From the American Revolution: Short Land Pattern Brown Bess

The long land pattern had superior accuracy because when you lined up across the field from your enemy, your muzzle could almost touch his chest

I love that you can still get 5-packs of the original flints for these from UK surplus stores :) just sitting in storage for 200+ years...

It's still just absolutely mind blowing that something from the late 1700s is sitting in your hands and being broadcast to us through a digital platform. Wild.

When I was at the Naval Academy and then served as a USMC artillery officer, I and some good friends studied and read the diaries of 18th and 19th century combatants (almost entirely officers) in some fine old original books in Nimitz Library or from other sources. Some of us bought replica flintlocks and spent hours on weekends playing around with smoothbore muskets and learning the ins-and-outs of actually firing live rounds under timed circumstances. What we learned from those "war games" was the experienced flintlock period combat veterans were a lot smarter than we originally understood. As a rough rule of thumb, we could all aim and hit targets reasonably out to 100 yards. But we had time to aim and weren't rushing. The reality of flintlock period warfare was that the military effectiveness of the smoothbore musket when fired by ranks of men in formation against other ranks of men in formations was A LOT more than 75-80 yards because picking off individuals wasn't the goal. Line infantry in European armies were generally not taught to aim and fire at single targets nor was individual marksmanship (outside of dedicated skirmishers) taught or encouraged (I should add that the use of skirmishers varied by period and army throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries). Line infantry in almost all European armies of the flintlock period were taught to fire as groups, either the entire formation in one volley, or by platoons, ranks, etc. The thinking at the time reflected what many had observed as a battlefield reality: massed volumes of fire delivered in rapid succession were much likelier to kill or maim enough men in the opposing formations to break down or at least shake morale. Pushing the attack home with the bayonet was the final straw for a formation that had lost enough men (and particularly officers and NCOs) and usually resulted in men fleeing long before the attacking formation go close enough to use their bayonets. That is why when you read the accounts of officers in these battles, you frequently read how a formation broke ranks and retreated and the officers had to retreat with it and then get their men back under control when they could. In addition, period physicians who treated wounded troops in the wars of this period consistently commented that wounds from bayonets and swords were far less common than from firearms. I vaguely recall one eyewitness account from a mid-18th century battle where the witness wrote the defending formation opened fire at a range of 200 paces, or about 150 yards. That fire dropped more than a few of the opposing men though the great majority were unscathed. It didn't break the enemy formation, as I recall these 30 years later, but it inflicted multiple casualties on the attacking formation. Subsequent volleys inflicted even more casualties, especially as the range closed and a higher percentage of balls hit their mark. People forget that attacking formations had a big tactical challenge/dilemma. It's one thing to stand in one position and reload your musket. If you are stationary, then reloading and discharging your weapon every 15 seconds or so can be done FOR A LIMITED TIME (if you have every fired a flintlock musket rapidly, you quickly learn the barrel gets very, very hot and you almost cannot touch the gun for reloading purposes except under the strain of the adrenaline rush of combat). In contrast, if you're the attacking formation you don't want to (more accurately, you can't) stop the momentum of your attack to reload. The human element of combat being what it is, once you get your men moving forward you don't want to stop that momentum unless you absolutely have to. So, it was a commonly accepted notion of the time (based on combat experience) that attacking formations would often hold their fire until they were within 50-70 yards, then unload on the defenders and push the attack home with cold steel. Being that close meant a higher percentage of bullets hit their mark and that resulted in greater disruption of the defending formation. If all went as planned (more like, hoped), it would be enough to break the defenders' will. But to get to that point, the attacking formation had to cross the battlefield under not only small arms fire but possible artillery fire that could reach out and touch your formation literally 1,000 yards out.

"...blow a golf ball sized hole in the first man, he's dead on the spot..." "...just as the founding fathers intended." And yep, that quote does seem to ring true when you see the .75 caliber bore on the thing!

It's common practice at UK steelworks to have nicknames for blast furnaces, with Bess being one of them. For example, at Scunthorpe steelworks in the UK the four furnaces are known as Bess, Victoria, Anne and Mary (after four Queens of England/Britain). In the US we have the same custom; "Jenny" is the name of the furnace sung about in the Bruce Springfield's song "Youngstown".

The front sight was consistently referred to as sight in period documents and it is somewhat of a modern myth that it was primarily a bayonet lug. Muskets of that era pretty normally had a front sight, various types existed. the british sight just happened to do double duty as lug.

