Across the medieval period, the administrations of Church and State were heavily intertwined, both in terms of procedure and personnel. Consequently, records relating to the English Church survive not only in the archives of the various dioceses and archdioceses, usually in county or regional archives, but also throughout the collections at TNA, the successor to the Public Record Office and archive for records created by and for the English (and later British) royal governments from the eleventh century onwards. Many of these appear in series already well known to historians: the vast rolls of Chancery contain thousands of examples of activities pertaining to church administration, from royal presentations to benefices, to the granting and collection of clerical taxation, while the Ancient Petitions (SC 8) and Ancient Correspondence (SC 1) are littered with requests and letters from clerics of all ranks. Many of these documents stemmed from, or led to, correspondence also recorded in the episcopal and archiepiscopal registers, often allowing events to be viewed from both sides, while others can provide additional stages in administrative processes, or record business never included in even the fullest and most detailed episcopal register or archive.

But there are also certain series within TNA's collections devoted specifically to the direct administrative interaction between Church and State. One such series, which has attracted relatively little attention from historians, is the Significations of Excommunication (C 85), which record attempts by the Church to employ the royal administrative machinery against its recalcitrant members. The process of excommunication was long-established, and its use lies well beyond the scope of this paper. It remained the ultimate sanction available to the medieval religious authorities, as it effectively severed individuals or groups from all contact with their church and, at least in theory, wider society. Not only could excommunicates no longer attend church services, but they could not be buried in holy ground, could not take part in other church or social activities, and even their own families were expected to shun them. The reasons behind an excommunication could be many and varied, but for all its power and influence, the medieval Church's ability to enforce its sanctions was limited.

The summer of 1812 was wet and cool, bringing some relief to the small staff of the Hydrographical Office on the often-stifling top floor of the Admiralty Building in Whitehall. Every space in the passageways was taken up by the boxes which they laboured to fill with charts destined for ships of the war-time Royal Navy deployed from the Baltic to the Cape of Good Hope, and from the East Indies to an unwelcome new theatre on the borders of the USA. On Thursday 1 July, during a lull in superintendence of this work, the Hydrographer returned to his desk to consider a letter and a manuscript survey, one of over 30 which were rendered from the fleet during the year.

Captain Thomas Hurd examined these eagerly as they were passed up by the clerks to the Board of Admiralty. It was generally a mixed bag. Many were swift reconnaissance surveys made in the heat of operations, sometimes recorded as a sketch in the remark books which captains and masters were required to render. They might supply a few soundings which could be dropped into smaller-scale published charts. This inspection was, however, the only opening for Hurd to spot talent for the vision which he would represent repeatedly to the Board and eventually bring to fruition: ‘ an establishment […] of officers and scientific young men […] capable of making nautical surveys in whatever part of the world their future services may happen to place them in’.

Hurd's vision had been shaped by his own experience in the front line. His reputation in the Admiralty had been made by a remarkable survey which enabled the creation of a naval base in the hazardous waters of the Bermudan archipelago. Consequently, he had been the immediate choice to undertake an examination of another complex of islets and rocks in the approaches to the French naval base of Brest following the loss of a 74-gun ship of the Royal Navy's Inshore Squadron in 1804.

When he came to reiterate his vision in 1814, he would stress ‘the great deficiency of our nautical knowledge in almost every part of the world, but more particularly on the coastline of our own Dominions’.

The coastal landscape of Alderney is dominated by the relics of its former strategic maritime prominence – a prominence based on British naval planning of the mid-Victorian period which would transform the island over a critically brief interval of thirty years in the mid-nineteenth century. However, it would be misleading to suggest that this was the first and last occasion on which the Channel Islands archipelago would find itself in the front line of international conflict.

Islands in the front line

The idea that the Channel Islands – as we now call them – would provide an advanced station for English and British warships and a base from which to observe and intercept enemy shipping, may be truly said to have originated as far back as the thirteenth century after King John's loss of Normandy, but more recently – during the War of American Independence – the British government would support modest plans to improve the coast defences of the islands, and build major works at Fort Regent in Jersey and Fort George in Guernsey. At this time, and following French commitment to develop the port of Cherbourg, more serious attention would be given to the provision of improved harbour facilities in the three principal islands in order to secure military support and naval protection in time of war. The threat from France was real and ever-present: for instance, an attack by a French squadron on Elizabeth Castle and a foiled coup de main in St Ouen's Bay, Jersey, in 1779; the attempt by three French privateers to seize Alderney in 1780, and the defeat of Baron de Rullecourt's forces at the Battle of Jersey after a successful landing in 1781.

