When, Where and Why was the BAYONET INVENTED?

george bennetts when was the bayonet invented and by whom and why [Music] hi folks matt easton here scholar gladiator now the answer to this question is not as simple as you might think most people will think the bayonet they think of the term bayonne but the city in france which i've been to it's very nice by the way in the basque paybask and um they would think that this is a french invention in fact lots of websites you'll find do you say that but it's not as clear-cut as that um the fact is that the bayonet comes out of necessity okay and that's why in this video we're also going to look at why why was the bayonet invented now um before i go on i just want to briefly say that you will of course be familiar with different types of bandits from different periods we start off with the plug bayonet but more about that in a minute and it goes through to socket bayonets as seen here again we'll come to that and it finishes up with types of knife and sword bayonet here's a world war one example as found uh or mounted on the smle british rifle used in world war one which many of you be familiar with there are shorter varieties that we used in world war ii and still used today of course in the 19th century as well as the socket bayonet there were other varieties that came along like the yatagan bayonet here with a blade modelled on the turkish ottoman yatagan originally these seem to have come along because of course if you're muzzle loading so the muzzle ring goes through here then it means that the point is out of the line of your ramming hand coming down so it's quite a useful shape but additionally there was a guy called a french guy called colonel mary mong who was a big advocate for the yatagan blade used as a weapon in the hand so for numerous reasons yatagan bayonets from about 1840 were used particularly in britain by sergeants but in france they were used by all troops for for a period of about 20 years um more than that actually more like 40 years and um we even find more exotic varieties like this pioneers bayonet now this is massive you might think that's a huge thing to have mounted on the end of an already big and heavy uh musket or rifle and yes that's it is but these of course could double up as sidearms it's essentially a cutlass and indeed there are naval cutlass versions as well so sailors had types with a cutlass guard that you can mount on the end of a naval firearm usually a carbine usually a shortened rifle a bit shorter than the infantries but this is a pioneers one which has essentially got a knuckle bow guard rather than the cutlass hand guard it's got a straight blade so it's still effective for thrusting with a spear point but you'll notice it has a saw blade along the back so this can be used as a tool it can be used as a weapon in the hand a short sword or it can be used mounted on the end of a rifle um for fighting it you know in a battle essentially in line with the rest of the infantry or indeed for repelling cavalry so they come in a huge variety um we're not going to look at that in this video and i suspect that lots of you watching this video will know that okay so the most common types of bayonet historically you could say or the most certainly ones most people are familiar with are the knife bayonet as used extensively in world war ii and ever since and the socket bayonet which has a socket and a sometimes defined as a zigzag kind of bar at the side so that the point is offset so again you can take your ramrod out here and you can ram you can muzzle load the gun uh that becomes less of a necessity when you get breach loading guns but is it as simple as uh the the standard kind of it was invented in france and everybody copied it the answer's no in fact the history of the bayonet is more complex than that so who actually invented it was it one group of people or was it lots of people collectively and why did they invent it now as a dealer in antique weapons like these bayonets i regularly have to photograph them and i am always looking to increase my skills and my photography skills and my ability to represent the objects that i want people to appreciate and hopefully buy as well through my website and skillshare is a website where you can gain all sorts and brush up on all sorts of skills skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of courses it's about improving your existing skills or learning completely new ones so as an antique weapon dealer i am always looking at new ways i can improve my business and particularly in terms of photography as well i find that great photographs tell a great story and also help with your sales fundamentally the latest course that i've been looking at is one run by sean dalton who's a travel photographer and the course is called still life photography capturing stories of everyday objects at home as well as giving you a whole bunch of pro tips it's also really great that the way the course is constructed in a way that you actually take photographs as you go through the course with sean your day-to-day is filled with tasks and endless to-do lists prioritize your self-care and wellness by using skillshare as a way to invest in yourself unwind and relax skillshare is ad-free so you can stay in the zone while you're exploring new skills it has new premium classes launched every week so there's always something new to discover and the entire catalogue is now available with subtitles in spanish french portuguese and german so my special offer only through this channel right now is if you check out that link below for the first thousand people of you so this is only for a thousand of you so be quick for the first thousand of you you will get one month's free trial of skillshare completely to check out all