486 
ON THE WOED “ GONNE ” OE (< GTJN.” 
(Set crossbows with levers, and brazen guns, and sboot shot enough 
to blind his squadrons. Set Mohammed at the mangonal; throw 
mill-stones and crooks and crows-feet, to frustrate each squadron of 
them). 
Guns and gynnes appear together in the “ Romaunt of the Rose ” 
(4175-6), a poem attributed to Chaucer who died in 1400 :— 
“ They dredde noon assaut 
Of gynne, gunne, nor skaffaud.” 
(They dreaded no assault by machine, gun or skaffolding). 
Of the many derivations of the word gonne, the most plausible 
seems to be that which deduces gonne from gonner , and takes gonner— 
gunner = guigneur = an aimer or layer, from guigner, to aim with one 
eye. All armes de jet must have been aimed in some way, however 
roughly. 
Was the word gonne used by the unknown author of (( Kyng 
Alisaunder ” in its old, or in its present sense ;—as signifying a machine 
which ejected projectiles by mechanical means, or a piece of ordnance 
in which gunpowder was used ? We are bound in reason to assign 
to it the meaning in which it was used by writers of the period at 
which the romance was written. Two questions, therefore, present 
themselves to us : first, when was the poem written; and secondly, 
what meaning was assigned to the word by contemporary writers ? 
Mr. Weber says the Bodleian MS. belongs to the 14th cent. This 
statement is no doubt substantially correct, but it is so vague as to be 
of little value to us. Can we not narrow the period ? Fortunately 
we can, thanks to an observation made by M. Paul Meyer, of the 
French Institute, in his “ Alexandre le Grand dans la literature fran- 
<?aise,” Paris, 1886; II., 64. When studying “ Kyng Alisaunder,” 
M. Meyer observed that one of the books made use of by the author 
was the “ Polychronicon ” of Ranulfus de Hygden, a monk of the 
abbey of St. Werburg in the diocese of Chester. This work comes 
down to the year 1867, in which its author died. “ Kyng Alisaunder,” 
therefore, must have been written after the year 1367, i.e ., in the 
latter half of the 14th cent. 
What was the meaning of the word gonne at this period ? In a 
note (under f Gunne ’) to his edition of the “ Promptorium Parvulorum,” 
an English-Latin Vocabulary of the year 1440, Mr. Albert Way quotes 
a passage from a MS. by Arderne, an English surgeon who lived 
throughout the second half of the 14th century, which shows beyond 
any doubt that he used the word gonne in our sense. This passage 
will presently be given at length. 
Gonne is also used in its modern sense in the passage quoted above from 
u Piers the Ploughman.” Satan is giving orders for the defence of 
Hell (against the Saviour), and the poet names all the different weapons 
that occurred to him. Used in its old sense, gonne would come under 
the head of mangonal } and would therefore have been quite superfluous. 
It will be observed, too, that the poet speaks of stones for the man¬ 
gonal and of shot for the gonne . I cannot at this moment recall any 
instance of the projectiles of the machines being called shot. The 
