WEAPONS. A Pictorial history

Fourteenth-century archers

In the illustration, the nearer man is about to release a long flight arrow at the enemy's rear rank; the other man is starting a livery arrow point-blank at the opposing crossbow-men. Actually, archers shot from behind the sharpened stakes of their anti-knight defense rather than from among them; but showing them this way made it simpler to get both into the same drawing. Those handles projecting from both men's backs belong to the mauls to which archers resorted when their arrows were gone.

Bows weren't new in England at the time of the conquest but the Normans made greater use of them in battle than the Saxons did. The Norman bow doesn't seem to have been the "great bow" or longbow which gave England her undisputed mastery in archery, but a shorter weapon which, to judge from the way it is shown drawn to the chest in old pictures, couldn't have approached the longbow in range and power. Yet six-foot bows were not new. The Egyptians had them, and they've also been found in the hulls of old Norse boats which were buried not later than the year 800.

Just when the English bow was lengthened and a better method of shooting was developed isn't known. When the longbows of some outlaws made his peace officers look foolish, Edward III had the idea of encouraging archery practice and forming companies of bowmen for his army; but this was around 1330, only a few years before the battle of Crecy, where the longbow startled the world. A lot of bow shooting must certainly have gone on for a long time before that.

The ordinary longbow, or "livery bow" as it was sometimes called, was supposed to be as tall as a man, but some of them were six feet four inches long and one monster, called Little John's Bow, still exists which is six feet seven! The livery bow "weighed" about a hundred pounds—that is, it took that much pull to draw it. Most modern bows weigh about fifty or sixty pounds, if they are heavy. The old longbow was a self-bow made from a stave of yew, basil, wych-elm, ash or hazel. Of these yew was by far the best, but the old phrase, "a bow of good English yew," is misleading. Much better yew than the native kind was brought to England from Italy and Spain by the Venetians, and it was imported from very early times.

A longbow was about an inch and a half wide and an inch and a quarter thick in its middle, where the hand grasped it. The back, away from the archer, was flat, and the belly, facing him, was nearly half-round. Both ends tapered evenly and were capped with a bit of horn in which a notch was cut to hold the bowstring. The careful selection and shaping of the wood had much to do with the merits of a bow as a weapon, and the expert craftsmen who did the work were called bowyers.

The English archer used a bowstring (sometimes he called it an arrow-string) of hemp carefully whipped with light linen cord. Against it he set the nock (end notch) of an arrow with a light aspen-wood "stele" or shaft; a metal "pile" or head; and "fletched" or "flighted" with the halves of three goose feathers near the nock end. This was the "cloth yard shaft." A cloth yard was thirty-seven inches; only a very tall, very strong man could draw the bow which took an arrow of that length. The arrow was generally assumed to be the length of a man's arm, or half the length of a bow; but flight arrows for distance are known to have been longer than the ordinary sheaf arrow.

To shoot, an archer held his bow at the full length of his left arm, standing with his feet a little apart, his heels in line with the target. Nowadays the heels are nine inches apart but in the Middle Ages they seem to have straddled a little more. The bowman's body wasn't turned at all but faced as his feet did; his head was turned sharply to the left, facing his mark and sighting it over the pile of the arrow. The nock end of the arrow lay against the middle of the string (the place was marked) and was held there lightly between the right forefinger and the middle finger which lay across the string protected by a glove or a leather tab. After 1500 the third finger also held the string. Either way was more effectual than the ancient pinch draw. Arrow and string were drawn back together until the nock lay directly under the archer's right eye, just at the angle of the jawbone. To draw a thirty-seven-inch arrow to its full length, most men have to draw it past the jawbone and it's hard to sight it accurately. The pile end of the arrow lay to the bow's left, resting on the bowman's left hand. In an almost continuous motion the archer drew, aimed and loosed; the bow did the rest.

