Pike and Shot Tactics 1590-1660 by Keith Roberts

Author:Keith Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pike and Shot Tactics 1590–1660
ISBN: 9781780967844
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Musketeer and pike postures from the 1608 second edition of Jacob de Gheyn’s influential and widely copied The Exercise of Armes – the first illustrated weapons-training manual, published the previous year. The purpose was to establish a uniform set of movements or ‘postures’ for loading and firing a musket or handling a pike, so that speed would improve through constant practice of the same drills.

It must be understood that the Dutch battalion was a tactical battlefield formation, not an administrative element of a regiment. In his optimum example, Hexham’s Dutch regiment would provide the men for both of a pair of battalions. In practice, however, Dutch regiments did not all have the same strength either in terms of the number of companies in a regiment or the number of men in a company, and under campaign conditions strengths would vary still further. On campaign weaker regiments might only have sufficient men to form one of the paired tactical battalions, or in extreme cases it might be necessary to form two or more weak regiments into a single battalion. The concept of paired battalions was retained for the battle formation, since it was the requirements of the overall formation that were dominant.

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