Posted on 05/01/2017 11:45:06 AM PDT by C19fan
Let's get this out of the way: England's King Edward I was an ass. You may remember Longshanks from his villainous turn in Braveheart. Tall, forbidding, and bad-tempered, the 14th century monarch stomped his Welsh neighbors in submission, taxed the Irish into poverty, and stole money from his Jewish subjects, killing many of them and expelling the rest. When he was done with that he engineered a takeover of Scotland using tactics that would make Machiavelli blanch, including inflicting an unbelievably cruel death upon the leader of the Scots, William Wallace, that's familiar to movie fans.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
A Trebuchet is a bit more "standoffish".
The official documents of the time show that Edward sent a letter to his treasurer and the barons of the exchequer "firmly enjoining you with haste to provide a horse load of cotton, quick sulphur and saltpeter… for casting fire into the castle."
I'm surprised to see "cotton" referenced. I don't know how much actual cotton was present in Medieval England.
I would think wool would have been more common than cotton.
Gun cotton, perhaps?
You need one to take care of those pesky squirrels.
By the middle ages, cotton from the middle east was traded throughout Europe through Venetian merchants.
It’s not too surprising that Edward knew about gunpowder, because Roger Bacon published a recipe for it in 1261, during Edward’s reign.
More common, yes, but no use if you are trying to make explosives. For nitrocellulose, you need cellulose, which is comes from plant fiber, not from animal hair.
Bookmark.
Thanks for posting!
2. See 1.
Thanks C19fan.
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