Mons Meg: the Great Bombard on the March (MED0075)

Mons Meg on the road to the siege

Men in quilted jacks and kettle hats, shoulders into the mud, hauling a barrel of hooped iron on a timber cradle; behind them a forest of spears and two mounted men pointing the way; ahead, on its rock, the castle that is the point of the whole exercise. The gun is doing the only thing that made it difficult — moving.

An iron barrel, built like a barrel

Mons Meg is wrought iron, not cast bronze. Long staves of iron were laid side by side around a core and then bound with hoops shrunk on hot, exactly the way a cooper builds a cask: the hoops hold the staves together against the pressure. It is a technique borrowed from barrel-making and it gave a bore of about twenty inches and a weight of some six and a half tonnes. Iron guns built this way were cheaper than bronze and far bigger — and less forgiving, because everything depends on the hoops.

Three miles on a good day

This is the part of artillery that no chronicle makes glamorous and every account confirms. A gun of this size moved at a walking pace measured in a few miles a day, with ox teams, a crew of haulers, carpenters ahead of it to strengthen bridges and lay road, and its own carriage and cradle. The picture is honest about it: the ground is churned, the men are pushing, and the whole army is waiting on them. A bombard was not deployed on a battlefield, it was delivered to a wall.

A present between princes

Meg was made at Mons in Hainaut in 1449 and given to James II of Scotland in 1457 by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. That is worth pausing on. In the middle of the fifteenth century a siege gun was the most impressive object a ruler could own, and giving one away was a statement about the giver as much as a favour to the receiver — a display of what Burgundy’s foundries could produce, wrapped in a dynastic courtesy.

What it could actually do

A stone shot of around 150 kilos, thrown a considerable distance and arriving with enough energy to break masonry that had been designed against rams and mining. High medieval walls were tall and comparatively thin, which is exactly the wrong shape when the threat changes from climbing to battering. Within a century the answer appeared — low, thick, angled bastions — and guns like this became obsolete as siege weapons while remaining terrifying as objects.

The king killed by his own enthusiasm

James II collected artillery and died of it: at the siege of Roxburgh in 1460 a bombard standing beside him burst and killed him. Meg herself lasted longer and ended the same way — she split in 1681 while firing a salute, and she is still at Edinburgh Castle, a weapon that spent far more of its life being admired than being fired.