Its primary responsibilities were 'to act as custodian of the lands, depots and forts required for the defence of the realm and its overseas possessions, and as the supplier of munitions and equipment to both the Army and the Navy'.

In its place, a distinct Office of Ordnance began to establish itself at the Tower; this body was responsible for firearms and artillery, and was staffed in the 1460s by a Master, a Clerk and a Yeoman.

The Master-General was head of both Establishments; on a practical level, the Lieutenant-General had day-to-day oversight of the military personnel and the Surveyor-General oversaw the civil departments.

Prior to the Union of the Crowns there was a Master of the Ordnance in the North (with oversight of Berwick, Newcastle and the nearby coastal forts) who had greater autonomy, though he was reliant on the London office for most supplies.

[14] As a precaution against the risk of igniting the Ordnance stores of gunpowder, it was equipped with modern flintlock fusils, rather than with the matchlock muskets borne by most other regular troops.

[16] In its formative years, the regiment accompanied the royal artillery train to Hounslow Heath each summer (where the Army remained encamped for several weeks);[15] there they guarded the guns, and the gunners and matrosses who had been drafted in to operate them.

Small arms, ammunition, armour and other equipment were stored elsewhere within the Tower precinct, a succession of Storehouses and Armouries having been built for such purposes since the fourteenth century.

One response was the establishment of a Royal Ordnance Depot at Weedon Bec, well away from the coast in Northamptonshire: a sizeable complex of storehouses and gunpowder magazines constructed along a waterway, it was connected to the Grand Union Canal to facilitate access and distribution.

Bermuda's, begun in the 1830s, remains largely intact behind the dockyard fortifications; its magazines and storehouses are arranged around a small pool, where boats would arrive by way of a tunnel through the ramparts to be loaded with ammunition.

These centres continued to grow, as the processes for refining and preserving gunpowder became more complicated and as new explosives began to be used, requiring their own storage and maintenance areas.

In 1850, Devonport's magazine depot was moved from Keyham to a new complex at Bull Point (where it was integrated with a nearby proofing and purifying facility) - this proved to be the last major construction project of the Board of Ordnance before its disestablishment.

Later, in 1834, the Board inherited (also from the Commissariat) the task of providing food and 'fuel' (namely coal and candles for use in barracks) for all homeland troops, as well as forage for cavalry regiments.

[9] Prior to the 18th century the Board had generally relied on private contracts for the provision of armaments: small arms often came from the Birmingham Gun Quarter, gunpowder from Faversham (also, later, from Waltham Abbey).

More expensive 'brass' (bronze) ordnance was produced on a smaller scale, by specialist foundries mostly in the London area (in Houndsditch, Vauxhall, Southwark, at The Foundery in Moorfields and elsewhere).

It later expanded into a large-scale production facility, specializing in: Gunpowder manufacture was mostly kept separate of other operations (though some took place at Woolwich in the early years, inherited from the Wardrobe's earlier activities at Greenwich Palace).

In the wake of the French Revolution, however, there was a spate of barrack building and the new post of Barrackmaster-General was established to oversee it; he was answerable not to the Board of Ordnance but to the Secretary at War.

In addition, the Artillerymen did on-site work at the Arsenal and at other Ordnance Board facilities, from preparing fuses and proving weapons to providing a guard.

[29] From the start, the Board (and its predecessor the Office) of Ordnance had had a department of military engineers and surveyors to build and improve harbours, forts and other fortifications.

The year after the demise of the Ordnance Board, the Sappers and Miners were fully amalgamated into the Royal Engineers, and at the same time the Corps moved from Woolwich to its present headquarters in Chatham.

By 1764, the institution had been renamed the Royal Military Academy, and in the words of the Survey of London, 'it became a uniquely enlightened establishment in which training comprehended writing, arithmetic, algebra, Latin, French, mathematics, fortification, together with the attack and defence of fortified places, gunnery, mining and laboratory-works [...] along with the gentlemanly skills of dancing and fencing'.

The Royal Military Repository was established, also within the Warren, in 1778 to provide practical, theoretical and historical training in gunnery, both for officers and other ranks; it too moved to Woolwich Common in the early 19th century.

[36] The principal offices and drawing room of the Survey were in the Tower of London; this not only accommodated surveyors and draughtsmen, but also functioned as a place where cadets (some as young as eleven or twelve) were trained in mathematics and draughtsmanship by leading practitioners.

In 1839 the Government gave its support to Major (later Sir) Edward Sabine for the establishment of four fixed magnetic and meteorological observatories in different parts of the world: one in Hobarton, one in Cape Town, one on Saint Helena, one in Toronto.

[45] These widely-reported failings led to the fall of the government in January 1855; its successor, under Lord Palmerston, wasted no time in embarking on a comprehensive reorganisation of military administration.

[2] In 1830, the number of Principal Officers of the Ordnance had been reduced to four by the abolition of the posts of Lieutenant-General and Clerk of the Deliveries; arguably, this exacerbated the problems that led to the board's demise.

Management of the British Army in the 1850s was chaotic, unwieldy and inefficient,[2] with several different officials and establishments claiming and exercising the Sovereign's authority in relation to military matters, and no means of co-ordinating their functions, orders and activities.

[47] Furthermore, following forty years of relative peace, the army and its support services found themselves ill-prepared and ill-equipped for war: for example, responsibility for providing food, fuel and forage to troops overseas fell to the Commissariat (a branch of the Treasury which, in the years since Waterloo, had developed into an administrative division, unpractised in warfare); while the Army's land transport capability, the Royal Waggon Train, had been abolished as a cost-cutting measure in 1832.

Starting with the advantage of a well-trained and excellent personnel and reliable and sufficient materiel, they had faced the terrible losses of the winter of 1854 with resource and energy, and had lost no time in correcting the blunder of the absence of siege transport.

Men and horses were quickly obtained and sent to the front, and, though every mistake in war demands an inevitable penalty, the military organisation did not fail under the heavy strain placed upon it.

It continued to receive, report on and experiment with inventions or improvements submitted to the Secretary of State relating to arms and to gunpowder until 1869, when it was split into ten sub-committees overseen by a Council of Ordnance (an arrangement which caused confusion, and which fell into abeyance the following year in all but name).