511 



ARMS. 



ARMS. 



543 



Gunpowder was invented in the 13th, and the larger sort of fire- 

 arms iu the 1 4th century : these will be separately treated of under 

 the head of ARTILLERY. 



Portable or hand fire-anus, to which we shall confine ourselves at 

 present, were not invented till a century later. Sir Samuel Meyrick in 

 a Memoir in the ' Archaeologia ' of the Society of Antiquaries, has 

 collected most of the scattered notices to be found in military writers 

 relating to their introduction. He has indeed given the very year 

 of their invention, upon the authority of an eye-witness. " It was in 

 H-i",'' says Bilius, "that they were contrived by the Lucquese 

 when besieged by the Florentines." Villaret, however, states that 

 John, Duke of Burgundy, had 4000 hand cannons, as they were called, 

 in his army in 1411 (Villaret, t. xiii. p. 176, 310). The French and 

 Italians appear to have made the principal improvements. 



A French translation of Quintus Curtius, written in 1468, pre- 

 served among the Burney manuscripts in the British Museum, ex- 

 hibits two warriors in one of its illuminations, who bear the earliest 

 representations of hand fire-arms with which we are acquainted : they 

 appear to be hand-guns. 



The following is the enumeration of the different pieces of portable 

 fire-arms and their accompaniments, almost all of which have been 

 engraved by Skelton, in his ' Specimens of Anns and Armour.' Hand- 

 cannon, hand-gun, arquebus, arquebus a croc, haquebut, demi-haque, 

 musket, wheel-lock, currier, snaphaunce, caliver, carabine, esclopette, 

 fusil, musquetoon, fowling-piece, petronel, blunderbus, dragon, hand- 

 mortar, dag, pistol, tricker-lock, fire-lock, self-loading gun, fancy-gun, 

 musket-arrows, match-box, powder-horn and flask, touch-box, bandoleers, 

 cartridges, patron, sweynes-feathers, and bayonet. The recollection of 

 the fact, that j)Ai a/a (small pots) had been sometimes used for casting 

 the Greek fire, was likely to lead to some more dexterous invention. 

 The emperor Leo, in his ' Tactics,' ch. xix. 6, irtpl vau/uxxfas, on sea 

 .H'jht, describing the use made of artificial fires in vessels employed in 

 pursuit after a naval battle, says, " on the prows of such vessels were 

 placed crf^xew? (>ipkone), large tubes ; they were of copper, through 

 which these fires were blown iuto the enemies' ships." Anna Comnena 

 (' Alex.' 1. xiii.) says, " that soldiers were supplied with copper tubes, 

 and blew artificial fire in the same way upon their enemies in battles 

 on land." Here we have, undoubtedly, the origin of fire-arms. 



The hand-cannon was a simple tube fixed on a straight stock of wood 

 about three feet in length. It was furnished with touch-hole, trunnions 

 and cascable, like a large cannon. The touch-hole waa, in the first 

 instance, at top ; but the liability of the priming to be blown away led 

 to the improvement of placing a small pan under the right side to 

 hold the powder. This pan was the first step to the invention of the 

 guh-lock. 



The hand-yun was an improvement on the hand-cannon. It was cast 

 in bran, and, as a tube, was of greater length ; a flat piece of brass 

 made to turn upon a pin, covered the pan wliich contained the powder : 

 it had alao the addition of a piece of brass fixed on the breech, and 

 perforated to insure the aim. The hand gun appears to have been 

 use in England at least as early as 1446. The Greeks made use of il 

 to great advantage in then- last defence of Constantinople in 1453. 



As soon as the hand-gun had received a contrivance suggested by the 

 trigger of the cross-bow, to convey with certainty and instantaneous 

 motion the burning match to the pan, it acquired the appellation o 

 arf[tiebu, corrupted into harquebus. Previous to this invention, the 

 match had been held in the hand in using the hand-gun as well as the 

 hand-cannon. The arquebus is first mentioned by Philip de Comines 

 in his Account of the Battle of Morat in 1476. In England, on the 

 firrt formation of the Yeoman of the Guard in 1485, one-half were 

 armed with bows and arrows, the other with arquebuses. At the 



>attle of Fournoe, in 1495, we read of mounted arquebusiers. A large 

 vrty of arquebusiers are seen in the picture at Hampton Court which 

 epresents King Henry VIII.'s procession to meet Francis I., between 

 Guisnes and Ardres. The arquebus, like the hand-cannon and hand- 

 gun, being fired from the chest, while its butt remained straight, the 

 eye could with difficulty only be brought sufficiently near to the barrel 

 ,o afford a perfect aim. By giving to the butt a hooked form, the 

 xirrel was elevated, while the horizontal position would be retained. 

 This idea, originating with the Germans, gave name to the fire-arms 

 ;hus constructed, and was thence by the English termed a haquebtit, 

 lakebut, hagbut, or hagbush. The invention as well as the name was 

 cnown in England as early as the reign of Richard III. We find 

 numerous haquebutters in the English army in the time of Henry VIII. 

