Is David Starkey wrong?

[fsn]

I was listening to David Starkey on the Brendan O'Neil podcast. He was his usual peppery self, and no-one could ever accuse Starkey of being a delicate wallflower or anything except opinionated.

Anyway, he did say something that I disagreed with. He said that Cromwell cleared Parliament out in 1653 at the point of a bayonet. As a Scotsman, it is of some painful recollection that the first use of the bayonet was Killiecrankie in 1689.

Did Starkey mis-speak or have I erred?

[Matt J]

Isn't it a turn of phrase - at the point of a bayonet ie physically motivated by sharp pointy things - rather than specifically meaning using bayonets

[flamingpig0]

I remember Brendan O'Neil when he was the enfant terrible of the Revolutionary ( or as  I called them at the time Rococo) Communist Party

As to Starkey I am pretty sure he is just using a turn of phrase rathe than being literal.

[fsn]

He may have been using a turn of phrase, but I do think it behooves him to be accurate. "Gunpoint" perhaps would have been a better phrase.

[FierceKitty]

He may have been using a turn of phrase, but I do think it behooves him to be accurate. "Gunpoint" perhaps would have been a better phrase.

Implying Cromwell brought artillery into the House?

[Westmarcher]

He mis-spoke. An anachronistic error. Like someone commanding a body of archers to shoot at the enemy by shouting, "Fire!" I've always considered "at the point of the bayonet" as meaning to go in to the attack in close combat; face to face, hand to hand.

[FierceKitty]

The first time Lee encountered the term "charge home", she thought it implied routing back to camp. Reasonably enough.

[Westmarcher]

Yes indeedy!   

[steve_holmes_11]

David Starkey, like several other notable historians has an established field of expertise.

The transition to the higher pay-grade of celebrity historian requires him to step outside that area.

I could muse for a while on the nature of historians: Is Dan Snow for example a better historian than Jeremy Clarkson.

Instead I'll suggest (implying no slight to Dr Starkey) that when dragged into comment on a spen of 5,000 years, celebrity historians are frequently wrong.

[mollinary]

But he is the acknowledged world authority on the activities of Henry VIII's Groom of the Stool in the afternoon of Thursday October 26th 1528.

[Last Hussar]

He mis-spoke. An anachronistic error. Like someone commanding a body of archers to shoot at the enemy by shouting, "Fire!" I've always considered "at the point of the bayonet" as meaning to go in to the attack in close combat; face to face, hand to hand.

There historical sources for the use of fire as the command at times.

[FierceKitty]

Details, please. Interested in this one for a while now.

[Lord Kermit of Birkenhead]

I thought the correct command to bowmen was "loose". Likewise the command to fire today is "watch and shoot" since if you shout fire everyone does, without aiming !

IanS

[Raider4]

. . . if you shout fire everyone does, without aiming !

ah, so Hollywood is right then!

Do they also have unlimited ammunition? At least up until the point where it's suddenly vital to the plot that they run out?

[FierceKitty]

Only if you mean the kind of arrows that drive clean through plate at two hundred yards but never wound the unprotected hero (or his even less clad feisty but dependent female sidekick) at twenty.