Dating Earliest Barrels: the Importance of the Position of the Touch Hole

[Matchlock]

Further attachments to post #1:


The top attachments show the haquebut barrels in the Fortress Oberhaus, Passau, Lower Bavaria. The original red lead minium paint can be seen on many pieces underneath a 17th/18th c. layer of black arsenal coating!


A heavy and stout, round, wrought-iron Nuremberg-made haquebut barrel, ca. 1490-1500, originally coming from one of the Tyrolean arsenals of Maximilian I; author's collection, deaccesssioned from the Fortress Oberhaus, Passau, in WW II.

Originally, this was a socketed tiller haquebut and looked like the ones in numerous watercolor illustrations by Bartholomäus Freysleben (1490-1500) and Jörg Kölderer (1507) in their illuminated arsenal inventories made for King Maximilian I.

All Passau barrels belonging to this group, and those still preserved in the Oberhaus-Museum, were altered in ca. 1520-25, during the Peasant Wars, by shortening the socket and using part of it to form both a rear sight and a rear barrel loop for a transversal pin fixing the barrel to a full stock. A second pin went through the pierced hook.