... new weapons in war. The first reliable sources which assert the existence of guns appeared in the 1320s, and from the late 1330s the number of references to them rose dramatically. The early guns were of large calibre and used almost exclusively for sieges, although as early as Crécy in 1346, the English "fired off some cannons which they had brought to the battle to frighten the Genoese." Guns were made in one of two ways. Firstly, there were cast metal guns, usually of bronze, which were made at the foundry. These were usually the better weapons because they were made of a single piece of metal and therefore were less likely to burst apart on firing. The second method was arranging wrought iron strips into tubes which were then bound together with iron hoops in much the same way as barrels were made. The advantage of these guns was ...

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