Chapter 6
‘What of the bow?
The bow was made in England,
Of true wood, of yew wood,
The wood of English bows;
For men who are free
Love the old yew-tree
And the land where the yew-tree grows.’
Marching Song of the White Company
Gonan Doyle
Apart from some rough unfinished staves in the Tower of London recovered, in 1841, from the wreck of the Mary Rose sunk in 1545, and the remains of an early bow dug up at Berkhamsted Castle, thought to have dated from the siege of 1217, and now in the British Museum – there are probably no surviving specimens of the tens of thousands of longbows made during the Middle Ages.
There is little reason for any of them to be preserved; it was a weapon of the common man, kept in the corner of lowly cottages and then only if fit for use. The war-bow was not a decoration to be hung on the walls of castles, manors and great houses, along with the swords, shields and lances of ancestral knights. The old bow had nothing sufficiently artistic about it for it to form an attractive ornament for the wall after its useful life was over. If used long enough, every good bow eventually broke or developed faults that made it useless for anything except firewood – no inferior weapon could be retained by the English archer because his very life depended upon its efficiency.
It cannot be claimed that the longbow contributed towards the foundation of the British Empire; but it may well have gone a long way towards discouraging other countries and powers from attempting to add England to their empires. It was, in fact, simply a primitive form of artillery, playing the same part then as now – softening up the enemy to allow the infantry to get to grips under the most advantageous conditions. There are numerous instances of archers being used in most intelligent fashion to cover the movement of other troops – a ‘combined operation’ at the landing of English men-at-arms at Cadzand, in 1346, enabled them to get comfortably ashore whilst the defenders were pinned down by hails of arrows from massed archers. In the autumn of 1342 Robert of Artois was besieging Vannes, then second city of Brittany; after spending the first few days in making preparations for the assault D’Artois delivered it early one morning. The archers put down what would now be called a ‘standing barrage’ on to the battlements – so fierce and accurate that, according to Froissart, the battlements were soon cleared and not an enemy dared show his head. Covered by this fire, the men-at-arms advanced to the assault; but the town actually fell at night when a feint attack drew defenders from the walls to the gates, thus permitting small parties of English to scale the walls and attack from within.
In the summer of 1344 the Earl of Derby was attacking the town of Bergerac in Gascony, using the fleet on the river Dordogne in a combined land-and-water attack on a portion of the wall close to the river. Vessels were filled with archers, who, as soon as a breach had been made in the wall, kept up such a heavy fire that the garrison did not dare venture into the open to repair it. Others engaged in a long duel with Genoese crossbowmen in the town to draw their fire from the breach. The ranges at which these operations took place are not known, but the longbow had an effective range of 200 – 240 yards; Shakespeare says 290 yards (Henry IV, Part 2, Act III, Scene ii). Edward VI’s ‘Journal’ states that the King’s archers could completely pierce a board one inch thick.
The skill and deadliness of the English archer were not a matter of chance; the law prescribed the bow-weights which were proper for youths of various ages, because the weapon was little use without special training. Bishop Latimer wrote: ‘My father was diligent in teaching me to shoot with the bow; he taught me to draw, to lay my body to the bow, not to draw with the strength of the arm as other nations do, but with the strength of the body. I had my bows bought me according to my age and strength; as I increased in these my bows were made bigger and bigger.’ With so much practice and legislature to ensure that it was carried out, it is small wonder that the yeomen of England could pull a war-bow of 100 lb. or more with ease and skill. Incidentally, the contract price of a bow in 1341 was – unpainted, is.; painted, 1s. 6d.; a sheaf of twenty-four arrows cost 15. 2d. and the archers received pay amounting to 3d. per day.
The war-bow was about six feet in length and usually pulled 100 lb.; the strength of the bow was calculated by the power whereby it restores itself to its natural position, according to the distance from which it is removed; here the physical strength of the archer is the deciding factor in the effective range. It was usually self-nocking; that is, the nocks for the string at top and bottom were integral parts of the bow itself. Fancier bows had horn or ivory nocks fastened to the ends of the bow limbs. In cross-section the longbow looked like a letter ‘D’ lying on its back; the belly of the bow faced the shooter, formed the round of the ‘D’, whilst the back, facing the target, was flat. Although from a standpoint of design the longbow was wasteful of both wood and energy, the English used it without that fact being known, nor does it appear to have detracted from its efficacy.
