Battle of the Boye on "Battlefield Britain"

regeneration

For anyone interested, tonight at 9pm on BBC2, the show "Battlefield Britain" is covering the Battle of the Boyne. For those that haven't been watching the interesting show, it charts the most famous battles throughout British history and recreates the battles using CGI armies, looks rather cool and is an interesting, if glitzy look at some famous moments.

pork99

It was interesting and overall I enjoyed the CGI graphics etc.

They missed out on some interesting things about the weapons and tactics of the period. When they were describing the Jacobite cavalry counter-attack they mentioned the Williamite infantry as have 1-in-5 men armed with pikes which were deployed to repel the cavalry.

Around the mid 17th century the standard armament for European infantry were pikes and matchlock muskets (or pike and shot). There would be 1 or 2 pike for every 2 or 3 shot. Though the proportion of pikemen tended to fall during the 1670s-1680s until it was 4 or 5 shot to 1 pike.

Two inventions changed this. One was the flintlock musket which as the name suggests had a firing mechanism based on a the sparks from a piece of flint striking metal. This was first issued to troops guarding artillery trains as this was safer than having soldiers with matchlock muskets doing this job (they had to carry smoldering matches to fire their muskets which is not a clever thing to have around tons of gunpowder :eek:) By 1690 these muskets were commonly issued to ordinary foot regiments in the Dutch and Danish armies and were steadily replacing matchlocks in other Western armies. These allowed the use of more flexible infantry formations, were more reliable, less prone to disruption by bad weather and gave a higher rate of fire. The Williamite army had more of them.

The second invention was the bayonet. Foot regiments equipped with bayonets could dispense with their pikes as the bayonets defended them against cavalry. The first bayonets were plug bayonets - these were like a short sword which fitted into the musket by plugging the handle directly into the muzzle. The disadvantage of this was that once you fixed bayonets you could not fire your musket. By 1690 a new type of bayonet had been invented - the ring or socket bayonet which fitted onto the muzzle by means of a ring which was offset from the blade allowing the infantry soldier to fire while having the bayonet fixed and these were beginning to come into use in the British army at least. Again the Williamites had plenty of bayonets consequently many of William's regiments of foot did not carry pikes at all.

http://thearmouryonline.co.uk/BayonetHistory.htm

mike65

Watched it and the "You Thought You Knew" programme about King Billy which was on Tuesday. That programme was worth seeing first as it put the battle into its proper European context.

Mike.