It occurred to me, I've never actually taken a close look at a Brown Bess,
one of the iconic weapons of the American War of Independence.
So today that's what we're going to check out.
[ Short Land Pattern Brown Bess ]
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am at Morphy's today with the aforementioned Brown Bess.
This is specifically a Short Land Pattern Brown Bess.
It replaced the Long Land Pattern Brown Bess in 1769.
... Yeah, this is the short version. This has a 42 inch barrel,
which replaced the longer 46 inch barrel that had previously been in service.
In the 1750s, 1760s, there really was a push in the British military
to reduce the weight and bulk of soldier's kit to increase mobility.
And they did a bunch of things to that end.
They actually reduced the bulk of the uniforms.
And they realised that they could chop 4 inches off
the barrel of this thing to make it pretty reasonably handier.
It's still quite a long gun, but definitely better than being even longer.
And there was no noticeable difference in its effective range as a result.
And so this would be one of the predominant patterns of, well, not rifle, of musket
that were used by the British troops during the American Revolutionary War.
Let's start with a couple of basic statistics here.
... This weighs in at 10.2 pounds, so actually not that much different
from a typical rifle that would be carried by a soldier today.
It is .75 calibre, which is huge compared to a rifle one would carry today.
It is smoothbore of course, flintlock action,
which we'll take a look at up close in just a moment.
Expected rate of fire was about 4 rounds per minute,
it's about 15 seconds to fire and reload the thing.
It was fitted with a bayonet which I don't have on this particular example,
but the bayonet was a key component in combat at the time.
Firing ... in ranks was really only a precursor to a bayonet charge,
which is the thing that was expected to really decide an engagement.
The effective range of this, despite its 42 inch long huge barrel, was 80 to 100 yards.
At 80 ... a good marksman could reasonably expect to hit a human-sized target.
At 100 if you were good you could do it, at 150 you had to be kind of lucky.
And by 200 yards, ... the one quote from a British doctor was something like
he'd never seen anyone hit at 200 yards by the man who was aiming at him.
So that's what you were looking at in terms of military effectiveness.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at some of the detailed elements of a Brown Bess.
The standard ignition system at this time was the flintlock,
this would be the dominant system for a very long time.
So you have a piece of flint here, a steel pan cover.
You will muzzle load ball and powder down here.
You will load a little bit of priming powder here.
And you then cock that.
You've got your priming powder in there, you close the frizzen right there.
When you pull the trigger, the hammer (the cock) is going to snap forward.
This is going to scrape against this pan, which will both open it up
and drop a shower of sparks into your priming powder here.
That will light, the flame will go through that little tiny hole in the side of the barrel,
ignite the main charge and fire the projectile.
The projectile by the way, was approximately a .70 calibre round ball.
The projectiles were deliberately made undersized
compared to the nominal bore diameter for a number of reasons.
The moulds used to actually mould these projectiles, these round balls, were not perfect.
And the balls were not always perfectly round, so they'd be larger in one dimension than the other.
The interior diameter of the bore was not always perfect.
And once you start shooting, powder fouling is going to accumulate.
So the ball needs to be smaller in diameter than the barrel.
These are of course also smoothbore, so there's no rifling in there.
Ballistically what you would be looking at here is approximately a 500 grain projectile,
which ... you might think a little bit light for a .75 calibre bore,
but that's because they're using a round ball, not a lengthened bullet sort of shape.
And so a round ball is always going to be lighter in weight than you might expect.
Muzzle velocity here is probably going to have been 1,600 to maybe 1,800 feet per second.
So reasonable velocity, terrible accuracy because they are smoothbore,
and a lighter projectile than you might expect.
Still very capable of inflicting a pretty horrendous wound
if you get hit because it's a really big projectile.
This guy up here is sort of a pseudo front sight, but that is primarily there to be a bayonet lug.
These used socket-type bayonets that just lock on.
It's a triangular profile bayonet 17 inches in length.
