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Oh God, really?! Tell me they do these things on the Yankee side of the Atlantic! Mrs. O and I have fun doin’ the U.S. Civil War reenactments but that would be the absolute bomb. Especially buying all the clothes!
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NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!
Target practice! Large target on bales of hay. I can tell you, the trees beyond the target were not happy.
Then there was cannon practice. Now that was cool. Except for the time (I wasn’t there, but I heard about it) one regiment fired a package of fresh cow manure, not knowing there was someone on the other side of the hill.
Direct splatter. And no showers at the site.
Blackwell’s Third Company, ‘Benjamin’ at your service. (okay, I was the cross-dressing drummer - I was the only one who could play the drum, and my cooking skills were atrocious. I could do less damage with a musket than a ladle.)
Not sure if the reigiments are still active (this was several years ago, as evidenced from the conversation re-created below). Once I get the e-mail back up again, I’ll see if I can contact anyone who may know. Most of the regiments were based in the Northeast US.
Didn’t get a lot of support on this side of the pond (but quite popular in England, obviously - PBS ran a BBC mini-series - “By The Sword Divided” - where some of our other companies were involved, mush like hiring re-enactors for “Glory”.
“Are you in a play?”
“No we’re re-enactors - English Civil War.”
“Civil War, huh? You’re dressed awfully funny for Civil War. Are you north or south?”
“Cavalier. He’s a Roundhead, <elbow to ribs> ugh, Parliament.”
“Cavalier? Oh, The Three Musketeers! Which one of you is D’Artanian?”
Sigh.
“He was French. This is the English Civil War. You know, Oliver Cromwell, Charles the First.”
“Huh? The English had a civil war? When? I didn’t hear about it? When did Charles get on the throne, and is Diana Queen?”
And so on…
And we made our own clothes - both the field wear and the ‘peacocky’ flashy stuff. I hated wearing a bumroll.
Plenty of people have elaborated about the history of the musket but no one has discussed the rapier. Since I don’t think it’s all that relevant to the discussion, I won’t bother…but for one little factoid.
The rapier is a strictly civillian weapon. It was virtually useless on the field. Learning rapier play was in no way part of a soldier or an officer’s military training.
Well, paint me blue and call me Dopey Smurf. That’s what I get for going strictly from memory… I bet I was thinking about rifling being invented in the 1700’s, not the flintlock.
Thanks for the correction. Of course, the accuracy and load time issues were still a problem with the smoothbore flintlock.
Okay, so I’m hearing from the Masses that:
- Musketeers were probably members of the military,
trained to execute suicidal march & fire tactics in
formation. - Musketeers didn’t user rapiers. Or at least weren’t
trained in them.
On the other hand:
The films seem to portray the Musketeers as a fairly small
and elite group, sworn to protect the King, who fought with
rapiers. Kind of a Renaissance Secret Service.
So:
Did Dumas just borrow the name Musketeers and associate
it with his fictional swaggering rapier-dandies, or is
there some tangible, historical connection between
the Dumas ‘Musketeers’ and real Musketeers, whoever they were ?
How do you get into these reenactments?
From sources I’ve read, they stood still, fired, and had pikemen to protect them from cavalry…
The designation “musketeer” means little more than a soldier who carried a musket. However, as with most military organizations, certain groups of soldiers were assigned certain tasks. Seems logical that if I was a king, I’d want the pick of the litter to guard my castle and entrust secrets to. Now, I’ve never actually read any Dumas, but I’ll make a WAG and say the Three Musketeers were supposed to be the best of the best, probably highly experienced field officers.
Oops. I’m making quite the pathetic showing in this thread…
Tom already indicated that Dumas’s Musketeers were specifically “King’s Musketeers”, which I suspect was probably a real French Army unit, probably of regimental size.
I’d wager they were romanticized, exaggerated examples of real soldiers, as I don’t believe Dumas was writing a historical record.
Tom, maybe I’ll just let you finish this one up…
The Three Musketeers is semi-historical, although Dumas probably didn’t realize that his sources actually reflected facts (as opposed to being interesting forgeries).
D’Artagnan lived about a generation later than Dumas portrayed (he was commander of one company of King’s Musketeers, but under Louis XIV, the son of the Louis XIII in the novel). Treville was not as important as he is made to seem, and Richelieu eventually got the upper hand of him, banishing him for his involvement in the Cinq-Mars conspiracy of (IIRC) 1642. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (actually d’Athos, de Portau, and d’Aramitz) also existed; none of them had long or distinguished careers as Musketeers, and d’Athos and d’Aramitz were related to Treville, which is how they were recruited for the Musketeers; d’Artagnan may not have known any of them.
Lady de Winter (Milady) is made up of whole cloth; however, the other major non-musketeer characters (Louis XIII, Anne of Austria, Richelieu, Buckingham, Felton) are real, and did the things attributed to them, although the interpretations of their characters are Dumas’.
