Word: matchlocks
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...horseback, the warlord had to stand out from the anonymous mass of his footsloggers, archers and pikemen. In full rig, cased like a land crab in the formal armor that was designed to protect him against sword cuts and even the slow-flying lead balls of a matchlock, he was a sight: the armor consisted of hundreds of lacquered leather platelets, like fish scales, bound together with silk cord. But his mask, finial, badge and troops' standard, all in one, was the helmet, on whose design much fantasy and theatrical cunning were expended. Because they were an inviting target...
...solemn - and often inhuman - pomposities of power on display. This movie's first sequence, for example, shows the musketeers' efforts to rescue a spy from a firing squad, greatly assisted by the fact that a) it requires something like five minutes to load and aim a matchlock gun and b) using this very latest thing in weaponry, an entire squad of men is likely to miss a stationary target not ten paces away. A little later the French monarch and his retinue pause on their way to a siege for a little lunch in the fields. A portable...
...rifle and bird gun. Weapons that took only a few weeks to manufacture were subjected to months, often years, of or namentation, with several craftsmen combining their skills. Two Munich gunmakers, for example, used bone, ivory, chiseled steel and beaten gold to decorate a combined wheel lock and matchlock for Maximilian of Bavaria around 1600, with baroque swirls and scores of delicately detailed figures from classical mythology...
Harry Byrd was not on the Senate floor when Freshman Humphrey first discharged his matchlock. But last week Byrd planted himself firmly behind his desk, flipped open a manuscript on the lectern before him and fixed the upstart with a cold, stern eye. After glancing through the Congressional Record, he began, he had found at least nine major misstatements in Humphrey's 2,000-word accusation. He would proceed forthwith to set the Senate straight on the facts...
...Matchlock Gun-Walter D. Edmonds...