of the content and enjoy as much as you like so it'll cost you nothing check out that link right now so back to bayonets now first of all rather than we go into the the why we'll look at the where and when okay so where were bayonets invented and when well first of all we have to talk about the word bayonet okay which clearly means a thing from bayonne in france so therefore a lot of people take the simplistic approach of this was a thing invented in bayonne well sometimes words and names come to be used and come to be associated with an object that doesn't mean that they were necessarily created there or invented there first it's clear that there was a type of knife or dagger that was being made in bayonne however if we look at the earliest references they're not actually clearly describing what we'd now know as a bayonet that is something which can be attached to the end of a firearm the actual the earliest references we have talking about bayonets actually just describe a type of dagger while the term bayonet starts to appear in the 16th century that is the 1500s it's not clearly describing something which attaches to or enters or goes into or is used in conjunction with a firearm it seems to just be describing an edged weapon and indeed if we look at cot graves dictionary of 1611 it describes a bayonet as a type of pocket knife and in fact what it describes actually sounds like a pen knife it describes it as having an assortment of blades so in that case even in 16 and 11 we're already into the 17th century there it seems they're not really describing something explicitly that attaches to a gun you'd think in english if they wanted to describe a edged weapon attached to a gun that would have been the first thing they would say about it but no indeed it just says that this is a type of knife moreover from the beginning of the 1600s in europe we don't really have any representations in art or archaeology or anything else or text that suggests the use of an edge weapon which attaches directly to the firearm itself so we don't have any evidence for the bayonet as an object and in fact the evidence for the bayonet word is not associated with an object that attacks attaches to a firearm additionally in 1655 pierre borrel talks about the existence of bayonets and again he talks about a type of dagger that's made in bayonne but there's no mention of it attaching to a firearm even though by this point there were indeed edged weapons which attached to firearms so the bayonet is an object by 1655 did exist but yep but pierre borrel doesn't say that a bayonet is what that is so what we've got here is a problem we've got a problem of the terminology the word bayonet and we the object of what we know a bayonet to be now and it seems that at least in europe in the early 1600s at some point in the early 1600s objects which attached edged weapons which attached to firearms were invented however if we look in the early 1600s the word bayonet doesn't seem to be associated with those objects the word bayonet seems to only describe a type of dagger or knife that is made in the city of baon now as we get towards the middle of the 1600s around the 1630s 40s indeed we know that plug bayonets existed and i'll talk a bit more about bayonets and their use in warfare and europe in a little bit but let's try and answer this question of where and when do bayonets plug bayonets in this case that is a bayonet that literally rams into the barrel of your gun so if i just take this socket bayonet this off this is a later invention okay socket bayonet off so imagine you've got a muzzle loading firearm and for whatever reason we'll talk about the reasons in a bit you want to have a edged weapon attached to this as quickly as possible one of the simplest ways you can do it bearing in mind that this is a solid steel tube and fairly strong in itself you take your dagger essentially which has a tapered conical like handle you stick it in the end you give it a bash you maybe give it a twist to make sure it's securely fixed and you've now got a spear yes indeed you can no longer shoot your firearm however remember this is a muzzle loading firearm where in optimum conditions you're only going to be shooting three or four shots per minute so if we're now in close melee combat you're not going to be reloading anyway okay so you've now got a weapon you can use in close range you can use it as a spear as a pole arm obviously you can hit with any part of it but primarily the thrusting is going to be the important part so that's a plug bayonet when were these first invented well the answer might surprise you so i only found this out recently but there is a chinese treatise that's right a chinese treatise which i think is called binglu although my pronunciation is probably horrible and it dates to 1606 now this is earlier than any uh any that i found anyway european example of a plug bayonet and it is explicitly and clearly a plug bayonet in a chinese military treaties moreover it describes why this thing existed as well and the the answers are sort of obvious but we'll look at those in a second so it is a plug bayonet essentially you've got a matchlock musket so in china in the 16th century in china and japan as you know firearms had already come in just as they had in europe and they were hugely changing warfare however you've got a slow rate of fire most although some and in china they did have some early breach loaders as we did in europe as well but most of them were muzzleloaders but whether it's a breach loader or muzzleloader in this period it's still a relatively basic piece of machinery and it has a relatively slow rate of fire and because of a lot of people with hand weapons and the nature of warfare at the time they needed to have a musketeer who was able to