Into the making of a good English longbow went a great deal of fine craftsmanship – it had to be tapered correctly, with much patience and experience, from the middle towards each end so that it was brought to an even curve at full draw. All knots and irregularities in the grain had to be carefully watched and ‘raised’ or skilfully followed to eliminate weak spots. Except in the very rare case of a perfect stave, the finished article was a knobbly length of wood lacking in beauty. There were no cunningly carved horn nocks on the ends, merely simple grooves cut into the wood itself to take the loops of the bowstring; there was no velvet or leather padded grip at the centre; no mother-of-pearl arrow-plate let into the side of the stave where the shaft rested against it, so that the arrow was prevented from wearing a groove as it passed. The crossbow was an intricate and complicated mechanism with much metal work about it – but the longbow was a plain, rather ugly stick. It was almost as crude in appearance as a wooden club that could be cut from any tree or hedgerow, in spite of the careful workmanship that went into it. Infinitely greater artistry went into the fashioning of arrow-heads; there are plenty of specimens to be seen in museums but few complete shafts remain.
The English archer was accustomed to no other sort of bow than that styled ‘self’ or formed of a single piece. When summoned on domestic military service, the archers, except those living on Crown lands, came armed into the field; if they were engaged on foreign expeditions, the necessary equipment was provided at public cost. The bows themselves were of many woods. The chronicles seem wrong in invariably listing bows as being made of English yew; although the best wood was undoubtedly yew, it came from trees sought in all the mountainous parts of Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany. At one time Spain had supplied England with many of the rough bowstaves of yew – but Spain herself had suffered raids by English bowmen under the Black Prince, which so affronted Spanish pride that the legends say that all yew trees were cut down after the invasion and allowed to grow no more for fear the English would come again, plying bows of Spanish yew! A comparatively small number of bows were made of English yew because little of it grew in England, and that mostly in churchyards or other enclosed places where cattle could not reach its poisonous leaves. English yew was too quick-grown and coarse-grained to make a really good bow; it was so knotty and defective that no part could be relied upon, except that portion of the heart protected by the exterior stratum of sapwood. Other woods were also used, probably for compulsory practice purposes, among them wych-elm, ash and hazel, but the slow-grown mountain yew is, to this day, the supreme wood for the longbow of traditional English pattern.
In making a yew self-bow the entire butt of a clean tree, inside as well as outside, can be used, provided that the staves are not sawn but cleft from the plank. One old authority claims that the best is that nearest the outside of the log, consisting of practically all the light-coloured sapwood immediately under the bark and only as much of the darker heartwood as may be needed. This combination of sapwood and heart-wood in yew provides the two essential properties – the sap-wood is resistant to stretch and is therefore suitable for the back (the convex side when the bow is bent); and the heartwood resists compression and is, for that reason, perfect for the belly of the bow. In fact, the heartwood will not stretch at all if bent the ‘wrong’ way, but bursts immediately. Because of this, a broken string usually meant a broken bow in the case of a yew bow, because the bow flew back unchecked by the string to a point beyond its natural position of rest.
Ascham, the patron of the longbow, wrote: ‘The best colour of a bow is when the back and belly in working are much alike; for oft-times in wearing, it proves like virgin wax or gold.’ In other words, it became silky, smooth and took a fine polish.
Since the old war-bows were made in one piece from end to end, there might well be considerable changes in the properties of the wood in such a six-foot length – the thickness of the sapwood and direction of the grain might vary, together with the incidence of knots and pins. This meant that very great skill had to be exercised in shaping the limbs to obtain equal bending in both. It seems likely that there was tremendous difficulty in finding long staves fit for first-class bows in the numbers required; the obvious inequalities in these old bows giving them a very short life of useful work and little chance of survival to the present day. As England alone was quite unable to meet the supply of bow-staves demanded, it was necessary to import them; this often meant that they came in at prices which put them out of reach of the ordinary common man. To combat this, the government of the day hit upon a clever scheme or expedient to render them as inexpensive as possible.
