[Stephen Wheatley]

I've been combing museum and army websites to no avail looking for illustrations of 17th century fluted lances used as cavalry standard staffs and decorative finials. Have only found one spearpoint or finial with a monogram of Carl XII of Sweden and a couple of Imperial ones from Germany. Although there seem to be plenty of illustrations of fluted lances or cornets out there, the originals seem strangely absent. Anyone with access to Royal Armouries, Tojhusmuseet, Graz or Stockholm - I'd be very thankful for input.

[Daniel Staberg]

The Armemuseum, the Swedish Army Museum includes the Swedish State Trophy Collection which has the worlds largest collection of surviving 17th Century cavalry standards and staffs taken as war trophies in the 17th and early 18th Centuries. Time, poor storage and several fires have taken their toll on the thousands of captured colours in the collection so the available photos only cover a part of what was once available.

Got to
https://digitaltmuseum.se/owners/S-AM/info

copy and paste standarstång (the swedish word for the staff, the "å" is very important get it right) into the search field at the top. You may need to press space bar once or twice after having pasted in the word to get the search engine to react.

This will open up two choices, select the one which includes the word "Armemuseum", using "standarstång" as a search word should yield 207 results. To view all of the results simply press the button labled "visa fler träffar".

The surviving staffs follow the same basic pattern, the fluted lance style which you mentioned but there is still fair amount of difference in proportions and dimensions of the staffs, some have the bar and sliding ring which would allow the standard to be attached with a carbine hook to a bandolier, others lack it.

[Stephen Wheatley]

Daniel, tak sa mycket. The digitised Scandinavian collections are great - I've had a bash already with ''flagga trettioarigekriget'' with some results, will now try to find the correct Swedish aws and ehs after your tip. They're somewhere on my keyboard!