Hi I'm Jonathan Ferguson, one of the curators of firearms here at the Royal Armouries
museum in Leeds, and today we're in the stores. Just looking at a couple
of things that we think you might find interesting
this is a piece that is not currently on display, very unusual terms of 18th
century firepower flintlock repeaters there are few like that and this is one of them
we have two actually, I'll bring it up in to shot, or the mechanism into shot. This
is designed by a chap called John Belton this one dates from 1786. I cheat - it's actually written
on the gun - helpful. More markings here to explain in a minute. So it's got a
conventional flint lock lock, but it's facing the wrong way. If you know
about guns you will immediately spot it's backwards. And that's partly because it moves.
You actually have two triggers - one fires the gun and one when this is set and I
won't operate it because I'm not confident that I can put it back in
working order. This starts out here and moves back, so between shots you pull
the second trigger and it moves the lock back one
Why? Well because it's got multiple shots let's count the touch holds and you can see how many and flip
around it's a magazine repeating gun, so, magazine catch, which seems a strange thing to say in the context of 17th century firearms
and it's a bit of a three handed job but
it is at this angle anyway, pop out the magazine and you would load that with powder and ball
powder and ball, and so forth, and it is 7 shots
a seven shot repeating flint lock carbine fairly impressive and in the back proof marks and
interestingly the magazine is numbered to the gun or the chamber whatever want to call
it, it's numbered to the gun -124 so if you did have a reload you probably
have to have that numbered to the gun the idea being this won't necessarily fit
properly if it's off another guns we're talking handcraft production here not
interchangeable parts by any means reinsert the magazine. In theory you could
carry multiples of these on some sort of load-bearing equipment we've no idea if
that was ever done what you're probably thinking at this stage is surely no one
used this, and in fact they did - it was purchased and it was issued. I'll just put that back in place.
So hopefully you can see now how, magazine in place (breech loading of course)
the lock starts up here and you need to prime and cock the lock for every shot
So it's not quite a repeater but it means you've got seven shots on the gun
and when the best rate of fire at the time was maybe four rounds
per minute loading from the front this was a real force multiplier
so why else is it significant, well as I say it's actually been purchased
issues, maybe even used there's more research to be done on this but the
symbol here is that of the East India Company and the number below-124
and we know without even doing the research that 124 of these were issued
that's a rack number - so in 1786 there's an army running around
with repeating flint lock muskets, or carbines. It's missing the ramrod it's not uncommon I believe there's a sling swivel
below the barrel, because there's another one at the back here. A proper one. And that's about it,
fairly conventional apart from that but pretty wildly unconventional in every
other respect