Snaphance

A snaphance or snaphaunce is a type of firearm lock in which a flint struck against a striker plate above a steel pan ignites the priming powder which fires the gun.

The snaphance first appeared in the late 1550s as an improvement of the earlier snaplock in one or more of the following countries: Spain, Holland, Germany, Scotland, or Sweden.

The snaphaunce has a form of safety built into its design, since the steel (frizzen) could be manually moved forward so that if the cock should be released accidentally it would not strike sparks.

James Turners' Pallas Armata, written in the 1630s, noted that the snaphance (and other flintlocks) reigned supreme among cavalry in France, Britain, and the Dutch Republic, while the wheellock was still more common in the German lands: "The French use locks with half bends (snaphaunces), and so do for the most part the English and Scots; the Germans rore or wheel-locks; the Hollanders make use of both."

[4] By about 1680, it was gradually superseded and was still occasionally issued to reinforcements for Portugal for the British Army in the Wars of the Spanish Succession of 1703 and in Northern Italy where it was still in use until the 1750s.

In German, the calque Schnapphahn moved away from the earlier definitions and has traditionally referred to a mounted highwayman, who would have been likely to use a firearm of that nature.

In Swedish the word Snapphane is first recorded 1558 in a letter from King Gustav I to his son Duke John of Finland "reffvelske snaphaner" (Snapphanar from Tallinn-Reval), earlier correspondence were discussing Estonian privateers and problems created by them in Russian commerce.

In the inventories of the Royal Armoury in Stockholm the term snapphanelås (snaphance lock) appears first in 1730, after the conquest of the former Danish provinces of Skåne, Halland and Blekinge in the 1670s.