So you stick that on the end of this real pike of a musket
and you have, well, almost a pike, you have a spear essentially.
We have brass hardware here. One of the innovations of the Short Land Pattern rifle
was to actually flare out the first of these ramrod holders,
so that it was a little bit easier to get the ramrod in quickly after you were done loading.
Not that unlike having a flared magazine well in a rifle or pistol today.
There are a total of four of these brass guides for the ramrod.
We have a sling swivel up here on the front, there's another guide, there's the rear guide.
The ramrod's of course going to go all the way down the barrel inside the stock.
The rear sling swivel is attached here on the trigger guard.
The markings on the lock plate here are kind of faint today, but they can still be made out.
"Tower" refers to the Tower of London, this is a British military inspected and approved firearm.
A few decades before the adoption of the Short Land Pattern, they stopped allowing makers
to put their own individual names on government musket lock plates.
We then also have a crown here, we have a "GR" and a crown.
So GR would be for King George, or George Rex.
On the opposite side here we have the screws that hold the lock into the stock and the side plate here.
The flat side plate was indicative of these Short Land Pattern guns.
Previous ones had like a three-dimensional raised, more decorative, side plate.
The Land Pattern incorporated this and some other changes
that ... made the lock a little stronger and a little more durable.
And then we have a somewhat distinctive profile to the buttstock and the comb here.
It's interesting to note that there was an expected lifespan for a musket like this
of 12 years in military service.
Essentially we know that because if a regiment needed to replace guns
that were less than 12 years old, they were expected to pay for that themselves.
If they were more than 12 years old, well, that was considered the
acceptable lifespan in service of a musket like this. So.
Yeah, this ... has a bunch of pitting, and the wood has definitely seen better days.
But it is 250 years old, so let's cut it a little bit of slack.
These muskets were marked by the unit that they were issued to,
and we have that marking here on the top of the barrel.
It's really faint, so I don't know if it's going to come through on camera well or not.
But this is marked "53 Regiment", and that would be the King's Shropshire Light Infantry.
And we know pretty much exactly what they did during the American Revolution,
which is cool, that allows us to trace where this musket probably went.
And what we know is that they were stationed in Ireland before the American Revolution broke out.
In April of 1776 they departed Ireland, they arrived in Quebec City in May of 1776.
They participated in the fighting at Ticonderoga and then the Saratoga campaign.
And at Saratoga a bunch of the companies of the regiment were actually captured
and were interned at Saratoga until the end of the war.
The remainder worked with other units
and participated in raids ... from 1778 to 1780 up in New York and Vermont.
So this would be the standard British service musket until 1797, when it was replaced
by the India Pattern, which was a reduction in quality and not really a good idea.
But that's not particularly relevant to our look at the American Revolution today.
One of the things I definitely should cover here is the actual term
"Brown Bess", what it means, where it came from.
This is the term that is generically and widely used
to refer to British military flintlocks over a pretty long time period.
And there are some theories out there like, "Oh, it's a reference to Queen Elizabeth's name,"
... that's pretty much conclusively nonsense.
My friend Jonathan Ferguson at the Royal Armouries
did a really cool piece of research on the origin of this exact term.
And I'll actually link to his full article down in the description text.
But the short version is "brown" was a term that meant something that was ordinary,
bland, uninteresting, kind of generic.
And "Bess" was like a generic low-class female nickname.
Jonathan points out that this is similar to ... current Australian slang, ... the term "Sheila".
So essentially what you have here is "Brown Bess" means "the soldier's wife".
And you see that sort of term or reference still in use today.
You know, people, major trends ... things don't really change all that much over time.
"You're in the army now, like you don't get a girlfriend, your girlfriend is your rifle."
That's basically what Brown Bess means, which I found pretty interesting.
Anyway like I said, I'll have that whole article linked in the description below
if you'd like to read in detail Jonathan's research and findings.
Anyway, I thought it would be a pretty cool opportunity here
to take a look at the quintessential American Revolution rifle, a true Brown Bess.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.