Stowe tells us--"About the year 1585, certain gallant, active, and
forward citizens, having had experience abroad and at home, voluntarily
exercised themselves, and trayned uppe others, for the readie use of
warre, so as within two years, there was almost three hundredth
marchants, and others of like quality, very sufficient and skillful to
traine and teache common souldiers, the managing of their peeces, pikes,
and holberds, to march countermarch, and ring; which said marchants, for
their owne perfection in military affairs and discipline, met every
Tuesday in the year, practising all usual points of warre, and every man
by turn bare orderly office, from the Corporall to the Captain: some of
them in the yeare 1588 had charge of men in the great Campo at Tilbury,
and were generally called _Captaines of the Artillery Garden_."
After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the association soon fell to
decay. The ground they used was at the north extremity of the city, nigh
Bishopsgate, and had before been occupied (says Ellis) by the
"fraternity of artillery," or gunners of the Tower.
From the company's register, the only book they saved in the civil wars,
it appears that the association was revived in the year 1611, by warrant
from the privy council; and the volunteers soon amounted to six
thousand. In the year 1640, they quitted their old field of discipline,
and entered upon a plot of ground in Bunhill-fields, leased to them by
the city.--(See Ellis's History of Shoreditch, and Nicholson's London
Artillerie.)
In the thirteenth year of the reign of Henry VII. "All the gardens which
had continued time out of mind without Moorgate: to wit, about and
beyond the lordship of Fensberry (Finsbury) were destroyed: and of them
was made plain field for archers to shoote in." This was the origin of
what is now called the Artillery Ground. P.T.W.
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