Note 216 — 167 SIR ANDREW BARTON

These beams, Henry Hunt intimates in 32, would be dangerous to boarders, which is conceivable should they chance to hit the right heads; but they are evidently meant to be dropped on the adversary’s vessel, and this by a process which is not distinctly described, and was, I fear, not perfectly grasped by the minstrel. The veriest landsman must think that a magazine of heavy timbers stowed in either castle (there is an upper and a lower in the pictures of Henry VII’s Great Harry and of Henry VIII’s Grace de Dieu, and the lower is well up the mast) would not be favorable to sailing; but this is a minor difficulty. Stones and fire-balls were sometimes thrown from the topcastle, which, properly, should be a stage at the very tip of the mast, as we find it in old prints: see Nicolas’s History of the Royal Navy, II, 170. Stones and iron bars thrown from the high decks of Spanish ships did much harm to the English in a fight in 1372: Froissart, Buchon, V, 276. An intelligible way of operating the ancient “dolphins,” heavy masses of metal dropped from the end of a yard, is suggested in Graser, De veterum re navali, 1864, p. 82 f.