 The demihaque was a kind of long pistol, the butt-end of which was 

 made to curve so as almost to become a semicircle. The tlemihaques 

 were smaller, and probably about half the weight of the haquebuts, the 

 diameter of the barrel being much less. In the ' Gesta Grayorum,' 

 printed in 1594, we are told they carried bullets, and sometimes 

 ualf-shote. 



The musqttct is sometimes stated to have been a Spanish invention. 

 We find, however, that that arm was seen for the first time in 1432, in 

 Tuscany. (Muratori, Dissert. 26, p. 457.) And, in 1449, the Milanese 

 are said to have armed their militia with 20,000 muskets, which 

 Sismondi (t. ix. p. 341) states, required a quarter of an hour to load 

 and fire. Hallam, however (' Middle Ages,' vol. i. p. 342), doubts the 

 fact of so many muskets having been collected. It was used at the 

 battle of Pavia, and is said to have contributed in an especial manner 

 to decide the fortune of the day. Its use, however, seems for a while 

 to have been confined. It appears not to have been generally adopted 

 till the Duke of Alba took upon himself the government of the Nether- 

 lands, in 1567. M. de Strozzi, Colonel-General of the French infantry 

 under Charles IX., introduced it into France. The first Spanish 

 musquets had straight stocks; the French, curved ones. Their form 

 was that of the haquebut, but so long and heavy, that something of 

 support was required ; and hence originated the rest, a staff the height 

 of a man's shoulder, with a kind of fork of iron at the top to receive 

 the musquet, and a ferule at bottom to steady it in the ground. On a 

 march, when the piece was shouldered, the rest was at first carried in 

 the right hand, and subsequently hung upon the wrist by means of a 

 loop tied under its head. A similar rest had been first used by the 

 mounted arquebusiers. In the time of Elizabeth, and long after, the 

 English musqueteer was a most encumbered soldier. He had, besides 

 the unwieldy weapon itself, his coarse powder for loading, in a flask ; 

 his fine powder for priming, in a touch-box ; his bullets in a leathern 

 bag, the strings of which he had to draw to get at them ; while in his 

 hand was his burning match and his musquet rest ; and when he had 

 discharged his piece, he had to draw his sword in order to defend 

 himself. Hence it became a question for a long time, even among 

 military men, whether the bow did not deserve a preference over the 

 musquet. 



An ingenious contrivance to supplant the match-lock appeared in the 

 reign of Henry VIII. This was the wheel-lock, invented in Italy. 

 M. de Bellai informs us, that one of the first occasions on which it was 

 used was in 1521, when Pope Leo X. and the Emperor Charles V. 

 confederated against France, and their troops laid siege to Parma, 

 which was defended by the Marquis de Foix. It was a small machine 

 for exciting sparks of fire by the friction of a furrowed wheel of steel 

 against a piece of sulphuret of iron, which, from such application, 

 acquired the name of pyrites or fire-stone. The spring which turned 

 this wheel was attached to it by a chain, formed like those in watches, 

 and was wound upon the axle, or, as the term was, ' spanned ' with ;i 

 small lever called a spanner. This instrument, having at one end a 

 hole made square to fit on the projecting axle of the wheel, was used 

 like a key to wind a clock ; and, being turned, made the wheel revolve, 

 and a little slider that covered the pan retire from over it. The spanner 

 was then removed, and the wheel was held by a catch connected with 

 the trigger. The cock, like that in modern firelocks, except having its 

 position reversed, containing the pyrites, was brought down upon the 

 wheel, which, on the trigger being pulled, revolved rapidly, and grating 

 against the pyrites elicited the fire. Wheel-locks were for a long time 

 chiefly manufactured in Germany. They were certainly brought to 

 England in the time of Henry VIII., in whose reign we find them 

 mentioned in inventories under the name of ' fierlocke.' Benvenuto 

 Cellini (' Memoirs,' voL i. p. 182, Hoscoe's trausl.) mentions his mounting 

 a brown Turkish horse, and placing a wheel lock arquebus at the 

 pummel of the saddle, in the year 1530. 



The Carrier, or currier of war, is another species of fire-arm, first 

 noticed in a letter from Lord Wcutworth to Queen Mary (see the 

 ' Hardwick State Papers '), while writing respecting the siege of Calais. 

 It is again noticed in the Earl of Essex's operations in Ireland in 



operatio 

 ' Memoirs.') 



The earliest 



the time of Queen Elizabeth. (Birch's 

 account of it is given in a work entitled ' The Knowledge and Conduct 

 of Warres,' printed in 1578. Sir John Smith, iu his ' Animadversions 

 on the Writings of Captain Barwick,' describes it as of the same calibre 

 and strength as the arquebus, but with a longer barrel. 



Grose observes, that the Snafhaimcc derived its name from the 

 troops who made use of it. These were a set of marauders whom the 

 Dutch termed inaphans, or ' poultry-stealers.' The use of the match- 