defend themselves with a weapon now let's just break out for a second and add a little bit of context in here so for those of you who don't know for most of the 16th century and for a good part of the 17th century in most parts of the world where firearms were used because the firearm operator much like a crossbowman is quite vulnerable to cavalry attacks or to just mass infantry charge with hand weapons because of their slow rate of fire it is important that they are either protected or able to protect themselves and so the standard doctrine was to have a group of people musketeers operating muskets be it matchlock uh flintlock whatever with loading and firing while another group of people usually protect them protected them usually with pikes so you might hear of the era of pike and shot and the era of pike of pikenshot basically means those who operate firearms and those who operate spears and pull weapons to protect them for the most part now obviously if you can if you've only got half your men who are operating pikes and half your men who are operating firearms if you can find a way to combine those two things everyone's a winner even you've doubled your firepower and potentially you've doubled your handheld combat troops as well now let's come back to the chinese treaties now the chinese treatise is very very interesting because it specifically describes why you would want to stick a plug bayonet in the end of your barrel and it talks about essentially coming up against bandits so presumably people who are more numerous or indeed just coming into melee combat interestingly it doesn't as far as i'm aware mentioned defending against cavalry and i've noticed when talking with people who are used to 18th and 19th century warfare even 17th century warfare that there is a perception that the bayonet was designed primarily to defend against cavalry and i think that's a little bit uh narrow-minded okay i don't think it's wrong but i think it's too narrow yes that's one of the things that bayonets were designed for however fundamentally if we boil it down to its fundamental building blocks what it's there to do is to give the person who's got a firearm which is not a very good hand-hand combat weapon a better hand-hand combat ability and that doesn't matter whether it's against a man on a horse with a sword or a lance or whether it's against a bunch of bandits who are just steaming him with kitchen knives okay the simple fact is that people operating slow rate of fire firearms are very vulnerable to anybody charging in doesn't matter whether on a horse or whether on foot or indeed if it's in buildings a built-up area a jungle a swamp whatever so fundamentally this is not necessarily about just defending against cavalry it's about defending against anybody and that could be another bunch of people with muskets who've decided well we're going to charge him with our knives or our short swords the fact is the rate of fire at this period wasn't enough to like in the 19th century to mow down charging people with hand weapons the 21 foot rule guys so you need something to be able to defend yourself in that scenario so while the earliest so far found and documented example of a plug bar now bear in mind this is a socket bearing not a plug banner i don't own a plug bearing unfortunately but a plug bayonet which essentially is a dagger that you jam into the end of your muzzle while the earliest known example is a chinese military treatise from 1606 does that mean that the chinese invented the bayonet uh not necessarily so this is where it gets a bit complicated so sometimes absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and the fact is that there is some hints that maybe already around the year 1600 in europe people were starting to also think about this question and this is one of the points i really want to get across in this video is that what i think we see here is convergent evolution okay bear in mind that firearms had only been a major part of warfare whether it's in europe whether it's in china japan wherever they had only been a major part of warfare muzzle loading firearms for about 100 years at this point okay yeah we could say firearms come in in the 1400s in europe however they weren't they weren't massed they weren't they weren't mass ranks of people using firearms really until the 1500s so they hadn't been around for a huge amount of time and the simple fact is that the same conditions affected people whether it's in japan or whether it was in germany or england or china the same conditions affected all of them for about a century they had been operating muzzle loading firearms and coming in the same circumstances and the same predicaments and i think that they had all come to a conclusion that there was an advantage to have some kind of spike you could add on the end of your weapon and so i think the plug bayonet whilst it was clearly invented in china by 1606 bear in mind if it's in the treaties in 1606 it was probably invented at least a decade before that and i think that we probably see a similar thing in europe we know that plug bayonets were around by the middle of the 1600s in europe they weren't common but they were they existed so therefore i think they appeared some decades before that in limited numbers and in fact we know that certain people in the mid 1600s were actually issued with plug bayonets so we know that they had been around for a while they weren't a brand new invention and they weren't an instant game changer i have to say as well in the mid 1600s it was still normal to have pikeman a musket men but i think what we see here is convergent evolution i think it's a very simple easy fix for the problem of how does the musketeer defend themselves so as stated whilst through most of the 17th