Taking stock of gun design
It’s quite easy to look at a Best hammerless sidelock ejector and admire the perfection of form and function. It’s far harder to admit that the French have greatly influenced the sport of shooting and, as a result, the fit of a shotgun as we know it today.
Gunfit is a mercurial topic and far from an exact science. It provokes heated debate between different specialists in the subject, but it was barely even considered before we adopted the French habit of shooting flying birds.
The earliest ‘haile shot’ guns using their ‘villainous saltpetre’ in the Royal Armouries were likely born out of Henry VIII’s difficult relationships with his European neighbours. By the end of his life, Henry owned 41 such guns as a by-product of the pace of military invention as he modernised his army in response to the ease