I’ve fired a replica Brown Bess and it was probably the most fun gun I ever shot.

This weapon was used in two invasions that took place in the Río de la Plata (current Argentina and Uruguay) in 1806 and 1807. Both were defeated and the captured Brown Bess were among the first weapons used in the war of independence against Spain. In the 70s, Fabricaciones Militares (state arms factory) made a fairly good quality replica that was used both by shooters and in period films. It came with a mold for .69 caliber bullets. Around here it was said that Brown was because they used to have a brown bluing. A true Forgotten Weapon. Greetings from Argentine Patagonia.

It's amazing how paper thin the barrel of an original Brown Bess is compared to a reproduction.

At 75 yards, firing at 4 x per minute, I can consistently achieve 6" groups with my Brown Bess. The laid paper cartrages are very important for accuracy and to not have trouble with fouling. Ramming a bare ball will become problematic very quickly, the paper of the cartrages seem to clear most of the fouling. It's important to use laid paper which is closer to the paper used for money today. It's that cloth like propery that is important. Modern paper doesn't work nearly as well.

Years ago I remember a news article from my hometown (Hamilton Canada) when one of these was turned into a police run gun amnesty program (along with a functioning MG-34), both wound up being donated to a museum after some public outcry over their initial fate of destruction. I still find it hilarious that someone turned in a flintlock to a program meant for like semi-illegal handguns.

I own (and shoot) a modern reproduction of the long land pattern. It was manufactured using modern equipment but it is otherwise identical to an original that they copied, all the way down to the markings on the lock plate (and it doesn't have unit markings on the barrel), and the barrel has a serial number hidden underneath that wasn't on the original. Smooth bore muskets always fire curve balls. The round ball is going to randomly contact one side or the other as it goes down the barrel, which will make the ball spin. It will go straight for about 50 to 75 yards, after which you don't know which direction it is going to curve. It doesn't have sights, but as Ian said you can use the bayonet lug as a front sight of sorts. For a rear sight you can use the tang screw that holds the barrel to the stock. Back then they were used mostly in mass volleys, so you weren't so much aiming at an individual soldier, and instead were basically just pointing the barrel roughly at the entire group of enemy soldiers. A huge line of soldiers all firing simultaneously has this huge shotgun type of effect, so individual aiming wasn't all that important. It's a fun gun to shoot, but as Ian said, compared to a modern rifle it's definitely not all that accurate. It's also very finicky. You have to keep your flint sharp and your frizzen clean or it just goes click when you pull the trigger (see 3:05 if you don't know what the frizzen is). And if it is raining out, forget it. You aren't getting any kind of spark off of a wet frizzen. You also have to clean the entire musket meticulously after using it. Black powder contains sulfur and will combine with water in the air to create sulfuric acid, so if you don't carefully clean out your musket the sulfuric acid will eat away at your barrel, and at some point the barrel will fail and you are going to have a very bad day.

In Swedish, "bössa" (pronounced "bess-ah") is an older colloquial term for rifle, originally from the old German "büsse" which in more modern German became "büchse". Perhaps the "Bess" has a related origin?

One of the iconic weapons of the entire 18th century! My reading says that rate of fire in battle was 3 rounds per minute. And realistic battle range was 50 yards. Frederick the Great famously drilled his men to fire 6 rounds per minute but this was unsustainable during actual fighting. As for range, a German general quipped a man would have to be "exceedingly unlucky" to get hit at 80 yards. This was the dominant military small arms technology from roughly 1675 to 1850. An astonishingly long time for a firearm.

I was allowed to handle a 1742 in a museum once. Quite cool 😎👍!

Brownells WWKGD (What Would King George Do) Carbine when?

We fired these when I worked at Old Fort Erie, Canada. We were a bunch of former army and air cadets, and we got good at drill. We could manage about 6 rounds per minute. (we didn't load lead, so that saved time. Shooting tourists would have been bad...) When we went to reinactments for a lark, we blew everyone away. But then again, we were literally doing it for a living. The job got a number of us into firearms for life.

Another interpretation of Brown Bess could be “Basic B….”

So basically this thing can also be called a "Plain Jane"? Addition: I would also love to see reviews on musket patterns used by the British East India Company especially in the leadup to the Sepoy Mutiny.