century or certainly the middle of the 17th century the standard operating procedure for armies was to have people with muskets and people with pikes protecting them by the 30 years war so the middle of the 17th century we know that plug bayonets were in some limited use and indeed there's a rapid jean martinez was important in france in instigating the use of plug plug bayonets as regulation and in fact we see in england as well the plug bayonet starting to become regulation for specific groups of troops in the 1670s and 1680s so really um how it panned out was plug bayonets were being used in limited numbers in the middle of the 17th century in europe but by the late 17th century particularly the 1670s onwards plug bayonets more and more started to become a standard piece of equipment and of course this led to the gradual abandonment abandonment of the pike or pikeman this was great for the military authorities of course because it meant you could give a standard armament to all of your troops you didn't have to think about pikes and pikeman armor for that group of troops and then muskets and you know musketeer uniforms and hats for that group you could now give them all the same equipment very good for um for supply and economics but also it meant that in battle you had one type of soldier now you had one type of soldier that had a gun and a bayonet and they could therefore protect themselves or they could storm into buildings at bayonet point do a bayonet charge this kind of thing and so this is really the period when we see the beginning of the bayonet charge the idea of shooting your gun and then going in with hand weapons now in britain in 1689 something very important happened and that was the battle of kylie cranky and this was part of the jacobite uprising so in during the battle of kelly cranky which i suggest you go and search because very interesting conflict very important certainly in british history um the forces of william of orange were overwhelmed by the jacobite highland forces and the way that the highlanders fought in that battle was essentially and this was a typical highland charge if you've ever heard of the highland charge so they did the typical thing of uh firing their guns so obviously they used the landscape they used the lay of the land it's actually quite a complex battle in many ways but essentially their tactics were to sneak up on the royalist forces and then get within a good shot good shooting range but only fire one shot for the most part they didn't stand there reloading so the government forces are essentially the royal forces are essentially um standing there um they're they're giving a volley fire then they're um getting their um shot out they're reloading they're ramming they're doing everything they need to do they're cocking then they're firing another volley this is fairly slow of course so what the highlanders decided to do to overcome this was to basically charge in do one volley or one shot probably independent fire they didn't fire even as a volley one fire and then drop the firearm pull out their um this is the only sort i've got to hand at the moment but pull out their sword or axe or um uh kind of lock up axe or whatever they're carrying as a backup thing and charge in and it worked it worked fantastically in fact and the highland charge was extremely effective at kelly cranky and the sources suggest that one of the reasons it was so effective bear in mind that the william of orange's forces were using plug bayonets which they have to ram down the muzzle of their gun now if you're ramming down your if the way of deploying your bayonet is to ram it down the muzzle then you can't keep it mounted while you're firing you're either firing or you're using your bayonet one or the other you can't have the plug bayonet mounted and still fire well certainly you could fire the battery light out maybe but you can't reload so the problem was and the sources suggest that what happened is they were standing there in line firing the highlanders charged on them so quickly they didn't have time at least as a concerted and unified force to get their plug bayonets in so they're left with basically a fairly heavy and unwed wieldable firearm fighting against people who are charging in with broadsword and taj or lockhart acts or whatever so they were just overwhelmed they were they were completely swarmed and defeated it was a very um categorical victory so shortly afterwards they started to look at the idea of a type of bayonet that you could have mounted on your firearm on your musket and have it mounted while you were reloading and firing and they came up with essentially the socket bayonet now again as to who invented the socket bayonet this is probably open to some debate although generally speaking british people do claim ownership of this but the socket boner also known in period as the zigzag bayonet because it goes like a zed almost the advantage to this is you can keep it on your um keep it on your musket at all times the reason it has this zigzag is of course because you need the muzzle to be clear to shoot but also importantly the muzzle needs to be cleared to be reloaded with the ramrod so you take the ramrod out of here and you need to be able to get that down the muzzle now an interesting detail i think which a lot of people don't necessarily know is that the bayonet tends to curve slightly away as well so it's a slightly odd angle on these things because you don't want to be ramming your your charge home and smash your hand into the end of your bayonet and stab yourself so they have to have firstly an offset socket and then usually they have a slightly curved out blade as well you'll notice this example from the 19th century on an enfield rifle actually has an asymmetrical point