Fears of imminent attacks on the Channel Islands during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were given renewed impetus after Napoleon's visit to Cherbourg in April 1803, relaunching Vauban's project of over a century earlier to create un port militaire, and appointing Joseph Cachin as Directeur des travaux maritimes. Writing to Lord Pelham, Lieutenant- Governor General Sir John Doyle urged: ‘Your Lordship knows we are the advanced posts and that the fate of these islands would have an influence upon publick opinion.’

The waters around the Channel Islands and the Gulf of Saint-Malo are known to be dangerous. Treacherous rocks that scatter the sea and strong tides produce rapid currents.

The weather is frequently difficult, and fogs are not unusual. The need for accurate charts drawn at an appropriate scale and precise nautical instructions appears then to be quite obvious. The French hydrographic service, known during the major part of the nineteenth century as the Dépôt des cartes et plans de la Marine before changing in 1886 to the Service hydrographique, made efforts to provide seamen with a collection of documents of great quality.

It is interesting to explore further the sequence of the different surveys and to replace them in their political and economic context whenever possible. It creates a rather contradictory image. The maritime activities whose prosperity was the final aim of these efforts were languishing during the nineteenth century. The harbours of the western coasts of Cotentin Peninsula and northern Brittany were lagging behind, unable to make the necessary investments in order to attract freight. Saint-Malo missed out on industrial development and never regained its former grandeur from the previous century. The port collapsed and did not even rank among the first twenty in France. Granville, despite some improvements and the construction of two wet docks in 1856 and 1873, never emerged and remained a fishing port. Few coasters exploited the sea routes between Cherbourg and the harbours of Brittany. Moreover, the trade that was mostly made up of agricultural products was in the hands of British shipowners and businessmen. They enjoyed preferential terms and prospered on the commercial relationships between France and the Channel Islands.

There were few shipowners in this area, and they concentrated mostly on high-sea fishing on the Grand Banks and in Iceland. This activity was more rewarding and attracted the major part of the available capital and able seamen. The port of Granville held 50 fishing boats, Saint-Malo nearly 70 and Saint- Brieuc 60 in 1866. The activity employed at that time almost 7,500 people. Coastal fishing was by comparison fruitless. Every year the statistics bulletin3 described the fishing practices as a routine and regretted that fishermen lacked a spirit of enterprise. With limited access to capital, they could only have small day boats and dredgers.

The phrase ‘fire no guns, shed no tears’ is part of the chorus from a song called ‘Barret's Privateers’, which tells the story of a man who signed up to be part of the crew of a British privateer called The Antelope during the American War of Independence. The protagonist of the song deems himself deceived by the promise that the crew would have to fire no guns and shed no tears and that American ships would simply surrender themselves to The Antelope as prizes. As a whole the song evokes a darkly romanticized version of eighteenth-century privateers as poor sailors duped into joining leaky old ships with bad-tempered captains. These privateers would then ply the seas with abandon looking for gold-laden prizes with the blessing and non-intervention of the British state. It is the second part of this romantic outlook on privateers that this chapter seeks to address. Far from being a benign overseer of legalised piracy, British wartime governments in the eighteenth century were deeply concerned about the effect that the actions of privateers could have on British maritime strategy. Privateering as a concept and as a reality was deeply embedded in British strategic thinking and in British diplomacy with neutral nations. Far from operating as a remote arm of the British wartime mercantile sector, privateers played a key role in the delicate negotiations over neutral rights. This was certainly the case during the first four years of the Seven Years War when Anglo-Dutch relations were focused on Dutch neutral rights and the taking of Dutch prizes by British privateers.

From a strategic perspective, the ideal role for privateers in the first few years of the Seven Years War was to destroy French seaborne trade without needlessly molesting or antagonizing neutral shipping. This ideal role was consistently complicated by two factors. Firstly, neutral nations like the Dutch Republic often carried French goods in their ships in order to profit from wartime relaxations of mercantilist-inspired trade restrictions. Secondly, privateers were hard to control at sea and often captured neutral vessels indiscriminately. Much political effort was therefore expended in trying to contain the political damage done by privateers and in trying to get neutral nations to both remain neutral and to stop carrying French trade.