An archer can't sight along his arrow as one sights along a gun barrel, directly at the target. It isn't physically practical to draw a bow with the arrow on the eye level. There's only one right height to use a man's strength effectively and that at the level of the angle of the jaw. The sighting eye is about four inches above that. It isn't too hard to learn the feel of lining the shaft up horizontally by drawing to a point directly under the right eye, but in the vertical plane the eye looks downward at the arrow. If impulse is followed and the point is raised until it appears to center on the bull's-eye, the shot will pass high over the target at any ordinary range. So, for distances up to sixty yards, archers learn to pick an "aiming point" below the target. Sixty yards is about the distance an arrow will fly straight without dropping; beyond that allowance must be made for the effect of gravity by shooting at a higher angle. The aiming point rises with increasing distance, passes through a point where it coincides with the bull's-eye, and for long range is actually above the target. It is the selection of his aiming points plus a number of other things that makes a good archer.

An arrowsmith made heads only. The arrows themselves were made by a fletcher. Arrowheads varied widely in shape but there were two main divisions: the pile and the broad. The pile was sometimes leaf-shaped and sometimes lozenge-shaped, but more often it had a quite blunt point and was little larger in diameter than the shaft of its arrow. This was the war head which could pierce chain mail or kill a horse at two hundred yards; at closer range it would puncture ordinary plate armor. The standard broad head was quite sharp and had two wide barbs; it was much favoured for hunting. A special very broad head was used in sea fights to cut sails and rigging. There were other trick shapes, such as the fork head and a crescent shape, which were fancied for special purposes.

The longbow has provided remarkable demonstrations of the penetrating force of an arrow. Men have been pinned to their mounts by a single shaft through both legs and the horse! At close range arrows from longbows have been shot through oak doors three and a half inches thick, and an arrow from a bow two hundred and twenty yards away has been driven entirely through a one-inch oak plank.

Every English king from Edward III to Henry VIII encouraged archery and gave prizes for it. At some periods archery practice was compulsory, and the minimum distances from which a man might shoot at a target were fixed by law. In France, after the great successes of the British bowmen, there was a movement to encourage archery as a sport, but it was soon quashed because the nobles were afraid of so dangerous a weapon in the hands of the peasants. The English yeoman, who was a free man and who was on reasonably good terms with his overlord, could usually be trusted not to put a gray-goose shaft into the boss's back.

Target competition was keen. There were earthen butts in every hamlet and rounds were shot on Sundays and feast days. For variety the popinjay was put high on a tower and used as a target. The popinjay was a brightly painted wooden bird, supposed to look like a parrot. Clout shooting, in which the target lay on the ground and was shot at from a long distance, was popular. In this game markers stayed near the target behind shields and came out to signal the success of shots with flags. To indicate a shaft "in the clout" the marker fell Baton his back!

Another archers' amusement was the curious game of "rovers," which has been likened to golf because the players moved across the fields, shooting from one target to another. Special fields were set aside for the sport. Each target had a name and was a permanent fixture set up at the expense of some important person to cull favor with the public.

Robin Hood certainly did not shoot an arrow a mile; but many of the archery stories which have come down to us we can take for gospel because they have been approached, duplicated or beaten in our own day. Only a few years ago a Dr. Pope was able to shoot seven arrows upward, loosing the seventh before the first hit the ground. Hiawatha shot ten, but we have only Longfellow's word for it. The present flight shot record exceeds any authenticated distance in history. Locksley's one-inch peeled wand in Ivanhoe has been split many times by young men who also drive automobiles. As late as 1793 the longbow beat the musket for accuracy; and in 1924 General Thord-Gray made twelve pistol experts look silly by putting seventy arrows out of seventy-two into a twenty-six-inch target at eighty yards; the pistol men all shot nearer and scored worse.

But let's get back to the fourteenth century. The military longbowman was a stout fellow, selected for his size and strength. Normally he wore no armor except an iron cap and a quilted tunic; a few lucky ones had mail shirts or boiled-leather chest pieces. The archer's hair was cropped short to keep it clear of the bowstring, and if he had a beard, he held it in his mouth while shooting for the same reason. His left wrist was protected from the snap of the bowstring by a leather wristlet called a bracer, and he held a leather tab in his right hand to keep the string from cutting his fingers. For arms aside from his bow, he sometimes wore a sword, but almost always he carried on his back a twenty-five-pound maul with a four-foot handle and an iron-bound head of lead.

Pavise

On the battlefield the archer often set up a stake sharpened at both ends and leaned it forward at an angle, to protect himself from cavalry charges. Or he might have with him a soldier who held an over-size shield called a pavise to cover the archer while he shot. At sieges the bowman was more likely to work behind a mantlet, which was a rectangular wooden screen with a prop hinged to its back.

