.
The manuscript is called a firework book, or Feuerwerkbuch
which is at least what it calls it in the text and it's a book that describes
the various different core stages of how to make gunpowder
in very crude and very basic levels and ways. It hasn't been studied much in the past. People were really
more interested about the fact that the second part of it has got much more illustrations in it,
and the big question that I'm involved with is to see how much is it actually practically
possible to recreate what is in there? How would we understand what is in there?
It's a text that is written in Early New High German
The whole book is thought to be produced at some point in the first
half to the first quarter of the 15th century. The first part is not illustrated at all,
so it's written very much as a working manual and it's not
overly elaborate, or overly colourful. It's a book that
probably throws up more questions than it answers so it's called 'firework book', but is it really a firework book?
You look at original research that has been done on it before, it's been written about a lot, some people argue it was
a flashy show of a book but had no relevance to the truth.
A lot of people have been working on it, especially the
people at the Gunpowder Research Group in Denmark, who I've been working with as well, to look at
recreating some of the recipes, some of the bits that are in the firework book and
many things work,
if you understand how to do it as with any recipe books some things are not quite as clearly explained if it's too obvious,
nobody tells you how to switch on your computer anymore or nobody tells you how to
to do some day-to-day practical things. Most of the copies of the firework books in existence have been,
as many other medieval manuscripts have been, taken apart and rebound at a later stage in life, 16th, 17th, 18th century, so
people were going through books where there were blank pages
they took the blank pages or only the pages with text on it and rebounded with other ones and they often are compiled of other texts
of technical nature from different parts.
This firework book which is what
we have has got a number blank pages in there and also has got some different segments: first segment
looks as if it was kind of a standardized text. There are similar texts in existence of various different
components of how to do certain parts and then there's a second part
which seems to be a bit more, it's definitely written in a different hand, some parts of it on paper which has
the same watermark on it, so there's a continuation of the time when it is written,
but it was also writing
referring to text before, and referring to the illustrations coming afterwards so where it it rare,
one assumption could be that this book was a bit of a
combination, you've got the master text, you've got some kind of general instruction,
and then you've got your 'try it yourselves', as we find with modern cooking books as well.
So you've got a section and you could put your notes in there you can put some examples in there, and then in order to
comment of how you can refer back to what the original text was.
And that gives us a bit more insight of what these books might have been like,
with the proviso that it could be just an oddity, and it might be something that's one of the theories.
Can we say what it was (and wasn't)?
We don't know much about master gunners, what they were. There are some people who have made some intonations that it was a
new profession - when gunpowder artillery came into existence we needed somebody to operate it.
You need to have people who meet,
to be willing to take risks,
because it was a dangerous business. You need to have people, as it describes in the firework book, that have got a certain
disposition, certain ways, that they are not too
as it says in the text, not too prone to alcohol and so they are able to be
moderate, to step away, because if you are dealing with dangerous items it's not a good idea to be too intoxicated
and so it's something that was used for
people who were involved in the business of
gunpowder artillery
in the practice in the 15th century. The first few pages are very very familiar, very traditional
and so even for somebody who's not that literate, they would then be able to see all these texts work,
also In the book it says that the master gunner needs to be able to read and write and that's something which people
sometimes think that in the Middle Ages people didn't read and write. In the 15th century, to do this job
you need to be able to read and write because in parts, what it also states in there,
there's so many different components you need to remember, if you got the order wrong and there may be some bad consequences.
How much does the book help us in the search for answers about early gunpowder artillery?
It helps us a lot because it's the recipes, people are given some instructions and
Information about quantities of mixtures and some ways to do it.
Through experimental archaeology, through putting this into practice and finding out
how do these elements really give us,
how, in practice, do they work together, can we start making some assumptions?
It's one of the big questions for early gunpowder - how efficient was
gunpowder artillery
in the 15th, 14th or 16th century and, as it was non-standardized and there were a lot of factors involved in it, how pure were the raw materials?
How much did people know about purifying certain parts
and how much did the external circumstances, for instance if the powder was wet,
it couldn't work. How do you keep your powder dry which is a wonderful modern expression as well?
How did people use these elements in order to make
working, functioning and effective gunpowder, and this book has a lot of various different components which give us a lot more insight that we wouldn't have without it.