Just saw yet another Three Musketeers movie on the cable box; I just love this swashbuckling tripe for some reason.
But it just occured to me: why do the Musketeers fight with swords? Shouldn’t they fight with muskets?? If not, why are they named Musketeers???
Thanks in advance for any historical clarification from the Teeming Millions – my grasp of French history and cheezy movies is at stake!
From http://www.globalstage.net/goback/three_discuss.html
also
This should keep you going till somebody who actually knows what their talking about comes along 
The world is insane.
DO NOT try to make sence out of it, as it will take you along too
That is all
9
Rats! I have wondered that for years, so I came dashing in here expecting to find that someone had sorted it all out in 3 posts. Sadly disillusioned now - I mean I can see that the swashbuckling is more dramatically satisfying, but one does have to wonder why bother carrying the muskets around at all. Or maybe they always forgot to buy musket firing powder, or whatever they use. Or it was a rainy time and the guns got too wet…?
Damn you squeegee, I won’t be able to get the musketeers out of my head now. Oh, and hello and welcome to the Straight Dope.
yojimbo, thanks for the clarification.
However, (and I just can’t resist the temptation to ask):
What exactly is a swash, and why would it need to be buckled?
And now for a WAG (Wild Ass Guess)
Ok the where Musketeers which AFAIK was a section of the French army, like the infantry. If they went to war they would have used muskets in some mad old fashioned I’ll walk at you firing and you walk at me firing sort of way.
The also had swords and would use them in close contact fighting as they where more effective. Most of the fighting we see in the movies is close quarter fighting so that’s why they use swords. They also had a macho honour thing going so iit would be more of a manly way of fighting than just taking a gun out and shooting somebody ala Indianna Jones.
And welcome squeegee good to have you here. BTW was it the Oliver Reed/Michael York movie? I love them there sooo funny.
No, no, not buckled. Bucklered. Which means protected, by a shield.
Going to war with only a musket isn’t a bright move. It takes forever to reload, and the range is as poor as the accuracy. Besides, the thing is so heavy it has to be supported while firing.
If you’re not careful, any enemies surviving the first salvo will run up & kill you while you’re reloading. Though a massed salvo from a bunched group of muskets would break most attacking forces, it was a very good idea to have a melee weapon as well. On its own, outside the battlefield, the musket is hopeless.
As for Dumas’ figures, I believe they were officers & gentlemen, who wouldn’t bother with something so profane as firearms - pistols, perhaps, but those, too, were one-shot affairs. Fencing, OTOH, was one of the skills that distinguished gentlemen from the rabble. Officers still have ceremonial swords, right ? And in the three musketeers’ timeframe, having the time to keep up fencing skill was indeed a luxury.
S. Norman
Rats - yojimbo posted the same. Ah well.
Yeah but whats annoying is you said it sooo much better than me. 
The “kings Musketeers” was one of the first organized firearms units. In war, they carried the musket- which was an expensive weapon for a short while. However, it was heavy, and slow to load. Thus, while bopping around Paree, you would carry a sword, or perhaps a pistol. It was a brief period where swashbuckling could really work. Guns were just good enuf- that running around in a lot of armour did nothing but slow you down (a good steel breastplate MIGHT stop a lower powered pistol bullet, which is why they were retained for a while), while guns were not so good that they were good for much outside war. The powder was so bad that they could not be kept loaded for very long, and the muskets were fired mostly by means of slow-matches. Thus- if you REALLY knew you were going to use it- a musket was great- otherwise, a rapier was better.
Not musch to add, except that ‘yup, the guys are right’.
Having done English Civil War re-enactments, I can vouch for the lack of accuracy and failure rate of firing a musket.
Aiming one a musket could be just as accurate as catching a hyper-active toddler - I’ve hit the broadside of a barn with musket fire. Too bad it was several feet away from my intended target. Another of my re-enactor colleagues (excellent marksman with many guns) went out turkey hunting with a matchlock - he wasn’t surprised that the pilgrims nearly starved. The smell of the match spooked the deer, and the explosion flushed out anything in a half-mile radius. (We had stored-bought turkey that year.)
Slow match took awhile to burn down (and just when you thought it was a dud - BOOM! - right in your face, and percussion locks (later invention) were a little better, but still a little edgy. Wet powder is such a pain in the dupa, and re-loading took at least 20 seconds (pour powder/pack/add wadding/pack/add ammo/pack/prime pan/light match (no zippo here!)/aim) [probably forgot a few things, but you get the idea], allowing your enemy time to advance on you. By that time, if you were in battle, you were probably mown down by the guys with the pikes.
