Weaponry

My story involves war, 17th century warfare. I went first to the internet to look up information about the two main weapons ordinary foot soldiers of the period would have used: the musket and the pike. The flintlock musket wasn't generally used before the 18th century, so my focus was on the matchlock. There are plenty of sites, British and American, with videos, which show how these muskets were fired. In addition to your weapon you carried your powder in a bandolier across your chest or in a powder horn attached to a belt at your waist. First, you would ram a powder charge into the long muzzle of your gun, followed by a lead bullet. Then you would tip a further pinch of powder into the firing plate and set it alight by a piece of cordlike material that you had to keep smouldering during a battle. Lots of things could go wrong. Use too much powder and your weapon could explode. If it rained you would not be able to keep your powder dry or your matchlight lit, so your musket would be useless as a firing mechanism. Reloading could be slow, although, all things being well, skilled musketeers could fire several rounds a minute. The most effective musketry came from the Scandinavian (Gustavus Adolphus) model of soldiers lined three deep, the first kneeling, the second stooping, the third standing. Alternatively rows of musketeers six deep would fire in sequence, thus allowing each row time to reprime their weapons.

Historic Scotland holds re-enactments of battles past throughout the year. One wet Sunday in August I went down to Dirleton Castle in East Lothian to meet a Scottish soldier of the period, who demonstrated the musket firing in a dark damp vault out of the unrelenting rain. I could never fire a musket at all, let alone with any degree of accuracy, but it was useful to handle one and to feel the weight. For men marching a great distance carrying one would have been quite a heavy load. The soldier said that often on campaign they would have waggons carrying the weapons. I also learned that in a battle the closer you came to your adversaries the order would be given to 'Club muskets', at which point you stopped attempting to fire it and would turn it round so that you could club your enemy with the butt, and as it was reinforced with brass you could deliver a pretty lethal dunt.

Now the pikes were something else, anything from 12 to 18 feet long with a heavy iron point at the end. In battle a pikeman's life expectancy was about 12 minutes, half of that being a matter of getting ready. You aimed your pike first at the eyes of your adversary. Failing that you aimed for the mouth. Otherwise you aimed for the nearest most vulnerable part of him you could find. Once the pike had penetrated you gave it a twist and a drag, leaving your unfortunate victim a bleeding eviscerated wreck. When groups of pikemen clashed together they struggled in a formation known as 'push of pike', a sort of porcupine scrum, till one side or the other gained the advantage.

Is any of this more destructive than a Kalashnikov or stepping on a land mine? It's certainly more up close and personal and soldiers died in their hundreds and thousands during the wars of the period. There was no heroic return of the coffins that we have seen in our recent and current wars, where every death is mourned as an individual tragedy. Often ordinary families did not know what happened to their menfolk who went a-soldiering. They just never came home, and after a time, years probably, would simply be presumed dead. In a kirk session record for Colinton Church in the early 1650s a couple were summoned to account for their adultery. It transpired that they were very attached and intended to marry if they could, but the woman's husband had fought at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and since he had left home nothing further had been heard from him or of him. It was not known whether he had been killed in the battle or captured and taken south as a prisoner and might be still alive, although it was unlikely.