ID of this Lance / Pike head
 

This was acting as one of the finials of a curtain pole in a rural cottage when I found it recently. It has very tiny broad arrows on it , but o/w I can see no other markings. I am not familiar with the pattern of head and am unsure whether it is a lance or a boarding pike head . Can anyone help ? The blade is 26 cm long from tip to the start of the langets . What remains of the shaft is wood not bamboo.

This looks remarkably like a French 1814 boarding pike (Boarders Away page 57) which of course does not explain the broad arrow mark.

i do agree ...... but that's what threw me . It has a single broad arrow on one side and the 'head to head' sold out of service broad arrows on the other !

I thought someone may have identified it as a cavalry lance but if, by any chance, it is a French boarding pike, it is hard to see how a French weapon could have British government marks because even if captured it would not have gone through the initial inspection process.
However, perhaps there was a mechanism, that as ships were refitted and overhauled, captured weapons were given acceptance marks during an inspection before the vessel returned to duty. A theory only - hard to prove.

Ships were regularly captured and taken into the service of the captor and it is likely that ships tools and equipment and even pikes and axes would have stayed with the ship.

Some ships changed sides more than once and I always liked the story of the Ambuscade.

She was a British Naval frigate which was captured (much to the delight of Napoleon who decreed a massive painting be made of the event) by the smaller French corvette Bayonnaise in 1798. The resulting court martial exonerated Captain Henry Jenkins of Ambuscade, though a good case could be made that he messed up by losing a much more powerful ship. The French took her into service as Embuscade.

She was recaptured in 1803 by HMS Victory and returned to Royal navy service as Ambuscade after 5 years in the French fleet.

CC

What an interesting story , and I agree , its very likely that captured weapons would be pressed into service.

Very nice pike head and I do suspect that it is naval, as others have already pointed out. If this British item was indeed 'mustered' out, it could very easily have ended up sold in a private purchase deal, meaning it was used on a merchantman and not a French government/naval ship. If it truly was a part of a grouping of private purchase weapons, the records on such simply weren't kept track of. In other words, it could have gone anywhere, but eventually ended up back in the hands of "the enemy".

Reminds me of the situation with trade axes in N America. During the early/mid-19th century, the government forbid ax manufacturing companies from selling to the Native Americans for obvious reasons. Batches often sold as 'tools' were being used quite effectively as weapons. As this was a large business, some companies began removing their logo from the items and went right on making the sales- :eek: Lack of a maker's mark made them impossible to trace in those days...

interesting points !

I believe it is a British 1846p lance head.https://www.ashokaarts.com/shop/scar...dnance-marking

You are absolutely correct , thank you , mystery solved !