Huzzah for the Paper Cartridges 10,000 Subscriber special! I love the 1990’s Sharpe TV series with Sean Bean, the plots are historically inspired and follow real events, but sometimes to beat the French, you need to blur the line between real historical methods and Hollywood fantasy.

One such fantasy is Sharpe’s “bite, pour, spit, tap” method of rapid-firing a Brown Bess. It’s great as a plot device that gets Sharpe’s plucky outnumbered British soldiers out of a tight spot, but it doesn’t work in real life, or as it turns out, in history as well.

And Brown Bess is quite capable of Sharpe-approved rates of rapid fire, simply by loading the way the boring old manual calls for. Imagine that!