Pick up the “Osprey” series book (great books on military history, and most of the illustrations of uniforms and weaponry are excellent) on the English Civil War (the “Musketeer” time period. You’ll find that several of the officers did carry swords as well as guns.
Mmmmmmmm. Michael York. Mmmmmmmm. Oliver Reed.
One neat costuming note - Faye Dunaway (M’lady) is wearing a Montero - a hat contructed to fold up into a small cap or unfold to cover the head and neck (looks like a baseball cap with flaps when folded up), not as flashy as the wide-brimmed hats that everyone expects a ‘Musketeer’ to wear, but historically accurate for the time period. And worn by men, too!
Fair enough. So, what’s a ‘swash’ ? A sword?
Would that make ‘swashbuckler’ == ‘sword and shield’ ?
Or is a ‘swashbuckler’ a specific kind of buckler?
Apparently not. The meaning of swash that seems to apply is “swagger or bluster,” so swashbuckler is someone who carries a shield with a swagger. Seems apt, but I probably wouldn’t try to call anyone a shieldswagger.
IIRC, the York/Reed versions had at least one significant sequence in which the musketeers used firearms extensively.
I really liked those movies.
Trivia bit: Oliver Reed was severely injured and nearly killed during the making of the movies. He was stabbed in the throat during a fight scene.
Actually, a “swash” in a small inlet. If you go to the beach, and see a long finger of water stretching inland for as much as a 1/2 mile, that’s what you’re looking at.
Pirates would use these swashes to hide in because they were easily defensible from the water (but not land).
Perhaps it would help if we would elaborate a little for you on the history of muskets…
As mentioned, muskets of the period were inaccurate and slow loading. Why? Well, they were inaccurate mostly because they were smoothbore (as opposed to rifled) and the balls they fired were not perfectly round. Bullets would tumble erratically in the air and would therefore randomly deflect. Rifling would later fix much of this problem and would extend the effective range of musketry from 100 yards to 400 yards or more. And of course most of us probably realize the difference between loading a musket with powder and shot and loading a gun with modern cartridges.
We also must take into account the method with which the gun is fired, commonly referred to as the “lock” (presumably so-called due to the similarity to locks of the period). The earliest handheld guns (roughly 1300’s) were nothing more than miniature cannons held in a gloved hand or on a pole. From multiple craftmen came refinements in the design, and the matchlock evolved sometime during the 1400’s. It used a burning wick to light the powder in a flashpan, which in turn lit the powder in the breech, firing the gun. There was some delay between pulling the trigger and firing, which led to further inaccuracy.
If my chronology is correct, this is the type of gun the musketeers would be carrying. It is technically possible that they could have had wheellocks, which were intricate and expensive, but those definitely were not standard army issue. The wheellock had a winding-watch type mechanism to strike a spark against an iron pyrite wheel, IIRC. The flintlock (which made matchlocks obsolete) did not make an appearance until the 1700’s, percussion caps were invented somewhere around 1830.
My history here is a little weak, but the Army tactics of the day were basically “shot and pike”. In other words, you marched toward the enemy formations in ranks and unleashed a single shot volley of musket fire, then closed the distance and stabbed each other with long spears (aka pikes). Elite, trained troops would use swords instead of spears. Eventually the bayonet would make the gun and pike the same weapon.
(This is all from memory, so don’t quote me.)
The other logical reason you’d use a sword? Stealth. If you can only fire your gun once, and it attracts everybody’s attention, it’s probably not a good idea. Stabbing a guy in the back doesn’t make nearly as much noise.
What, you think all these guys were chivalrous?
The information on matchlocks and wheellocks has been interesting, but the Musketeers would almost certainly have used flintlocks. The earliest proto-flintlock, the snaphaunce, had been tried out around 1570. By 1620, the improved genuine flintlock had been introduced to the French army (and these were the King’s Musketeers–so likely to get decent weapons), and the siege of Rochelle featured in the novel was ordered by Richelieu in 1628.
To ‘swash one’s buckle’: To brag or boast. It doesn’t refer to a ‘buckler’ or shield (English usage, that), but to ‘strike’ (old French, corrupted).
The Gentlemen of the era were expected to boast of their exploits by social norm, and when gathered about, they would strike the hilts of their swords against the rather large and ornate buckles they wore, as a way of adding emphasis to their words. Not unlike pounding one’s hand on a desk or table, as is sometimes done today.
You can vouch for the accuracy of musket fire? You mean you guys use live ammunition in these re-enactments?!?
Damn! And I thought some of these American Civil War re-enactors were hard core…