| From Hewitt’s Arms and Armour. |
| Fig. 11.—Meeting of Henry VIII. and Maximilian. |
| Fig. 12—Suit by Jacob Topf, nearly complete, the gorget does not belong to it. Below is the placcate. |
Before the end of the 16th century the full suit of war harness is an antique survival. Long boots take the place of greaves and steel shoes, and early in the 16th century the military pedants are heard to bewail the common laying aside of other pieces. The mounted cavalier—cuirassier or pistolier—might take the field, even as late as the Great Rebellion, armed at all points save the backs of the thighs and the legs below the knee; but a combed and brimmed cap, breast and back plate and tassets equipped the pikeman, and the musketeer would march without any metal on him save his headpiece, for it was soon found that heavily armed musketeers, after a long trudge through summer dust or winter mud, were readier to rest than to shoot. Everywhere there was revolt against the burden of plates, and as early as 1593 Sir Richard Hawkins found that his adventurers would not use even the light corslets provided by him, “esteeming a pot of wine a better defence.” Gervase Markham, in his Souldier’s Accidence of 1645, asks that at least the captain of cuirassiers should be armed “at all peeces, cap a pee,” but he would have found few such captains, and Markham is a great praiser of noble old custom. The famous figure of a pikeman of 1668 (fig. 13) in Elton’s Art Military has steel cap, corslet and tassets, but he stands for a fashion dead or dying. The last noteworthy helmet was what is now termed the lobster-tail helmet, a headpiece with round top, flat brim before, a broad articulated brim behind, cheek-pieces hanging by straps and a grate of upright bars to cover the face, some having in place of the grate a movable nose-guard to be raised or lowered at will. The close resemblance of this helmet to that worn by the Japanese, with whom the Dutch were then trading, is worth remark, although each of the two pieces seems to have had its separate origin. Thus, save for a steel cap here and a corslet there, especially to be found amongst the guards of sovereigns who must cling to something of antique tradition, armour departs out of the civilized world.
| Fig. 13—Pikeman. |
| From The Compleat Body of the Art Military, by Lieut. Col. Elton (1668). |
When in the reign of Queen Victoria her mounted guardsmen were given back their breast and back plates, the last piece of body armour had been the tiny gilt crescent worn at the throat by officers of foot, which crescent was the Survival of armour. shrunken symbol of that great gorget of plate that came in with the 13th century. The shining plates of the Guards are parade pieces only, but a curious revival of an old defence was carried by English cavalry in the field at the end of the 19th century, when small gussets of chain mail were attached to the shoulders of certain cavalrymen as a defence against sword cuts. Through all the age of modern warfare inventors have pressed the claims of various bullet-proof breastplates, but where they have been effective against rifle fire their weight has made them too heavy an addition to the soldier’s burden. (See, however, [Armour Plates], ad fin.) Last of all we may reckon those secret coats of mail which are said to be worn on occasion by modern rulers in dread of the assassin. The London detective department has such coats of fence in its armoury; and on the other side it may be remembered that the Kelly gang of bushrangers, driven to bay, were found to have forged suits of plate for themselves out of sheets of boiler-iron.
Ancient arms and armour are now eagerly sought by European and American collectors, and high prices are paid down for every noteworthy piece. The supply is assisted by the efforts of many forgers of false pieces, the most cunning of whom bring Collections. all archaeological skill to their aid, and few great national or private collections are free from some example of this industry. For the genuine pieces competition runs high. Suits of plate of the earliest period may be sought in vain, and the greatest collectors may hardly hope for such a panoply of the late Gothic period as that which is the ornament of the Wallace collection. Even this famous harness is not wholly free from suspicion of restoration. Armour of the latter half of the 16th century, however, often appears in the sale-rooms and is found in many private collections, although the “ancestral armour” which decorates so many ancient halls in England is generally the plates and pots which served the pikemen of the 17th-century militia.
It is not hard to understand this scarcity of ancient pieces. In the first place it must be remembered that the fully armed man was always a rare figure in war, and only the rich could engage in the costly follies of the later tournaments. The novelists have done much to encourage the belief that most men of gentle rank rode to the wars lance in hand, locked up in full harness of plate; but the country gentleman, serving as light horseman or mounted archer, would hold himself well armed had he a quilted jack or brigandine and a basinet or salet. Men armed cap a pee crowd the illuminations of chronicle books, the artists having the same tastes as the boy who decorates his Latin grammar with battles which are hand-to-hand conflicts of epauletted generals. Monuments and brasses also show these fully armed men, but here again we must recognize the tendency which made the last of the cheap miniaturists endow their clients lavishly with heavy watch-chains and rings. As late as the 18th century the portrait painters drew their military or naval sitters in the breastplates and pauldrons, vambraces and rerebraces of an earlier age. Ancient wills and inventories, save those of great folk or military adventurers, have scanty reference to complete harnesses. Ringed hawberks, in a damp northern climate, will not survive long neglect, and many of them must have been cut in pieces for burnishers or for the mail skirts and gussets attached to the later arming doublets. As the fashion of plate armour changed, the smith might adapt an old harness to the new taste, but more often it would be cast aside. Men to whom the sight of a steel coat called up the business of their daily life wasted no sentimentality over an obsolete piece. The early antiquaries might have saved us many priceless things, but it was not until a few virtuosi of the 18th century were taken with the Gothic fancy that popular archaeology dealt with aught but Greek statuary and Roman inscriptions. The 19th century was well advanced before an interest in medieval antiquities became common amongst educated men, and for most contemporaries of Dr Johnson a medieval helm was a barbarous curiosity exciting the same measure of mild interest as does the Zulu knobkerry seen by us as we pass a pawnbroker’s window.
