Force
Highland Clansmen
The clan warriors of the Scottish Highlands — broadsword, targe, and dirk — whose charge broke at Culloden in 1746.
The fighting men of the Scottish Highlands were a clan society's levy: tenants and tacksmen following hereditary chiefs whose authority was kinship, land, and the sword. Their way of war was built for one moment — the Highland charge: a downhill rush, a musket volley at close range, muskets dropped, and the final yards taken at a sprint with broadsword and targe before the enemy could reload.
The equipment matched the method: the basket-hilted broadsword — the later Scottish Claymore — the targe with its center spike, the dirk in the off hand, and pistols and muskets discarded once emptied. Against troops with slow-loading muskets and shaky nerves it was devastating: Killiecrankie in 1689, Prestonpans and Falkirk in the '45, each over in minutes.
Culloden in April 1746 ended it — boggy ground, Cumberland's artillery, and a retrained bayonet drill breaking the charge before contact — and the aftermath dismantled the society that produced it: proscription of weapons and tartan, the end of heritable jurisdictions, and eventually the Clearances. The paradox followed within a decade: the British Army raised Highland regiments that carried the broadsword and the charge's spirit around the world, making the kilted soldier an icon of the empire that had broken the clans.
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Plug Bayonet
The plug bayonet was the first bayonet: a dagger with a tapered handle that was pushed into the muzzle of a musket, turning the gun into a short pike. It appeared in France in the mid-seventeenth century, perhaps named after the town of Bayonne, and was issued to French and English troops from the 1670s. Its fatal weakness was that the musket could not be fired while it was fitted. At Killiecrankie in 1689, government troops were overrun by charging Highlanders while fixing their plug bayonets, a disaster that helped bring in the socket bayonet.
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Scottish Claymore
Claymore — Gaelic claidheamh-mòr, 'great sword' — names the two-handed sword of the Highland clans of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, instantly known by its forward-sloping quillons ending in pierced quatrefoils — a hilt form found nowhere else in Europe. The name later passed to the basket-hilted broadsword that the clans carried through the Jacobite risings, and between the two of them the claymores arm every image of the fighting Highlander from Bannockburn myth to the sworn charges and grapeshot of Culloden fact.