When the idea for an international maritime history symposium in the Channel Islands was first mooted some twenty years ago, it received the enthusiastic support of the late Marc Michel. It was fitting, therefore, that he should live to see his dream realised in Alderney in September 2019, and that he should play such a prominent role in the organisation and recording of the event which proved to be such a popular and resounding success. All of this was made possible by the foresight and generosity of Mary Euler, who set up The Henry Euler Memorial Trust in commemoration of her husband, Henry Euler, a direct descendant of the celebrated Swiss mathematician, who had served as an RNVR torpedo officer in HMS Illustrious from her date of commission, through the Mediterranean campaign and including the raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto.

As the Trust's patron, His Excellency, the Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey, Vice Admiral Sir Ian Corder, KCB stated in his opening address at the 2019 Symposium that one of the Trust's principal objectives is ‘to inform, develop and maintain the interest of the inhabitants of Alderney and others in the maritime heritage of Alderney’. By placing Alderney in its Channel Islands’ setting, thence within the wider context of Anglo-French relations between 1689 and 1918, the Symposium enabled leading British and French historians to complement existing scholarship which has tended to treat the Islands as a place apart. Their strategic location was of immense importance in Anglo- French relations – the Islands shaped national strategies in war and peace, and strategy shaped the Islands in equal measure.

The Trustees have expressed their warm gratitude for the unreserved support received from Andrew Lambert and Jean de Préneuf in the organisation of the 2019 Symposium, and for the agreements reached with their respective academic institutions – King's College London, the Université de Lille and the Service Historique de la Défense, Paris. The close working relationship thus established, and the outstanding contributions of all those speakers who participated in the 2019 Symposium, have laid a solid foundation for future cooperation and research into the maritime history of Alderney and the Channel Islands throughout all periods of history.

In the mid-nineteenth century the complex relationship between Britain, France and the Channel Islands acquired a new urgency, as the British state launched a massive project to create an artificial harbour on the Island of Alderney, the lynchpin of a system of maritime security that would ensure the safety of British merchant shipping in wartime, countering the threat posed by the rapidly advancing naval base and fortified harbour at Cherbourg. In the event of war Braye Harbour would be critical to Britain's global system, the physical manifestation of a distinctive maritime culture and the strategic methods of a unique seapower state. Together with a second new harbour at Portland, 60 miles north, it would enable the Royal Navy to control the western entrance of the English Channel, isolating Cherbourg from the French naval bases on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. This massive, costly project, the product of an era of heightened Anglo-French tension, exploited the latest engineering expertise to address the strategic problem of commanding the seas with short-ranged steam ships. But Braye was only the latest in a long line of developments that linked the Channel Islands into the British strategic system and, like those that had gone before, it changed the relationship between Britain, France and the Islands, and the Islands themselves. How should we understand the interlocking relationships between great powers and small islands, terrestrial identities and maritime realities? The conflicted history of Braye Harbour suggests an ambitious cultural reading could offer a way forward.

Early in 1862, as the British House of Commons prepared to decide whether to continue funding the massive naval harbour project at Braye, geologist, mining engineer and author David Thomas Ansted (1814−80) elevated a humdrum issue of expenditure and engineering onto an altogether higher plane. Ansted presented the harbour and fortress complex as the key to naval dominion, and a totem of national culture. His article ‘England's “Broad Stone of Honour”’ linked the great Prussian fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, looming over Coblenz at the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine, the key to the defence of Germany, with the new bastion that secured command of the English Channel: they were the representative bulwarks of their respective countries.

Having discussed the ownership of this and other Firework Books, and their possible use, we will now focus on the physical characteristics, structure, and content of Royal Armouries manuscript I.34, in order to place it among other manuscripts of this genre. It is clear that I.34 is a highly distinct manuscript but serves as an ideal platform to explore some of the issues shared by many of the others.

Codicology and Palaeography

I.34 is described in the Armouries’ catalogue as a ‘“Firework Book”, an illumi-nated manuscript showing the manufacture and use of gunpowder’.

The catalogue gives the date as ‘mid-fifteenth century’, and suggests that the geographic range is ‘South German’. The entry is limited to four pages, in which the content of the text is scarcely mentioned. Instead, the main focus of the catalogue entry is on individual descriptions of the illustrations.

In 1996, Sarah Barter Bailey, at that time librarian of the Royal Armouries, produced the first scholarly article to address I.34 directly, but – similar to the catalogue entry which is also accredited to her – she devoted only five pages to the text, concentrating mainly on its physical characteristics, with the main focus of her article being her interpretation of the illustrations, dismissing the text as a ‘version of the standard Firework Book text’.

