Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/166

 must be considered of comparative unimportance. Many examples of these combination weapons have been preserved, none claiming, however, we believe, a very early date. The histories of most of them, could they but be traced back, would be found associated with the latter part of the XVIth or even with the next century; for we find them figuring very prominently in the Tyrolese peasant wars of the XVIIth century.

The military flail, of which many specimens are extant, was certainly a weapon in the XVth century; but its use would seem to have been chiefly relegated to naval encounters. We illustrate an example (Fig. 927) which is now in the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh. The "holy water sprinkler," Schiessprügel, and the "morning star" appear to be of Eastern origin; for precursors of the same kind of weapons are to be seen in the Eastern armoury of the Wallace Collection, Nos. 2328, 2331, and 2325. We illustrate both types from the collection of M. Charles Boissonnas of Geneva (Figs. 928 and 929). King Henry VIII had a force of 12,000 of his infantry armed with a weapon similar to the "holy water sprinkler." A contemporary account of the arming of this force appears in a letter written by Antonio Barasin in 1513 to the government of Venice (Venetian State Paper, No. 237); after alluding to halberdiers he goes on to say "and 12,000 (armed) with a weapon never seen until now, six feet in length, surmounted by a ball with six steel spikes." Again, in 1557, the Venetian ambassador, Michiel, describes these "greate hollywater sprinckelles," as they are called in the 1547 inventory of the Tower of London, as "certain long poles of the height of a man, thick and armed with certain iron spikes at the head, three inches in length, issuing from all parts; which are very perilous weapons, calculated to smash and break the hardest substances." The strange names given to these arms had their origin in the grim and rather savage peasant humour of the time. The holy water sprinkler was so styled from the way in which its spikes caused the blood to spurt out; while the morning star appears to have been a jest upon the German and Swiss morgenstern, the "Good morning" greeting to an adversary. Occasionally these types of mace are combination weapons; as, for instance, the example in the Tower of London, known since the 1676 inventory as "King Henry ye 8th walking staff," but figuring in the 1547 inventory only as a "Holly water sprincles w^t thre gonnes on the Topp," without any allusion to its royal ownership. This staff comprises three gun barrels (Fig. 930), each to be fired by a match. Perhaps this was a weapon of the class noticed by Paul Hentzner in the Tower and described in his Itinerary as "Hastae ex quibus ejaculatur." Meyrick, again, had in his