17th Century Pike Drill
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- čas přidán 25. 01. 2021
- In early 17th century Massachusetts, every able-bodied male between 16 and 60 was required to attend militia drill once a month except during the harvest months of July and August. One of the main weapons for European armies at the time was the pike, a wooden pole up to 17 feet long with a sharp metal point on the end. Handling a pike in a row with your fellow soldiers could be very difficult and exhausting. This video shows reenactors from the Salem Trayned Band demonstrating a training drill from a 1607 manual with 16 ½ foot long pikes!
Amazing. I love reading about warfare from the 16th and 17th century and seeing the double rows and the slow advances gives me the best picture of what battles must have been like back then.
Thank you, we were thrilled to be involved with this project! (I'm a member of Salem Trayned Band)
Fun to see that this is roughly the same drill our mid to late 16th century city militia uses in the Netherlands.
We use Jacob de Gheyn's manual (obviously the English version) from 1609. We have also worked from Henry Hexam, Bingham's Aelian's Tacticks, and others.
We have a documented lineage from the wars of Dutch independence to English militia like the Artillery Company of London, to the Mass Bay Colonial militias like the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. To this day the Artillery Company of London sends a delegation to the change of command ceremony of the AHAC every June in Boston. A couple of years ago, they sent their musketeers and pikemen.
Interesting !
Great video gentlemen
Nice and clean. We use less orders in our group but most of the called orders, I recognized clearly. Impressive.
Remarkable because at that time in the USA there wasn't much actual use for a pike drill.
It was most useful in Europe against other similarly organised armies with pikes and cavalry.
In the USA those big organised armies were in fact non existent. Any skirmish was smaller in size and more "guerilla like"(Indian wars).
By the time the wars between big armies came around(the English, the French or later North/South) the pikes were obsolete and replaced by muskets/guns.
As late as the Civil War the Confederacy seriously considered raising units of pikemen. Such was the weapon’s reputation and relative cheapness even then. Fortunately wiser heads prevailed.
@@EricDaMAJ Would've been interesting, one side pikemen, the other side rifles. 😉
@@johnsamu The Confederacy's based their pike enthusiasm on the English Civil War, where pike formations played a big part. The Confederates (and the Revolutionaries before them) were primarily British descendants, nostalgia played a part. Amazingly, notable Confederate leaders to include Robert E. Lee championed the idea. Men who should of known better though common sense did finally insert itself so they didn't follow through.
You're definitely right. If Confederate pikemen led the first Battle of Bull it would've likely been the _only_ Battle of Bull run. Napoleonic era smooth bore muskets would defeat pikemen with relative ease. Rifled muskets would've exterminated them before they got within 200 meters. Civil War artillery would've obliterated them at 1000 meters.
The English colonists in Salem and other Massachusetts Bay Colony towns brought European "pike & shot" tactics to New England specifically to counter the potential threat from other competing European colonists using European weapons & tactics in the new colonies. In 1629-1636 there was really no threat from the natives in New England (Jamestown, of course, is another story), but by 1637 we do see the Pequot wars, and at the same time, the Mass. Bay decided they had enough numbers from these Town regiments to consolidate into formalized, full-size regiments. So, yes maybe not on the same massive scale as European armies at the same time, Mass Bay was by far the most organized and best equipped of all the other colonies. But also by 1638-40 the Pike in New England was seen as impractical/unnecessary, and gradually phased out. There is even some speculation from some letters and anecdotes, that some natives were invited to or willingly participated in Drill in around 1629-1631.
We can see that there wasn't a need for pikes because of hind sight, but the Mass Bay colonists had to be prepared for the possibility of conflict with other European colonists. The Spanish were in Florida, the Swedes were in Delaware, the Dutch were in New Amsterdam (now New York) and the French were in Acadia (now Maine). The English in Europe fought two wars with the Dutch and one with the French in the 17th century. The colonists couldn't know in advance that these wouldn't spill over to this side of the Atlantic.
In practice we can tell from probate inventories that almost all English colonists owned firearms. The fact that they knew how to use pikes doesn't mean they were forced to use them, or that they would stupidly use them at inappropriate times.
Lmao. I was expecting some video about how they would catch and drill pike in the 17th century. In the thumbnail it even looks like he is holding a rod with a nice red lure.
Hey, Bruce Lee, nice kata.