Mons Meg, a fifteenth-century, 510mm (20 inches) bombard housed at Edinburgh Castle
2 December 2020
While we don’t know the origin with absolute certainty, the word gun appears to come from the woman’s name Gunnhildr, which is a compound of two Old Norse words, gunnr and hildr, which both mean war. Giving a weapon a woman’s name is hardly an unusual practice. Two famous examples are the fifteenth-century bombard in Edinburgh Castle known as Mons Meg (it was made in Mons in what is now Belgium) and the 420mm German WWI howitzer dubbed Big Bertha by Allied soldiers.
The word dates to the fourteenth century. From an inventory of munitions at Windsor Castle conducted in 1330–31:
Una magna balista de cornu quæ vocatur Domina Gunilda.
(A great ballista of horn which is called Lady Gunilda.)
A ballista is essentially a giant crossbow. So, in early use, gun would appear to refer to any kind of siege engine. But only a few years later an inventory of the Guildhall of London in September 1339 uses guns to refer to gunpowder cannons:
Item, in Camera Gildaulæ sunt sex Instrumenta de latone, vocitata Gonnes, et quinque roleres ad eadem. Item, peletæ de plumbo pro eisdem Instrumentis, quæ ponderant iiiie libræ et dimidium. Item, xxxii libræ de pulvere pro dictis Instrumentis.
(Item, in a room of the Guildhall are six instruments of brass, called guns, and five wheels of the same. Item, balls of lead for the same instruments, which weighing four hundredweight and a half pounds. Item, thirty-two pounds of powder for these instruments.)
Although these early appearances are in Latin texts, the word gun does not appear to be native Latin, but rather represents an English word. Note that both texts say the devices are “called” guns; they don’t say they “are” guns. This use of vocare is typical when the word is being glossed in another language.
Outside of the context of inventories, we see the word appear in the romance Sir Ferumbras, c. 1380. The text here makes a distinction between guns and ballistas or crossbows:
Þat wanne þe frensche þyderward; caste stones oþer tre,
Þay scholde with hure scheldes hard; kepe þe dent aȝe;
& summe scholde schete to þe frencshe rout; with gunnes & boȝes of brake,
Þat þay ne beo hardy to lokie out; defense aȝen hem to make.
And on þat oþer stage amidde; ordeynt he gunnes grete,
And oþer engyns y-hidde; wilde fyr to cast & schete.(That when the French cast stones or trees in that direction,
They should with their hard shields keep the blows back;
& some would shoot, to the woe of the French, with guns and crossbows,
So that they would not be so valiant as to look out; making a defense against them.
And in that middle tier; he prepared the great guns,
And other hidden engines, to cast & shoot wildfire.)
The he in the penultimate line refers to the French engineer in charge of the siege. I have translated boȝes of brake as crossbows; literally it reads “bows of the crank.” It’s unclear whether the poet here meant guns to refer to gunpowder cannons or some other type of siege engine, but he may have meant cannons. Gunpowder cannons appeared in China c.1000 C.E. and in Europe in the fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, written at about the same time, c.1378–80, makes mention of early gunpowder weapons:
That thrughout every regioun
Wente this foule trumpes soun,
As swifte as pelet out of gonne,
Whan fyr is in the poudre ronne.
And swiche a smoke gan out-wende
Out of his foule trumpes ende,
Blak, bloo, grenyssh, swartish reed,
As doth where that men melte leed,
Loo, al on high fro the tuel.(So that throughout every region
Went this foul trumpet’s sound,
As swift as a pellet out of a gun,
When fire is in the powder run.
And such a smoke began to wend
Out of his foul trumpet’s end,
Black, blue, greenish, darkest red,
As does where men melt lead,
Lo, all on high from the chimney.)
Overtime, the non-firearm senses of gun dropped away, and the word came to be used to refer to a firearm of any caliber. Although, in my Army training I learned a more restrictive technical definition. According to this definition, a gun is large-caliber, high-velocity weapon with a flat trajectory, such as on a tank or a naval ship. Howitzers, which are large caliber but with relatively low muzzle velocities and arcing trajectories, and rifles and pistols, which are small caliber (i.e., small arms), are not guns. But this technical definition is not generally observed.
Sources:
Chaucer, Geoffrey. House of Fame. The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, lines 1641–49, 367.
Herrtage, Sidney J., ed. The English Charlemagne Romances, Part I: Sir Ferumbras. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 34. London: Oxford UP, 1879, lines 3261–66, 103. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Oxford, Bodleian MS Ashmole 33).
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. gonne, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, gun, n.
Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Memorials of London and London Life. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1868, 205. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia, 2008.