There’s no smoke without fire - and no musket firing without gunpowder! Nathaniel Nye was

There’s no smoke without fire - and no musket firing without gunpowder! Nathaniel Nye was a master gunner from Worcester during the English Civil War and gave a recipe for black powder in 1647 of “four parts petre, one part Brimstone and one part Cole", which is four parts potassium nitrate (or saltpetre), one part sulphur and one part charcoal. Some powder used may have been manufactured by simply powdering the three components separately and then grinding them together in a mortar by hand. Larger scale production would be carried out in stamp mills where the powder mixture was pounded in wooden mortars by wooden-headed stamps, which were moved up and down by using horse or water power.
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Powder was always in short supply, especially for the King’s forces. In his capital of Oxford, two corn mills were converted to produce gunpowder (helping precipitate a food shortage) and by the summer of 1643 a munitions plant established in the Schools at Oxford was supplying a range of military stores including gunpowder, slow match, bullets, pikes and bills. However, production was limited: in July 32 barrels of gunpowder were delivered and the following month a further 15 but it was not until November that a further 50 barrels were supplied. As there were no natural deposits of saltpetre in the country, Oxford, like all other gunpowder mills in England, was dependent upon supplies manufactured by a slow and unpleasant process from human and animal waste. Despite the best efforts of the king’s ordnance officers at Oxford, production in the city was not sufficient to meet the demand for arms and ammunition.
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Karen Morris
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