The King’s Musketeers were sort of a cross between a training school for young officer-candidates (not that they weren’t expected to fight, too) and a royal bodyguard (thus, Richelieu’s having the Cardinal’s Guards). The entry requirements were more or less what Treville tells d’Artagnan. Since the Musketeers were officer-candidates, they were young aristocrats; as such, they were trained with the (civilian) rapier, although privately, not as part of their military education.
Aka has it right. Altho originally, they were a fighting regiment of musketeers (and one of the first), they became a Guard unit, and mostly did errands for the King. Thus, the rapier was important for their usual "about Paris’ duties. The REAL Kings guard are those other guys, in Gold & Silver, with halbards- that you see a few times in the Movie.
screech-owl writes:
> 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.
If the sources I’ve read are correct, the Pilgrims didn’t hunt. They trapped for game. Guns didn’t become accurate enough to be used for regular hunting until the nineteenth century. Most eighteenth century Americans didn’t even own a gun, and many of the ones that were around weren’t in workable condition. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that guns began to become reasonably common. Even in the old West, they weren’t as omnipresent as you might think. It’s not clear that there were ever any shootouts as protrayed in movies, with two shooters a few dozen feet from each other daring the other to draw. When people did shoot each other back then, they wanted to be close so that they were sure that they would hit their target.
A few additions to the learned comments of Akatsukami:
As a matter of fact Dumas and his collaborator Maquet based their work on several histories of the period and the first book of the trilogy in particular (The Three Musketeers) has one of its main plot points directly taken from historical accounts (see below).
Not quite true. The Mémoires inédits de Louis-Henri de Loménie, comte de Brienne, secrétaire d’Etat sous Louis XIV, published in Paris in 1828, relate the whole story of the diamonds being stolen from the duke of Buckingham (which diamonds had been secretly sent to him by Anne d’Autriche, queen of France, through the intermediary of the Duchesse de Chevreuse). The diamonds were stolen at a ball from the Duke of Buckingham as related in the novel, and the duke of Buckingham suspected the countess of Clarick, with good reasons, since the memoirs say that she is the one that sent the diamonds to the cardinal of Richelieu.
This version of the story seems to be confirmed by the Mémoires of La Rochefoucauld, except that La Rochefoucauld names the stealer of the diamonds as countess Carlisle, a mistriss of the Duke of Buckingham.
Dumas must have read the mémoires of de Brienne since in another of his non-fiction books, Louis XIV et son siècle, he relates the anecdote but attributes the theft to a lady Clarick.
The history of the non-fictional d’Artagnan (in brief): Charles de Batz-Castelmore, aka d’Artagnan was born in Lupiac (Gers) in 1613 or 1615 and died at Maëstricht on 25 June 1673. (He would have been much too young to participate in the events of the first novel of the series, since he would have been approx. 12). He joined the Gardes of M. des Essarts around 1635 and participated in the sieges of Arras, Aire-sur-la-Lys, La Bassée and Bapaume, then left for england and came back shortly after the death of Louis XIII. He became a mousquetaire in 1644, but when the company was abolished in 1646 he became an agent of cardinal Mazarin. In 1658 he was named sous-lieutenant of the reconstituted Musketeers (reformed in 1657), arrested Fouquet at Nantes in 1651 (as mentioned in the third novel in the series, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne), brought a prisoner to Pignerol (possibly the mysterious Masque de fer), and finally died during a campaign in Holland.
Athos: historical figure would be Armand de Sillègue d’Athos d’Autevielle (1615-1643), a cousin (far-removed) of M. de Tréville, Porthos and Aramis.
Aramis: historical figure is Henri d’Aramits (? - 1674), who entered the company of Mousquetaires of M. de Tréville in 1640.
Porthos: historical figure is Isaac de Portau (1617 - ?) who served in the Gardes of M. des Essarts around 160 and joined the Mousquetaires of M. de Tréville in 1643.
Note: all above information is taken from Les grand romans d’Alexandre Dumas - I. Les Mousquetaires - Les Trois Mouusquetaires, Vingt Ans Après, Bouquins, Robert Laffont, in particular from the preface by Claude Schopp and the dictionary of historical figures included after the preface.
Wow! Great information, gang.
You guys (& girls) rock!
Wasn’t the Kentucky rifle a good weapon that was carried into battle agains the English in the Rev’n War?
Actually, not specifically true. The “Jaeger” or hunting rifle was known in Germany (and likely elsewhere in Europe) well before the Pilgrim’s time. It’s highly unlikely, however, that they’d have had many, if any at all, of these fairly expensive arms.
The Kentucky (Pennsylvania) Long Rifle, while quite accurate, was developed quite some time after the Pilgrims arrival. First making it’s appearance in it’s “Green Mountain Boys” form in 1725, or thereabouts, it arrived on the scene more than a hundred years after the Pilgrims landed. Interestingly enough, the name “Kentucky Long Rifle” was first documented around 1812, well after the Revolution.