Militaria offers a glimpse of the past

RMS and militaria may not be for everybody but two fascinating collections of weaponry in Lay's Auctioneers May 15 Antiques Sale in Penzance, certainly give pause for thought (who owned them, who used them?) and it’s rather fun to look into the history of some of these extraordinary weapons.

- 

The guns are mostly 18th and 19th century, they have fabulously romantic names like Man-stopper or Blunderbuss. The wonderfully descriptive ‘Man-stopper’ is fairly self-explanatory, and a Blunderbuss is a short barrelled, long armed weapon with a flared muzzle that was designed to spray its shot in a relatively wide pattern at close range.

The collections in Lay’s sale also include carriage pistols and coaching carbines; no doubt used by coachman to protect themselves and their passengers from highwaymen and robbers. Obviously these sorts of weapons were designed for self protection, travelling on English roads in the 18th century was dangerous, there was no active police force and robbery was common.