Since all timber possesses a harder texture and a finer grain when grown in a warm climate than when reared in one less gentle, the traders and merchants of Lombardy were compelled to deliver a certain quantity of foreign yew with every cask of Greek and Italian wine admitted into the London custom-house. Edward IV, with whom this law originated, fixed the number of bow-staves at four, but Richard III, his successor, increased them to ten for each butt. The merchants would have yew trees, already lopped and trimmed, conveyed to the ports, where they selected enough, at a rough guess, to equal the wine on board and made them useful as dunnage among the casks. Bow-staves were also imported for cash; under Richard III a law was passed which complained of the mendacity of the Lombard traders, who had caused inflation in the price. Formerly 100 staves had brought £2, but due to the traders’ machinations the price had risen to £8. It was to counter price increases originally that the wood and wine law was passed.
The old authority, Ascham, speaking of the quality of bows, said: ‘A good bow is known by the proof. If you come to a shop and see one that is small, long, heavy and strong, lying straight and not winding or marred with knots, buy that bow on my warrant. The short-grained bow is for the most part brittle. Every bow is made of the bough or plant of a tree. The former is commonly very knotty, small, weak and will soon follow the string. The latter proveth many times well, if it be of a good clean growth; and, if the pith is good, it will ply and bend before it breaks. Let the staves be good and even chosen, and afterwards wrought as the grain of the wood leadeth a man, or else the bow must break, and that soon, in shivers. This must be considered in the rough wood. You must not stick for a groat or two more than another man would give for a good bow; for such a one twice paid for is better than an ill one once broken. Thus a shooter must begin, not at the making of his bow like a bowyer, but at the buying of his bow like an archer. Before he trust his bow, let him take it into the fields and shoot with dead, heavy shafts. Look where it cometh most, and provide for that place, lest it pinch and so frete. Thus when you have shot him, and perceive good wood in him, you must take him to a good workman, which shall cut him shorter and dress him fitter, make him come round compass everywhere.’
Bowstrings of the era were made of a good grade of flax or linen and, when strung, were impregnated with beeswax so as to repel rain and dew. The bowman would watch his string carefully and if it showed signs of fraying, especially at the loops, he scrapped it before it broke. With a good yew bow, a broken string often meant a broken bow. Spare strings were always carefully broken in at practice – a new string never shot at first in the same way as the old one; archers were required to carry two spare bowstrings.
Most archers carried twenty-four arrows at their side, in their belt or girdle – in battle they were taken from the girdle and placed head-first in the ground immediately in front of the archer’s position, within easy reach of his hand. The arrows were of varying lengths but generally they were described as ‘clothyard shafts’; they were fitted with a barb and point of iron, fledged with feathers of goose or peacock. An arrow-head found, many years after the battle, on the field of Agincourt showed that it was made specially to pierce armour; the ferrule by which the head was originally attached to the wood was still perfect, but its diameter proved that the shaft could not have measured more than twenty-eight, or, at the most, thirty, inches.
In an ancient Act of Parliament it is stated: ‘Tres pedes faciunt ulnam’ – (Three feet make an ell) – this establishes an identity with the clothier’s yard at the most glorious period in the history of ancient archery. On no other supposition can the indiscriminate use of ‘yard’ and ‘ell’ by historians when talking of arrows be justified. As a Flemish ell measured twenty-seven inches, and a modern English ell forty-five inches, it would seem that an arrow might well have been less than an actual yard in length.
The arrow-heads used in this great period were tipped with little iron ‘piles’ no broader than the shafts upon which they were set. They were small heads with a bodkin-point, like a small cold-chisel, square or diamond in section, about two inches long and about half an inch square at the widest point, tapering to a sharp point; it was a solid chunk of iron with four barbs fitted to the shaft by a short socket. Against this tiny head and the enormous ‘muzzle-velocity’ behind it, chain-mail was no protection and it could even burst through plate-armour when a square hit was obtained. But plate-armour was more likely than not to deflect the shaft, hence the reason for its rapid development after Crécy had impressed upon an astounded Europe that the English bowman was a new power with which to reckon.
The effectiveness of these arrows is accentuated when one considers the much lighter modern hunting arrow, broad-headed and shot from a bow of perhaps 65 lb. weight; such an arrow is quite capable of cutting its way right through a deer and will easily penetrate a thousand sheets of paper as used in telephone directories. When fitted with a blunt, flat-ended cylindrical steel head, having the diameter of the shaft of the arrow, it readily penetrates an inch of pine board.