You never know what you will see

He comes in, full himself. He’s so excited. He joins us at our table in the village pub, & tells us of his latest acquisition. This is our friend who sells militaria on the market. Soon he’s off out to fetch the acquisition. And it is truly mind-blowing.

Somehow he’s found a French matchlock musket c1620-50. It’s a huge thing, 6 foot long. The barrel alone must be 4 foot. It’s very heavy. When you look at the barrel you realise why. It must be half an inch thick all round of solid metal.

Handling this ancient weapon it’s easy to see that you would use it as a club soon. It must have taken a certain amount of time to re-load, by the time you’d cleaned the barrel, inserted a ball & rammed the ball  in firm with some cotton wadding, then added gunpowder to the pan & made sure the slow fuse was still burning, before even thinking of taking aim. You would also need a rest for the barrel. The musket is far too heavy to just lift to your shoulder to fire. It would be impossible to keep the barrel up steady enough to fire. And what the recoil would have been like! Our friend is particularly aware of what a chore it must have been just humping this weapon around – he is an ex-soldier himself so knows about carrying heavy packs & weapons distances.

In many ways it’s quite a crude piece of work. The thick metal barrel is attached to a metal-plated wooden stock (another couple of feet) by some metal wire wound round the two. There’s no ornamental filigree or anything. We would guess it was done by some simple blacksmith.

Our friend’s excitement is as much about being in touch so graphically full of history as anything else. He’s yet to work out a realistic price to sell it for. A little research will be the next step. However, he’s already got some buyers interested, but for the moment he wants to treasure it for himself, to hold it & feel it, to work out how it works.

After we’ve all had a good examine, he eventually takes it away. There’s a buzz of conversation in the pub. Nobody had ever seen anything quite like it. They certainly didn’t expect to see one when they dropped in for a quiet drink.