Walter de Milemete: The Clerk Who Drew the Gun That Changed Everything

Walter de Milemete was an English scholar working in the early 14th century whose name would be entirely forgotten by history — except for one illustration. His 1326 treatise De nobilitatibus, sapientiis, et prudentiis regum ("On the Nobility, Wisdom, and Prudence of Kings") contains what is almost certainly the earliest known depiction of a European firearm.

A single marginal drawing on folio 70v shows a soldier touching off a vase-shaped cannon aimed at a castle wall, an arrow-shaped projectile already projecting from the barrel. That image sits at the starting line of a 700-year story that ends with every firearm on the planet.

The Manuscript

The manuscript itself is held at Christ Church, Oxford, catalogued as Christ Church MS 92, bound in red velvet. It is, by any measure, a remarkable object — one of the most elaborately illuminated manuscripts of its era, packed with heraldry, hybrid creatures, tournament scenes, and hunting imagery. The cannon drawing is easy to miss in all that visual noise. Historians have not missed it.

The sources are silent on Walter de Milemete's birth date, birthplace, and early biography. What is known is that he was in his early twenties when Queen Isabella of France commissioned him to write a treatise on kingship for her son, the young prince Edward — who would become King Edward III of England. The manuscript was completed at the end of 1326 and into the first months of what we now call 1327, according to the archive record of the treatise.

The commission itself tells you something about Milemete's standing. You did not get tapped by a queen to write an instructional text for a future king if you were nobody. He was educated, connected to the royal court, and operating in a world where manuscript production was a serious and expensive undertaking. Beyond that, the sources simply do not say.

Milemete's contribution to firearms history is indirect — he did not invent the cannon, and nothing in the sources suggests he had any technical knowledge of gunpowder weapons. What he did was document one, in ink, at the right moment.

The treatise was an ambitious political and moral text, and its decorative borders were produced at considerable expense and skill. According to the sources, those borders are crammed with:

• Heraldry and royal symbols
• Contorted hybrid creatures
• Combat scenes between men and beasts
• Hunting scenes and tournaments
• The pot-de-fer cannon illustration

The Cannon Illustration

The pot-de-fer cannon appears in the lower register of folio 70v, in that same border space — not in the main text, not as the subject of any written discussion, just tucked into the margin alongside knights and monsters.

The cannon depicted is vase-shaped or bottle-shaped — the "pot-de-fer" (iron pot) form that characterized this earliest generation of European firearms. A soldier, dressed as a knight, is shown applying what appears to be a red-hot metal touche to the touchhole. An arrow-shaped projectile protrudes from the muzzle, aimed at a fortification wall.

The cannon sits on what scholars describe as a flimsy trestle — almost certainly not how actual large cannon were mounted, but possibly an accurate representation of how small hand-cannons of the period were handled, lashed to a wooden shaft.

Technical Accuracy

Scholars cited in the sources note an important distinction: the large cannon in the Milemete illumination appears to have been drawn by an artist who was more familiar with small, bottle-shaped bronze hand-guns mounted on shafts roughly a meter long than with actual artillery-scale weapons. Larger early cannon were generally tubular, built up from iron strips and hoops — not the bulbous vase shape shown.

The artist may have simply scaled up the only firearms he had actually seen. That kind of creative extrapolation tells you something about how rare and strange these weapons still were in 1326 England.

Firing mechanism and cannon operation as depicted in the Milemete manuscript

Other Military Innovations

The manuscript also contains another early weapons document that has received less attention than it deserves. According to Wikipedia's entry on Milemete, the treatise depicts a group of knights flying a firebomb kite — a black-powder-filled incendiary device — over a city wall. That puts the manuscript in conversation with the full range of early gunpowder warfare, not just artillery.

Historical Context

Milemete did not cause the cannon. By the time his manuscript was completed, gunpowder weapons were already spreading fast across Europe. Per the Christ Church source, cannon use is first documented in France in 1324, in Florence in 1326, and in England in 1327 — the same year the Milemete manuscript was finished.

Timeline showing the rapid spread of cannon technology across Europe

German troops and the Moors of Granada were using them in attacks by 1331. The technology was not waiting on any one manuscript.

What the Milemete drawing does is give historians a fixed point. In the archaeology of ideas, you need artifacts. Written descriptions of early cannon exist, but a visual record is different — it shows you what someone who had seen these weapons, or heard firsthand accounts of them, understood them to look like. The illustration on folio 70v is that artifact for European firearms.

The weapons depicted at the 1331 siege of Cividale, where German knights used firearms against the town, were likely very similar to the pot-de-fer shown in Milemete's treatise, according to the Wikipedia source. That's a five-year gap between the drawing and a documented military engagement — which means the illustration was not speculative. It was capturing something that was already real and already spreading.