Perhaps the outstanding point about these men, as about the American riflemen of later times, was that they picked their targets and hit them; they didn't just cut loose in the general direction of the enemy. Any qualified archer was expected to shoot a dozen arrows in one minute at a man-size target two hundred and forty yards away—and hit it with all twelve. At his waist the archer carried a sheaf of two dozen arrows, "four-and-twenty Scotchmen in my belt" was his way of putting it. Eighteen of these would be sheaf arrows, the other half-dozen were flight arrows. In action the whole bundle was shaken out and the arrows lay on the ground points outward, near, some say under, the archer's foot. Some very early drawings show a quiver for holding the arrows behind the right hip, but its use was abandoned. When a man had shot all his arrows, he sometimes could advance and recover them or others from the bodies of the slain, then shoot with them a second time at the rear guard.

Mantlet

The English archer three times in a row, at Crecy, at Poitiers and at Agincourt, decimated "the flower of French chivalry," and so doing he put the foot soldier back on the military map for the first time since the decay of the Roman legions.

There was also the crossbow. It is said to have been used at Hastings but there is no representation of one in the Bayeux Tapestry. The crossbow involved no new principle. It was a very small, very stiff bow, set crosswise at the end of a staff or stock. In effect a small ballista. Its great advantage was that it could be drawn ahead of time and could hold its draw while the bow was aimed, and it could be raised to eye level and sighted. Actually, the early ones were pretty poor weapons, but the Pope considered them too murderous for "Christian warfare" and pronounced an interdict against them in 1139. The use of them against infidels was permitted, however. Richard the Lion-Hearted disobeyed the edict, and people generally felt that it served him right when he was killed by a crossbow bolt.

There was a metal stirrup on the front of the crossbow stock. When he wished to set the bow, the archer put one foot into the stirrup, then grasped the bowstring with his hands and strained it back far enough to hook it over a little catch called the "nut." The nut was something like a spool with a notch in it. The notch held the string until pulling the trigger allowed the spool to rotate enough to let the string slip off. This device was never improved upon for its purpose.

Mostly the crossbow discharged short arrows called bolts. Later, because they had square heads, these were called quarrels. The heads were iron. The short, thick shafts were wood and the "feathers" were leather or paper. Bolts for hunting were nicely finished and had three vanes like a standard arrow, but two of them were directly opposed so the bolt could lie flat in the groove of the stock. War quarrels were quite roughly made and had only two vanes, which were made as one and inserted into a saw-cut which was lashed tight behind them.

Drowing crossbow with belt claw

It isn't known just when the first gadget appeared for helping to set a crossbow. It was called a belt claw and that's what it was: a double hook hung from a belt. By hooking it on the string and sticking a foot in the stirrup, a man could take advantage of his strong leg muscles and so set a bow too stiff for his arms.

After the bow was set the bolt was placed in the groove with its square end (a bolt seldom had a nock) lying between the two lugs of the nut and against the string. To shoot, the bowman raised the stock to eye level, sighted directly at his target over the knuckle of his right thumb and squeezed the trigger.

There were disadvantages. The crossbow was heavy. It was slow. It could shoot only one quarrel while the longbow was delivering six arrows. Though it did not require a specialist and was more accurate at short range in the hands of the average soldier than the longbow was, yet its range was so short that it often couldn't be brought close enough to the enemy to bother him. The bowstring was ordinarily twisted of sinew or gut, and in damp weather it became entirely limp and useless; armies which depended heavily on the crossbow found this to be something worse than a mere nuisance.

The constant efforts which were made to increase the power of the crossbow presently resulted in adding whalebone and animal tendons to the basic yew frame. This composite was an improvement, and it was now too stiff for a man to set even with a belt claw. A simple little purchase was invented to help with the job. This was a short piece of rope running through a pulley which had a hook on it to engage the bowstring. One end of the rope was attached to the archer's belt; the other end could be hitched to the stock of the crossbow.

To set his bow the bowman with his foot in the stirrup, bent forward, hooked on to the string and the stock simply straightened up. In addition to taking advantage of the strong muscles of the lower back and hips, this gave a mechanical advantage of nearly two to one; so a weak soldier could set a strong man's bow and crossbowmen didn't have to be exceptional physical specimens.