It was in Henry VIII's time that the manufacture of cast-iron guns, for which England soon became famous, began in this country. One Ralph Hogge,[37] at Buxted, in Sussex, cast the first iron cannon. This is said to have been in 1543, and it is stated that the house in which this was done is still standing near the church of that village, and that it has the figure of a hog with the date 1581 carved over the door. There is another story to the effect that this early gunfounder's name was John Howe, and that there is the following distich, cut in stone, still extant in Buxted:-- "I, John Howe, and my man John, We two cast the first cannon". This invention may be said to have sealed the fate of the heavy breech-loading gun for some centuries, though the system remained in vogue for small pieces for another 200 years. A cast-iron or brass muzzle-loading gun could be made so much more easily, rapidly, and cheaply than a built-up wrought-iron breech-loader of the same calibre that with the growing demand for guns afloat there is little wonder that the former drove the more expensive weapon clean out of the field. It must be remembered, too, that the casting of bronze guns had already reached great perfection on the Continent. What is known as "Queen Elizabeth's pocket pistol" at Dover is a standing witness to this. It is supposed to have been cast at Utrecht, and to have been presented to Henry VIII by the Emperor Charles V in 1544. It is 24 feet long, and is a very fine piece of workmanship. Its bore is 58 calibres long--that is to say, it is fifty-eight times as long as its diameter, a proportion not very unlike that upon which some of our most modern weapons are designed. [Illustration: Early Breech-loading Cannon The first was an Armada weapon. This type of gun remained in use afloat well into the eighteenth century] But to return to our early naval cannon. As I have already pointed out, the casting of bronze guns in Germany and Flanders had reached a great pitch of perfection long before anything of the sort was made in England. Germany, in fact, may be said to have led in gunnery for a considerable period. The master gunners in most armies seem to have been Germans, and at the accession of Queen Elizabeth we were buying our powder from the German Hansa Company established in the Steel Yard in London, instead of making sufficient for ourselves. There were many brass guns afloat in Henry VIII's navy besides the wrought-iron breech-loaders. Some of fine workmanship were found in the wreck of the _Mary Rose_, as well as those of the latter class which have been already mentioned. As an indication of the cost and labour expended on such weapons, it may be instanced that a bronze gun cast in Germany in 1406 took from Whitsuntide to Michaelmas to finish, and required 52-1/2 hundredweight of copper and 3-1/2 hundredweight of tin. The metal cost 422 florins, while the master gun-founder received 86 florins for his pains.