to that position. Master Gunner of England For some 250 years, an official of the Board of Ordnance held the office of "Master Gunner of England" (Master Gunner of Great Britain after 1707). Mention of the office first occurs around 1485–1506; appointments were made by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm, and were normally for life. Until its dissolution in 1855, the Board (or Office) of Ordnance provided and operated all artillery pieces used in the field of battle and in defensive garrisons. The Master Gunner of England served as the principal technical expert to the Crown in all aspects of artillery. He maintained a register of all certified gunners in the realm and oversaw their training, he maintained a list of all guns in forts, on board ships and elsewhere and monitored their state of readiness, and also had responsibilities for proving guns and gunpowder. Proof testing initially took place in an area known as the 'Artillery Garden' just north of the Tower of London (the Board's headquarters), and the Master Gunner of England was provided with an official residence nearby. As weapons were growing more powerful, however, it became desirable for them to be proved in less populated areas, and this (among other things) led to the Crown in the 1670s purchasing an area of open land known as the Warren, at Woolwich in Kent, on the south bank of the Thames (the area soon developed into a centre for arms manufacture, and was later renamed the Royal Arsenal). In 1685 the Artillery Garden was sold, and the Master Gunner himself moved to the Warren, where he was housed on site (along with the local Ordnance Storekeeper) in a Tudor mansion known as Tower Place. (Proof testing of guns and artillery continued at the Woolwich site until the mid-19th century, at which point this activity was (once again) moved to a larger and less populated area: to Shoeburyness on the Essex coast.) The last Master Gunner to reside at Woolwich (Col. George Brown) died in 1702; his successor (Capt. Thomas Silver) already held the office of Master Gunner of Whitehall & St James's Park, and as such he continued to reside in the Gun House by the Park. The office of Master Gunner of Great Britain became obsolescent after the Board of Ordnance established its Regiment of Artillery at Woolwich in 1716; in that year,