In total, the manuscript contains 140 folios, in 12 gatherings, each of six sheets folded in half, numbered straight through at the top of each page from fol. i to fol. cxliii, the front flyleaf being unnumbered. Barter Bailey states that ‘ leaves, which should have been numbered lxxxxvij, lxxxviij, cvj and cxlj were torn out after the foliation was inserted’, as described in the catalogue. The paper has two different watermarks. The removal of single leaves and the two different watermarks could indicate that this was not a particularly high-status book. It could have been ruled and numbered close to the time of its production, using up already produced paper in a maker's workshop. This situation could also explain the removal of the leaves, cutting out single pages either because they were of poor quality, or because they were needed for other purposes. There is certainly no evidence that any of the text is missing; none of the prior folios are cut off in mid-sentence.

‘William Porlond's Minute Book, Being an Account and Memorandum Book, compiled by William Porlond, clerk to the Brewers’ Company, 1418–40’, is a remarkable book and a rare survival. It was compiled as the personal memorandum book of the clerk to the Worshipful Company of Brewers of London, for the years 1418–40, with a gap in the records from 1425 to 1429. It survives not as an official set of minutes and memoranda but as an informal record of matters of concern to the Brewers, gathered by their clerk, William Porlond, in his own working volume of draft materials. On the very first page he recorded, in Norman French, his appointment as clerk to the mistery and fraternity of Brewers of London on 14 February 1418 and that he, the said William, ‘ordained this book, to have cognizance of all the things done in the mistery and fraternity abovesaid, for all the time that the said William should be clerk of the said Brewers’ [1]. This book, with its collection of more personal proceedings, affords a valuable insight into the clerk's ways of working and into those matters that he considered significant.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

William Porlond created his memorandum book during his time as clerk to the craft and fraternity of Brewers, 1418–40. No books compiled by his predecessor, John Morey, or Porlond's successor, Robert Coket, have survived. Indeed, no further Brewers’ clerks can be identified from Coket, who began his term in 1440, until John Bowgham in 1554. Porlond's book was rescued from the Great Fire of London in 1666, over 200 years after its compilation, and it also survived the destruction of the seventeenth-century Brewers’ Hall in December 1940. One of Porlond's successors, William Vines, the Brewers’ clerk 1824–48, clearly worked through the whole manuscript identifying damaged and missing pages [92] [165]. During 1830–1, the antiquary W. H. Black compiled an unpublished manuscript volume, The Brewers’ Company Extract of Minutes 1418–40, in which he commented briefly on the contents of the Brewers’ Book.

Rainer Leng describes the Firework Book as a ‘recipe collection of chemical knowledge’. He mentions this in order to distinguish it from related manuals, such as the Büchsenmeister Books, all of which developed their own momentum in relation to distribution, use, and functionality. Berg and Friedrich are more specific, describing it as an ‘instruction for making saltpetre, gunpowder, and various incendiary devices’. They also single out the Firework Book as the first extant publication which collates practical knowledge related to a technical profession written in German, or any other vernacular European language – even if it was not the earliest it would have been among very few others. This chapter shows that it is far more than a ‘collection of chemical knowledge’. Following on from the edition and translation just provided, it gives a detailed analysis of the content of the Firework Book. Analysis will begin with the structure of the Firework Book and its key sections, discussing in particular the Master Gunner's Questions, the master gunner's core attributes, key terminology, and then in more detail the bulk of the Firework Book's recipes.

The majority of the Firework Book text consists of a wide range of recipes and notes, with seemingly little discernible structure and some repetition. This range implies that the book was not meant to be read from cover to cover, but instead to be used in its individual sections, and that it was helpful to have more information provided, even if it was repeating an earlier section. It is less clear, however, why their order changes from copy to copy.

Gerhard Kramer (1996 and 2001) is very specific in his analysis of the Firework Book composition, distinguishing between what he calls earlier and later sections, which he refers to ‘strata’. In total, Kramer subdivides the Firework Book into three stages of writing:

• 1 Produced around 1380: The Master Gunner's Questions and the core components on the ingredients and the powder (in I.34 this equates to fols 2r–20r, and fols 20v–25v, fols 29r–32v, and fol. 34r).

• 2 Produced around 1400: The ‘Preamble’, the ‘invention’ of gunpowder, and the gunner attributes, and the epilogue (in I.34 this equates to fols 1r–2r, fols 20r–20v, fols 25v–29r and fols 32v–34r).