(^142) Chapter Four
achieve than in earlier ages. But what froze infantry weapons at a given
level was resistance to any change that would require a choice between
the advantages of uniformity and the cost of reequipping an entire
army. This rational calculation was reinforced by affectionate attach
ment to familiar weapons and routines. Reason and sentiment thus
conspired to make the musket designed in England in 1690, and nick
named “Brown Bess,” the standard infantry weapon of the British
army until 1840. It underwent only minor modification in all that
time.^25 Other European armies were almost as conservative. And
since foot soldiers remained decisive in battle across this entire span of
time, the stabilization of infantry weapons had the effect of stabilizing
tactics, training, and other aspects of army life.
Stabilization was never complete, as we will see in the next chapter;
but it seems clear that as Prince Maurice’s patterns of training and
administration took hold across the face of Europe, the great surge of
change in Europe’s management of organized violence that we have
considered in this and the preceding chapter came to a close.
We may sum it up as follows: things started to change in the twelfth
century with the rise of infantry forces capable of challenging the
supremacy of mounted knights on Italian battlefields. Town militias
gave way to hired professionals in the fourteenth century, and a pat
tern of political management of standing armies swiftly evolved within
the context of the emergent city-states of Italy during the first half of
the fifteenth century, only to be upset by the irruption of French and
Spanish armies after 1494. Then a reprise of the Italian development
on a territorially larger scale began in transalpine Europe, achieving a
pattern reminiscent of Italian city-state administration by the mid
seventeenth century, when tax income and military-naval expenditure
came into more or less stable relation to each other in such countries
as France, the United Provinces, and England. But the northern Euro
peans improved on Italian precedents in two important respects: by
developing systematic, oft-repeated drill, and by constructing a clear
chain of command that extended from the person of the sovereign—
usually a king—to the lowliest noncommissioned officer. Jealousies
within the chain of command were never completely eliminated; but
the sacred aura that continued to surround royal personages made the
“divide and rule” policy that Venetian magistrates and Milanese ad-
- A stricter definition reduces the period in which the same pattern prevailed to a
mere century: 1730 to 1830. For details of the many minor variations in design, and of
the way the Board of Ordnance handled sudden crises when large numbers of muskets
had to be procured in short periods of time, see Howard L. Blackmore, British Military
Firearms, 1670–1850 (London, 1961).