Birdseye
BOCN Contributor
My interests are sorta catholic when it comes to weapons and related stuff. The sad truth is that if it is/was dangerous I probably crave it.
A bud and I are writing a book on early firearms (from the origins kind of thing) hopefully for an academic publisher (we submitted a draft of the first part of it, we are waiting to hear from the editor). In any event, I thought that I would share one observation that we made.
[FONT="]A series of very similar barrels are associated with the battle site of Aljubarrota, Portugal; the battle took place on August 14, 1385 so those barrels can be dated to ca. 1360-80[/FONT]. They are all "of a type" and have measurements that are so close that, for some of them, it beggers the imagination that they were not made in the same place.
The general dimensions are:
Length-180mm
Bore-40mm
weight- 3.5kg
They were stick mounted and might have been crew served (for small values of "crew").
Truely the earliest of the early.
A bud and I are writing a book on early firearms (from the origins kind of thing) hopefully for an academic publisher (we submitted a draft of the first part of it, we are waiting to hear from the editor). In any event, I thought that I would share one observation that we made.
[FONT="]A series of very similar barrels are associated with the battle site of Aljubarrota, Portugal; the battle took place on August 14, 1385 so those barrels can be dated to ca. 1360-80[/FONT]. They are all "of a type" and have measurements that are so close that, for some of them, it beggers the imagination that they were not made in the same place.
The general dimensions are:
Length-180mm
Bore-40mm
weight- 3.5kg
They were stick mounted and might have been crew served (for small values of "crew").
Truely the earliest of the early.
