Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A modern recreation of a mid-17th century company of pikemen. By that period, pikemen would primarily defend their unit's musketeers from enemy cavalry.. A pike is a long thrusting spear formerly used in European warfare from the Late Middle Ages [1] and most of the early modern period, and wielded by foot soldiers deployed in pike square formation, until it was largely replaced by bayonet ...
The latter would originally have been 18 feet long but for reasons of practicality, 12-foot pikes are used today. Pikes were used to repel cavalry charges and swords would have been used for personal protection in the event of a pike being broken in battle. Musketeers wear a buff coat and wide-brimmed black felt hat.
Gervase Phillips maintains the defeat may be considered due to a crisis of morale after the English cavalry charge, and notes William Patten's praise of the Earl of Angus's pikemen. [36] Merriman regards Somerset's failure to press on and capture Edinburgh and Leith as a loss of "a magnificent opportunity" and "a massive blunder" which cost him ...
Originally each regiment of cavalry had a company of dragoons attached, but at the urging of Fairfax on 1 March they were formed into a separate unit commanded by Colonel John Okey. [14] Although the cavalry regiments were already up to strength, the infantry was severely understrength and in May 1645 was still 4,000 men below the approved ...
Notable cavalry charges. Pages in category "Cavalry charges" The following 29 pages are in this category, out of 29 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. ...
The term dates from at least 1000 AD and derives from Old English roots expressing the idea of a "shield-troop". [1] Some researchers have also posited this etymological relation may show the schiltron is directly descended from the Anglo-Saxon shield wall, and still others give evidence "schiltron" is a name derived from a Viking circular formation (generally no fewer than a thousand fighters ...
The pike square was used to devastating effect at the Battle of Nancy against Charles the Bold of Burgundy in 1477, when the Swiss defeated a smaller but more powerful armored cavalry force. The battle is generally seen as one of the turning points that established the infantry as the primary fighting arm in European warfare from the 16th ...
These arquebusiers and heavy cannons scythed down the close-packed ranks of the Swiss squares in bloody heaps—at least, as long as the Swiss attack could be bogged down by earthworks or cavalry charges, and the vulnerable arquebusiers were backed up by melee infantry—pikemen, halberdiers, and/or swordsmen (Spanish sword-and-buckler men or ...