English Long Bow.

[funkymoped]

there have been thousands of weapons made in the last couple of years, but one of my favourites is the English long bow... read a small article about this weapon some years ago, some were made with a 100pound pull on them ! can you imagine the amount of physical strength needed in the upper body to be able to hold and pull, then release accurately !?!?!

these bowmen were true craftsmen. the bone in the upper body would grow thicker to compensate for the stresses of working these armour piercing beasts..

what can i say other than "amazing weapon"

[heathfield]

Just so's the tourists can find it, mycats meant 'Fortingall'. ;-)

[WoWo]

A little story.

A friend of my dads belonged to an Archery club, for one reason or other they couldn't use their regular location so went to a nearby common ground, which was safe to shoot on but they really shouldn't have been there. Of course the Police turn up and arrest them. They go to court and their lawyer trawls through the legal books and comes up with a defence which centers on a 16th Centry law which states that everybody must practice Archery on a Sunday.

The Judge accepts the defence and goes off to deliberate, he comes back and asks what Church they attended that day, of course they hadn't and he informs them that the law they used in their defence also required them to have attended church before practice and therefore they were in fact in breech of that law. They got fined.

[dot.hawkes]

That's a good one WoWo, that must be the law I am on about actually, I wonder if it still stands then? It would boost church attendence and think how good we would be as a National Team for Archery! (tho I know we are quite good anyway lol)

[mycats]

I did indeed mean "Fortingall" lol *blush* ooops

[qapmoc]

Some years ago we had a huge American guy from a local airbase joined our local archery club for a couple of months and he had a 100lbs pull "takedown" bow which he had bought on a ''the bigger the better'' sort of idea, that thing was awesome, even he could only just manage to shoot a few arrows before he was knackered and he was straining so much that he could not shoot straight anyway,
This was a field archery club so the targets were set up in forest and rough field areas, now when you use a bow of that power the trajectory of the arrows is very flat so that means if you miss the target the arrows don't hit the ground until a long way past the target, he could almost be sure that if he missed he would never find the arrows again afterwards, they just vanished into the surrounding rough.

[WoWo]

I think it's one of those laws that was just forgotten about over time and never repealed. It wouldn't have been an issue it's just the fact they tried to use it as a defence.

[jno]

when they find archers' skeletons, they're usually deformed because of the constant effort of drawing. Also, they had to practise all year to keep in trim (hence the business about practising on Sundays), which was difficult in the days before professional soldiering - in the off season, men used to have to work their fields as well.

lots of stuff here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow

[jake-the-peg]

Sadly I think there was a bit of a "tidy up" of a lot of these old laws about 15 years ago. (Major Government I think) about the same sort of time that "Piracy on the high seas" and "Arson in a Naval Dockyard" stopped being capital crimes.

Won't stop all the urban myths doing the rounds though

[dot.hawkes]

what about urinating in public, did they not reinforce that one because there are some louts around here who have no idea it is against any law.

[Octavius]

I can only back up a previous post, the Bernard Cornwell Grail Quest series - Harlequin, Vagabond and Heretic are a brilliant read.

Not only the immense strength required, but English archers made their own bows and their own string - and often arrows. The French (particularly) feared the archers more than anything because of what they were capable of. In battle if an English archer was caught by the enemy, they were tortured and mutilated beyond recognition and killed because of the hatred of them. No archers would ever be held prisoner as they were just too powerful a weapon to be allowed to live.

[jake-the-peg]

I think there's a bit of a danger of over estimating the impact of the longbow though.

Bows in general had long been a problem for the upper classes who'd previously seen war as a bit of a sport where you went off and killed a load of peasants and if you got in difficulties you'd yield and get ransomed back.

The bow rather messed all that up because all of a sudden a peasant could kill a lord!

That wasn't how the game was played and they tried to ban it. In 1139 the second lateran council said:

We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hated by God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on.

Didn't make much difference of course

In fact the longbow wasn't a great step forward in terms of power have a look at this analysis:

http://www.thebeckoning.com/medieval/crossbow/cross_l_v_c.html

I'd suspect the rate of fire was the big improvement

[heathfield]

The bow had been around in one form or another since the Stone Age. It was the invention of the crossbow, capable of great power and accuracy in the hands of a novice, that prompted the council's edict.The Pope at the time announced 'Here is the weapon that will destroy the world.'

[dot.hawkes]

I have it in the back of my mind that the crossbow was illegal for commoners/peasants to use, it has been bugging me for an hour or so so i shall check it out.

[jno]

yes, crossbows were a technological step forward;like guns, they meant the unskilled could kill.

[Octavius]

The Genoan crossbowmen were incredibly skilled, but ultimately, to the French, expendable. They were often put in the front line as a first attack only to be killed by the enemy or the French if they tried to retreat.

The debate of crossbow vs longbow gets recycled over and over.

The simple fact is that an expert archer could loose 6 or 7 arrows in the time it took a crossbowman to wind, recoil, reload and let loose 1 shaft. And with more accuracy. Multiply this by say 1,000 archers and the skies literally turned black with the rain of arrows, every 20 seconds or so. Crossbowmen were incredibly vulnerable when they had to rewind their bows so didn't have much chance to release more than 3 or 4.

[dot.hawkes]

but as a more sophisticated and complex weapon it wasn't something a peasant could knock up off the tree in the grave yard, and so i guess they were also expensive to produce on any grand scale, that is why it was used by the private armies and not the peasants. Mind you everyone who wasn't gentry were either peasants or paupers.

[WoWo]

"Won't stop all the urban myths doing the rounds though"

My dad told me that longer than 15 years ago but I have always suspected it was an Urban myth.

This page seems to clear the issue up with the very last statement.

http://archery.mysaga.net/archlaws.html

[Upforit]

I haven't read all the posts, but just to put a couple of things right. The reason the english bowmen flicked the V's at the French was because if an English bowman was caught by the French, they would cut off his index and second finger to stop him drawing a bow. the English would show the French their two fingers to show they were still capable of drawing a bow. The yew tree was grown in churchyards because cattle were in the habit of wandering into churchyards and eating the plants there, and causing other damage. Since the yew is poisonous to cattle, vicars, canons etc. would plant these trees there in the hope that farmers would keep the offending animals away.

[deeboy]

Mycat it wasnt your Longbow that was the worse weapon used to defeat Scotland it was GREED by certain Scottish based land owners..Hammer of the Scots was gold stolen from the French by england. Off topic I know.

[1rovert]

I cannot remember the king, I believe it was Henry IV, who made a decree, that there was to be no other sport but Archery. This has not been changed, and is in fact, the English National sport, not the so-called 'pretty game' football.