as well so it's actually scooped away there so it's taking the point as far away from the hand as possible that does mean that the whilst you can thrust this way um often often the thrusts were given that way with the fire lock or the mechanism up at the top here and so it's more in line with your thrust otherwise it's kind of curving off to the side minor detail but this um this meant that they could now keep their bayonets fitted and be ready for hand hand combat at any moment still be able to really reload still be able to fire an important detail is this later version has a locking mechanism of it on it so once you've turned that you can't get the bayonet off earlier versions did not have that and the bayonet could be pulled off the rifle which is something which occasionally happened in combat uh it's mentioned in india in the 18th century um so that the locking mechanism was the the final kind of um detail that made the socket bayonet a completely finished entity and the socket bayonet stayed in use until the modern world it was still being used in the 20th century so the final part of the bayonet story that i'm going to tell in this video is around 1697 the piece of rice wick reef wick i'm not sure how to pronounce it after that it seems that both the english and a lot of the german states essentially abolished the uh abolished pikeman did away with pikeman completely and the the socket bayonet by that point was completely standard so as we go into the 1700s you've got huge armies whether it's france germany england wherever in europe who've basically adopted by that point the zigzag socket bayonet and this really changes warfare because it means as i say there are no more pikemen anymore everybody has a musket with a bayonet on it but moreover because the bayonet is usually permanently fitted in combat at this point it means that at any given point your forces can give a bayonet charge so they are no longer the musketeers are no longer the people who stand there stationary reloading firing reloading firing you can instantly turn them into an aggressive attacking and ground capturing force or indeed building capturing force because they've got their bayonets fitted and ready at all times is the bayonet a fantastic hand weapon no i think there's some mythology about the bayonet because of course the bayonet is one of the hand weapons that has survived in mass use you know commando daggers and and gurkha cooker's aside it's one of the weapons that survived hand-to-hand weapons that survived into the modern world and is still sometimes used even in iraq there was a british couple of british bayonet charges bayonets are and there was a very famous one in the falklands war and 1980s so that bayonets are still used in the modern world occasionally not very often but occasionally and therefore the bayonet has almost mythological power to it but in the 18th century with relatively slow loading muzzle loading firearms the bayonet was a very potent weapon especially when you consider the nature of the recruits who were often being used in these armies they weren't they often weren't necessarily the most trained or most um experienced forces and if you had an experienced body of of troops who had fought in a few campaigns and were happy to use their bayonets if you come up against a bunch of fresh recruits who are fine to reload their guns they know how to reload they know how to shoot they might even have a good rate of fire and you charge them with bayonets the chances are they might run away and so therefore a lot of people say oh well there weren't huge numbers of casualties caused by bayonets and i've always argued that's not important what's important is the bayonet all the way up to world war one and even in some cases world war ii by used by the japanese the bayonet took ground and held it so you don't necessarily need to kill enemies if you make them run away then that's still the goal achieved and indeed even in the modern world it's sometimes used for crowd control and things like that and again it's not killing people but it's doing a job that the firearm can't do by itself i hope this has been interesting and maybe slightly informative i was very surprised to find out the first known example of the socket of a plug bayonet is in china 1606 in time we might find comparably early or even perhaps earlier examples in europe i don't think the chinese invented the plug banner i think it was convergent evolution because i think having a bayonet on a muzzle loading slow rate of fire firearm is a necessity certainly in the warfare of that period whether it was china europe japan wherever and i think the evolution to a socket bayonet made an awful lot of sense and finally the knife bayonets and sword bayonets that came along later are really just an evolution of the socket bayonet at the end of the day they have an element which goes around the muzzle they have an element which attaches to the side so they are offset they are basically a type of socket bayonet in use the only difference is they have a hilt or a handle on them which means that when you dismount them you can also use them as a knife a sword a saw or whatever but fundamentally as a bayonet they're essentially a big bulky type of socket bayonet um yeah so i hope that's been useful and interesting if you haven't liked this video already then please go and click that like button and um if you're not subscribed please consider doing so thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 53,958

Keywords: who invented the bayonet, when was the bayonet invented, where was the bayonet invented, when were bayonets invented, types of bayonet, history of the bayonet

Id: -4xvtUACVR0

Length: 29min 52sec (1792 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2022