The step from Valturio’s shell to common shell may seem to us now to have been a short and an easy one, yet it took nearly a century to make it; the obstacle that barred the way being neither the envelope nor the bursting charge, but the fuze. It is impossible to say exactly when, where, or by whom explosive shell were first employed. The want of them had been long felt everywhere, and numberless attempts to manufacture them were made. They may, therefore, have come into being independently in several countries about the same period; a supposition which receives considerable support from the conflicting claims which have been set up, quite honestly no doubt, to their first employment. We have sound evidence of the manufacture of large mortars and shell in England as early as 1543. In this year Bawd and Collet constructed mortars of 11″ to 19″ in calibre, with cast-iron shell “to be stuffed with fireworks or wildfire,” and a match (_i.e._ fuze) “that the firework might be set on fire for to breake in smal pieces, whereof the smallest piece hitting any man would kill or spoile him.”[582] Stow, to whom we owe these facts, began life as a tailor, and was not familiar with the intricacies of Artillery _matériel_; but it is sufficiently clear that he speaks here of two kinds of projectiles—incendiary shell filled with wildfire, and explosive shell filled with firework. Whether these shell were ever used and, if so, whether their action was successful, there is no evidence to show; but in 1588 took place the sieges of Bergen-op-Zoom and Wachtendonck at which explosive shell were used with much effect, for the first time according to the evidence we at present possess. Reyd, whose _Belgarum aliarumque Gentium Annales_ was published in 1600, tells us (lib. viii., p. 182) that during the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom “an Italian deserter to the Dutch devoted himself to the art, hitherto unknown, of making hollow balls of iron or stone, which, when filled with a certain composition and ignited, burst into innumerable fragments like grape stones.”[583] Father Strada, S.J., in his _Hist. de la_ _Guerre des Pays Bas, Brussels_, 1739, speaks as follows (iv. 415):— [Sidenote: On bat la Ville avec une nouvelle espèce de balles qu’on nomme Bombes.] “Il n’y avoit rien qui épouvantait davantage les assiégés (in Wachtendonck) que de certaines grosses boules de fonte creuses, et remplies de poudre et d’autres matiéres inextinguibles, qui étant poussées en l’air avec de gros mortiers, accabloient par leur pésanteur tous les lieux sur qui ils tombaient, et en même tems, comme le feu s’y prenoit par des buses qui y étoient attachées, ils rompoient en se crévant et embrasoient tout ce qui étoit à l’entour, sans que l’eau le put éteindre. [Sidenote: L’inventeur de ces sortes de boulets.]