I think I’ve mentioned before that our niece and nephew, Sue and Mike, have taken up Archery. I thought of them when I recently noticed a documentary on the longbow — I think it was maybe on PBS. I didn’t get to watch all of it but it was pretty interesting…. the program indicated that back in its day — roughly the 13 to 16th centuries — the longbow wasn’t just a weapon, it was the weapon, the supreme tool of any serious arsenal. It was probably invented in Germany or Scandinavia, it traveled to Wales, then England and made that country a superpower in Europe.
Historians disagree on the original length of a longbow, but it was generally considered to be no less than five feet. Ideally, the bow was as tall, or maybe just a little taller than the person using it, and made from yew, a type of wood known for its elasticity.
It was not an easy weapon to master. The “pull” of a longbow — the amount of force needed to stretch the bowstring back to where it needed to be, was between 80 and 110 pounds. Skeletons of longbow archers show signs of deformation consistent with the use of the bow. A spine curved in the direction of the pull arm, arm bones thick with compression, and coarsened bones in the fingers used to yank back the bowstring. The good news is that all that work of becoming a longbowman is that if he was experienced he could hit a target with killing force 200 yards out. And, he could fire six to ten times a minute — a firing rate that no practical weapon could match until well into the 19th century.
One thing that caught my attention was when in battle with a knight, wearing armor, the longbow arrow didn’t just bounce off the armor — it went right through, spearing the knight inside.
The longbow first rose to prominence during the Battle of Crecy, between the English and French. Edward I’s force of 8,000 men was led by his son, the Black Prince. The French forces had a firing rate of 3 to 5 volleys per minute — that proved to be no match for the English bowmen who could fire 10 to 12 arrows in the same amount of time.
The longbow’s military service came to an end at the end of the 16th century, not because it was obsolete as a weapon — even in the late 1500s there was still no weapon that could beat its combination of power, accuracy, and rate of fire — it was retired because there were too few people taking up archery as a profession. Someone once said, the longbow didn’t fail us — we failed it.
Maybe Mike and Sue can bring back its popularity and we’ll need to have “longbow control laws.”
— 30 —