"Foot flagpole length ??" Topic

Any info out there on how long the flagpoles for foot units were, as those supplied by Warlord look very short and so I'm looking to replace them with something longer.

The Warlord poles look to be about 7-8 ft long whereas I suspect they need to be about double that at 14-16ft ?

Thoughts

P

The flags were around 6' square so the poles would probably need to be longet than 7-8'. That said, I don't think they were partcularly long as the flags were waved and possibly tossed.

The flag poles really weren't all that long, only about 2 feet longer than the flags, see here blews-ltb.co.uk/the-ensign

As bigredbat says there were all sorts of flourishes, waves and maybe even tosses that would be trickier to do with a longer pole.

I think the Warlord poles are about right. There is a series of four engravings of officers, dating to around 1635, from the brass clasps of the Great Vellum Book of the Honourable Artillery Company. They depict two officers with half pikes, a sergeant with a halberd, and an ensign. The pole on which the flag is carried is only about a foot longer than the flag. A reproduction of these images can be found on p10 of the Osprey Elite No 25: Soldiers of the English Civil War 1 Infantry.
Hope this helps.

Cheers Gents- that's great info. So it looks like the flagpoles in the Bicorne command sets as an example are actual too long.

P

But photos of painted mini command groups on their website, show that they can be cut down!

I know that colours are about the 6ft 6in square and the colour pole would be a foot to 2 foot longer
Why is it in all 17th (and 16th) century illustrations of battles are the coiour always sticking out of the pike blocks, they'd need to be on a pike for this to be.
I can find no other reference to it,
As the Ensign ran the pike he may have commanded using the colour pole and the colours are flown from a pike ?

I've always wondered about the great height of flags in period engravings. Might it be an artistic convention? It would have been hard to depict a flag seen through a forest of pikes.

I was speaking with friends over the weekend
A different idea came up
What of the number of colour was to do with the number of men in the uinit/regiment more men more colours?

The number of colours was traditionally one for every company in a regiment. However, it seems likely that many regiments never had the full ten companies one might expect, and others that started that way often found themselves heavily under strength, or even amalgamated with other regiments to form a single battalia. In such circumstances it is unlikely all the original flags of the regiments were carried in the field, but possibly about one for every hundred or so men.