Matchlocks to Assault Rifles: Part 5, The Muzzle-loading Flintlock Rifle

This is the fourth part of a ten part series. The previous parts are: Part 1 (The First “Handgonnes”), Part 2 (The Matchlock Musket), Part 3 (The Smoothbore Flintlock Musket) and Part 4 (The Bayonet).

The key feature that differentiates the rifle from the musket is that a rifle has spiral grooves cut into the inside of the barrel so that the ball or bullet is shot out from the barrel spinning on its axis. This spin makes it much more stable in flight, leading to considerably better accuracy over significantly longer ranges.

The rifle had been around for quite some time before it was adopted as a military weapon in any numbers and there are two reasons for this slow uptake. Firstly it was more expensive and whilst an individual hunter might be willing to invest in a better weapon the expense really added up when equipping mass armies of tens or hundreds of thousands of men. Secondly, as long as the weapon was a muzzle loader, a rifle was much slower to load than a simple musket.

The reason for slow loading is simple: the ball or bullet of a rifle had to be a tight fit to engage with the rifling grooves in the barrel and that made it hard to force down the barrel when loading, especially since after a few shots the barrel became fouled with burned gunpowder. A muzzle-loading rifle was therefore more accurate over long range than a smoothbore musket, but you could manage fewer shots per minute, maybe only two instead of three or four. Troops with rifles could pick off the enemy at long range but were vulnerable to being rushed whilst loading when the enemy got close. For this reason, rifles were first adopted by specialist skirmisher and sniping units.

Some German units adopted muzzle-loading rifles in the 18th century, but the most famous users of them, at least in the English-speaking world, were the British 95th (rifle) Regiment of the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800s. This light infantry unit was uniformed in green rather than the red coats of the rest of the British infantry and were made especially famous by the Sharpe series of books by Bernard Cornwell and the TV series based on them.

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