From approximately 1410 to 1530, match cord was too thick to fit into the tiny serpentine jaws of early arquebuses... Artwork from Diebold Schilling's Berne Chronicle (1483) and tapestries depicting the Battle of Pavia (1525) show arquebusiers carrying the thick match cord wound around their arm or held in the hand, using it not to directly fire the weapon but to ignite a separate small piece of tinder fixed in the serpentine.

So for over a century, these soldiers weren't even using the cord directly — they were using it to light a separate piece of tinder to fire the gun. That's two ignition steps before the powder sees any heat. Next time you get frustrated waiting for your suppressor paperwork, remember that guys were managing burning rope-to-tinder handoffs under battlefield conditions.

A British officer's 1811 test of a smoothbore musket showed it hit a target 53% of the time at 100 yards, 30% at 200 yards, and 23% at 300 yards. But massed infantry volley fire didn't require individual accuracy — it required that enough balls were in the air at once.

This is the part that reframes everything. We spend time at the bench trying to tighten groups — and there's real value in that — but these armies intentionally built tactics around the fact that their weapons were barely hitting half the time at 100 yards. The "solution" was just more guns firing simultaneously. Different problem, completely different answer than what we'd reach for today.

The British Army's estimate of a mile of cord per soldier per year — cited in the Wikipedia source — means that supplying a regiment of several hundred men required a continuous supply chain for what was essentially treated rope.

We complain about 9mm prices. A regiment of matchlock musketeers burned through literal tons of chemically treated cordage just to stay operational — before they fired a single shot in anger. The logistics tail on a slow-match army is almost hard to picture.

What's the most finicky ignition or reliability issue you've personally dealt with — whether that's a flintlock at a black powder match, a rimfire that wouldn't light, a squib at a competition, anything — and how did you work around it?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team