Armed Rural Folkof the royal court and in Burma at least was very vigorously enforced.
Cannon from various sources and times were hoarded in the royal arse-
nal and brought out for major campaigns. Reportedly this was the case
in Burma for the best examples of small arms as well,^42 but it may also
be the case that the availability of older, less effective small arms was
widespread.^43 Another feature of larger scale warfare or rather a feature
that was absent from local, rural warfare was cavalry tactics. Rural set-
tlements did have mounted fighters or warriors who moved about on
horses and dismounted to fight, but not cavalry. Cavalry would denote
a royal force. Native horses, really ponies, were too small to really be of
much use other than affording relatively slow, long-distance travel. This
was where the Burmese court had an advantage because it could afford
to import foreign mounts that were relatively more agile and larger, just
as the invading Indian Army in the 1886–1889 conflict could bring in the
cavalry on larger mounts as well. The royal court also had special needs
for which these additional military resources were essential. Campaigns
against foreign courts required resources so large that only a royal court
could afford them and they were fought over issues about which only a
royal court could have cared. With the exception of Alaunghpaya, even
the most powerful of local, rural warlords would not have considered
(or if crazy enough to want to do it, been powerful enough to try) be-
sieging Ayudhya on the other side of the mountains to the east to take
the Siamese king’s white elephants. And Alaunghpaya did not consider
taking up this task until he had reunified the Irrawaddy Valley and made
himself King of Burma first. And, in response to such attacks, Ayudhya
required special military resources to defend it as well. As one scholar
- In the late eighteenth century, the Burmese royal arsenal held some twenty thou-
sand firelocks in its magazines that were only released in wartime. Michael Symes,
Account of an Embassy to Ava (London: John Murray, 1800): 319. - Symes, who saw much of Burma during his 1795 embassy to the royal court,
provides anecdotal evidence of the possession of shotguns being fairly widespread
in Burmese society at the end of the eighteenth century, the limitation being avail-
ability of shot, which the average Burman did not know how to make, rather than
the availability of shotguns per se. As he observes: “The Burmans, even the com-
mon boatmen, are fond of fowling pieces to a degree of childish delight; sooner
than not shoot they will fire at sparrows. I never was more importuned than by
them for shot, which they do not know how to fabricate.” Ibid., 236.