485 
ON THE WORD “GONNE” OR “GUN.” 
BY 
LIEUT.-COLONEL H. W. L. HIME. 
ACCORDING to Mr. H. W. Weber, the editor of “ Metrical 
Romances,” a collection published at Edinburgh in 1810, “ Kyng 
Alisaunder ” is “ one of the most ancient of the English romances.” 
The oldest MS. of it is in the Bodleian Library, and “it is evidently 
of the 14th century.” In this poem we find the following lines 
(3267-8) :— 
“ Theo othre into the wallis stygh, 
And the kynges men with gonnes sleygh.” 
(The others mounted upon the walls and slew the king's men with 
guns). 
On these lines Mr. Douce, formely keeper of the MSS. in the 
British Museum, remarks (“Met. Romances,” III., 307) “we have 
here, perhaps, the earliest use of the word gonne that can be adduced.” 
Gonne, he continues, certainly signified “a machine for expelling balls 
of some kind, or pellets as Chaucer called them ; but it by no means fol¬ 
lows that gunpowder was” necessarily “used for that purpose .... 
A gonne might have originally been a machine of the catapult kind ; 
and on the adoption of powder, having changed its form, might still 
retain its name, whilst the explosive would take the name of gun- 
powder.” That gonne completely changed its meaning at some in¬ 
definite period, had been distinctly asserted two centuries earlier by 
Selden (“ Table-talk,” p. 107) ; and the following passage from the 
romance of “ Sir Tryamoure,” written in the reign of Ed. II. (1307-27), 
proves that it was originally applied to machines of the catapult species. 
King Aragus, we are told :— 
“ . . . ordeyned hym ful well 
With gonnes, and grete stones rounde 
Were throwen downe to the grounde (955).” 
“ I once ” (goes on Mr. Douce) “ thought gonne to be a contraction of 
engine until I found Chaucer using the words ginne and gonne together. 
Somner has plausibly enough derived it from mangona, or mangonal 
which was a machine for throwing stones; but this is objectionable, in¬ 
asmuch as both machines were in use at the same period.” We find 
guns and mangonals mentioned together in Langland's “ Vision of 
Piers the Ploughman,” a poem begun in 1362 and revised by its 
author in 1377 (Passus, XXI) :— 
“ Set bows of brake • and brazen guns, 
And shoot out shot enough © His sheltrums to blend. 
Set Mahound at the mangonal ©and milk-stones throw, 
With crooks and with calthrops • a-cloy we them each one ! ” 
9. VOL. XXV. 