(O. Ba.)
7. Fire-arms. (For the development of cannon, see [Artillery] and [Ordnance].)—Hand-cannons appear almost simultaneously with the larger bombards. They were made by the Flemings in the 14th century. An early instance of the use of hand fire-arms in England is the siege of Huntercombe Manor in 1375. These were simply small cannon, provided with a stock of wood, and fired by the application of a match to the touch-hole. During the 15th century the hand-gun was steadily improved, and its use became more general. Edward IV., landing in England in 1471 to reconquer his throne, brought with him a force of Burgundian hand-gun men (mercenaries), and in 1476 the Swiss at Morat had no less than 6000 of their men thus armed. The prototype of the modern military weapon is the arquebus (q.v.), a form of which was afterwards called in England the caliver. Various dates are given for the introduction of the arquebus, which owed many of its details to the perfected crossbow which it superseded. The Spanish army in the Italian wars at the beginning of the 16th century was the first to make full and effective use of the new weapon, and thus to make the fire action of infantry a serious factor in the decision of battles. The Spaniards also took the next step in advance. The musket (q.v.) was heavier and more powerful than the arquebus, and, in the hands of the duke of Alva’s army in the Netherlands, so conclusively proved its superiority that it at once replaced its rival in the armies of Europe. Both the arquebus and the musket had a touch-hole on the right side of the barrel, with a pan for the priming, with which a lighted quick match was brought in contact by pressing a trigger. The musket, on account of its weight, was provided with a long rest, forked in the upper part and furnished with a spike to stick in the ground. The matchlock (long-barrelled matchlocks are still used by various uncivilized peoples, notably in India) was the typical weapon of the soldier for two centuries. The class of hand fire-arms provided with an arrangement for striking a spark to ignite the powder charge begins with the wheel-lock. This lock was invented at Nuremberg in 1515, but was seldom applied to the arquebus and musket on account of the costliness of its mechanism and the uncertainty of its action. The early forms of flint-lock (snaphance) were open to the same objections, and the fire-lock (as the flint-lock was usually called) remained for many years after its introduction the armament of special troops only, till about the beginning of the 18th century it finally superseded the old matchlock. Thenceforward the fire-lock (called familiarly in England “Brown Bess”) formed with the bayonet (q.v.) the armament of all infantry, and the fire-arms carried by other troops were constructed on the same principle. Flint-lock muskets were supplanted about 1830-1840 by the percussion musket, in which a fulminate cap was used. A Scottish clergyman, Alexander Forsyth, invented this method of ignition in 1807, but it was not till 1820 that it began to come into general use. (See [Gun].) The system of firing the charge by a fulminate was followed by the invention of the needle-gun (q.v.). The muzzle-loading rifle, employed by special troops since about 1800, came into general use in the armies of Europe about 1854-1860. It was superseded, as a result of the success of the needle-gun in the war of 1866, by the breech-loading rifle, this in its turn giving way to the magazine rifle about 1886-1890. (See [Rifle].) Neither breech-loaders nor revolvers, however, are inventions of modern date. Both were known in Germany as early as the close of the 15th century. There are in the Musée d’Artillerie at Paris wheel-lock arquebuses of the 16th century which are breech-loaders; and there is, in the Tower armoury, a revolver with the old matchlock, the date of which is about 1550. A German arquebus of the 16th century, in the museum of Sigmaringen, is a revolver of seven barrels. Nor is rifling a new thing in fire-arms, for there was a rifled arquebus of the 15th century, in which the balls were driven home by a mallet, and a patent was taken out in England for rifling in 1635. All these systems were thus known at an early period in the history of fire-arms, but for want of the minutely accurate workmanship required and, above all, of a satisfactory firing arrangement, they were left in an undeveloped state until modern times. The earliest pistols were merely shorter handguns, modified for mounted men, and provided with a straight stock which was held against the breastplate (poitrinal or petronel). The long-barrelled pistol was the typical weapon of the cavalry of the 16th century. (See [Cavalry].) With the revival of shock tactics initiated by Gustavus Adolphus the length of the pistol barrel became less and less, and its stock was then shaped for the hand alone. (See [Pistol].)
(C. F. A.)