By the 1350s, weapons that had recently been "viewed with great astonishment and admiration" had become "as common and familiar as any other kind of arms." — Petrarch

Technical Challenges

The technical problems visible even in the drawing were real and lethal. Early cannon were as dangerous to their operators as to any target. Casting iron was still imperfect in this period. The following manufacturing flaws caused early cannon to explode with regularity:

• Air pockets and fractures in cast iron
• Imperfect welding in wrought-iron cannon
• Inconsistent gunpowder strength
• Projectiles that didn't fit the bore reliably
• Inadequate recoil management until 17th century

The Christ Church source notes the most famous casualty: in 1460, a cannon employed at the siege of Roxburgh Castle exploded and killed King James II of Scotland, who had been inspecting his artillery at close range. Recoil itself wasn't adequately solved until the 17th century. The knight in Milemete's illustration, holding a lit touche to a vase-shaped cannon pointed at a castle, was not in a safe profession.

Firing Mechanisms

The drawing also documents the firing mechanism of the period. According to the warfare.ueuo.com source analyzing the manuscript, all firearms of this era were almost certainly fired by a red-hot metal touche — a simple heated rod applied to the touchhole. The Milemete illustration shows exactly this. That detail matters because it places the image firmly in the technology of its moment, before the development of the matchlock, wheellock, or any subsequent ignition system that would define later firearms history.

What happened to Walter de Milemete after 1326 is not addressed in the available sources. His birth and death dates are unknown. The Wikipedia stub on him categorizes him under "Year of death unknown" and "Year of birth unknown." He wrote the treatise, presented it to the young prince who became Edward III, and then effectively vanishes from the historical record that has been compiled here.

Scholarly Recognition

The manuscript he produced did not vanish. Christ Church MS 92 has been in continuous scholarly interest, described in the sources as "one of the most beautifully illuminated manuscripts in the world and one in the highest demand by specialists." The Milemete treatise was edited and published in a scholarly edition by Montague Rhodes James in 1913, bringing it to a wider academic audience. It has been cited in works on military history, the history of artillery, medieval arms and armor, and the iconography of kingship.

Scholars have noted that the cannon illustration, as historically significant as it is, has sometimes distracted from the manuscript's other content. The warfare.ueuo.com source observes that the cannon drawing "has tended to divert attention away from other interesting pieces of armour and weaponry in this manuscript" — including transitional helmet forms, early throat-covering armor, and detailed depictions of mail and plate combinations that are themselves important documents of 14th-century military equipment.

Academic Citations

David Nicolle referenced the manuscript as figure 223 in Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era, 1050-1350, treating it as a primary source for the equipment of the period. Anne Curry, in The Hundred Years' War, noted that another drawing — from a book of instruction for Edward III — "may predate slightly" Milemete's illustration, which introduces a small caveat to the "earliest known" designation. That competing claim is worth acknowledging. The Milemete illustration is the most widely cited and reproduced candidate for the earliest European firearm depiction, but the historical record is not entirely closed on the question.

Walter de Milemete almost certainly did not know he was drawing history. He was a court scholar producing a lavish gift manuscript for a future king, and someone — either Milemete himself or the illuminator he worked with — stuck a cannon in the margin the way you might doodle something interesting you'd recently heard about. That casualness is actually what makes it credible as a document. Nobody in 1326 knew they were at the beginning of something. They were just watching a new and terrifying toy spread across Europe faster than anyone expected.

What I find worth thinking about is the gap between what the artist drew and what the technology actually was. He drew a vase-shaped pot-de-fer scaled up to artillery size, sitting on a trestle that would never hold it, because the small hand-cannons he'd seen were bottle-shaped and mounted on poles. He did his best with incomplete information.

The Milemete illustration is the first instance of someone trying to understand firearms technology that's moving faster than their frame of reference, but it is not the last.

That's the story of every generation trying to understand firearms technology that's moving faster than their frame of reference. The Milemete illustration is the first instance of it in the Western record, but it is not the last.

The fact that this drawing exists at all — that someone thought to put a cannon in the margins of a treatise on kingship in 1326 — tells you that the people of that moment understood, even if vaguely, that this technology was going to matter to kings. They were right about that.

• https://www.cabinet.ox.ac.uk/firearms-earliest-european-image-1326-7
• https://warfare.ueuo.com/14/Milemete-Christ_Church_Oxford_MS_92-f70v-lower-lg.htm
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_de_Milemete
• https://www.researchgate.net/figure/First-known-western-illustration-of-a-firearm-in-Walter-de-Milemetes-1326-treatise-De_fig1_372434023

Last Updated: February 27, 2026