Some 25 major, set-piece ‘field’ battles took place across the course of the English Civil War. Many of these big battles saw the use of enormous artillery pieces beloved of ECW wargamers – cannon royale, demi-cannon and culverins, as well as the ubiquitous sakers. These guns fired balls weighing from 6lb (saker) to 60lb (cannon royale), required teams of up to 24 horses to pull them, and large numbers of men to serve them. Once positioned, they didn’t move.
But the Civil War also saw thousands of smaller, localised clashes and encounters, involving a few hundred (or even just a few dozen) men. Enormously heavy, difficult to move guns had no role in these sorts of engagements - if anything, they were a liability. Smaller calibre ordnance - minions, falcons and falconets – were of much more use.
Both sides used whatever guns they could lay their hands on, however old or decrepit, and however big or small. Trundled out of town armouries, dusted down, and put to use. Hence small calibre, Heath Robinson looking contraptions, such as robinets and battlement guns.
Battlement guns, as the name suggests, were small calibre ‘swivel guns’: light cannon on adjustable mounts (fixed frames or wheeled trundles), used on defensive works to repel attackers. With barrels up to six feet long, they fired balls of around 0.75lb - although smaller civil war era cannon with short ranges were just as likely to be used to fire anti-personnel case shot.
The robinet (occasionally ‘rabinet’, and also known as a ‘base’) was the smallest calibre gun in the mid-Seventeenth Century arsenal. With a three to four foot long bronze barrel, it fired a small ball from 0.5lb up to 1lb, or small charges of case shot. It could be manhandled by two men and easily pulled by a single horse.
Our robinet is mounted on a solid beam truckle carriage. Primarily used in a defensive capacity, a ‘garrison gun’ of this type could still be dragged out into the streets or countryside for use as a diminutive field piece. Even mounted on a cart - an early example of propelled artillery perhaps. Many arsenals would have included this sort of very small calibre ordnance - relatively simple to construct and easy to move.
These guns are also eminently suitable for the Thirty Years War of course.
