Bow Design
The shorter recurve bow, shot from horseback, helped Genghis Kahn and the Mongols to conquer most of Asia and a large part of Eastern Europe
revealing that a ‘recurve’ or S-shape bow limb added power to shorter bows. In later times, this had the added advantage that a short bow could be used effectively by horsemen. (With a longer bow, the horse gets in the way.)
In ancient times, the Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman armies all used archers, with varying degrees of effectiveness. [Figure 1] Battles at longer range were often a contest between archery and armour/ shield technologies. The Romans developed a repeating crossbow on a tripod, able to shoot a rapid series of arrows, and a giant crossbow used as a siege weapon. These evolved from the smaller crossbow used in later times. (Technically these are shot by ‘arbalests’ not archers.) [Fig 2] The shorter recurve bow, shot from horseback, helped Genghis Kahn and the Mongols to conquer most of Asia and a large part of Eastern Europe around 1200. [Fig 2b] It was also used by the Saracen armies against the Crusaders. Some 200 years later, in the Hundred Years War, 1337- 1453, the longbow gave the English (and Welsh) armies an overwhelming advantage over the French. In England, all other sports were banned and all able bodied men had to do at least an hour of archery practice a week (a law which has never been repealed!). As a result English kings could find enough good archers to form the core of their armies.
English longbows were usually made from imported yew. Most English yew was too coarse grained and rarely straight. Bundles of yew bow staves, imported from sheltered alpine forests were, for many years, the ‘customs duty’ on all cargos coming into English ports. The advantage of yew wood is that it naturally has both good compression resisting heartwood and tension resisting growth wood, so avoiding expensively laminating materials, at a time when glues were primitive and unreliable. Today, such wood is only available from a very few sources in the world, and most modern longbows are laminated from three or more different woods.
The last major battle against the French, 18
where archery was decisive, was at Agincourt on 25 October 1415, where Henry V’s exhausted English army of some 1500 men at arms and 7000 archers faced a fresh, well equipped French army of perhaps as many as 50 000. [Fig 3] The English had been able to choose a narrow muddy battlefield heavily wooded on both sides. The well-trained English archers could all shoot at least 10 arrows a minute and the best could shoot 20. Shooting high for distance, it was said that they were shooting their third arrow before the first one hit. Standard bows needed a 100lb pull to draw them and the heavy ‘artillery’ bows needed 180lb, with a range of some 350yds. Arrows were described as falling like snow out of a gray sky on the heavily armoured French floundering in the mud. Accounts vary, but between 4000 and 10,000 French were killed against fewer than 100 and a maximum of 450 English.
Archery continued to be an important part of military thinking up to the time of Elizabeth I. The first technical treatise to be written in the English language, rather than Latin, was Toxophilus by Roger Ascham (pronounced Ask-am) in 1544. This was a long exhortation, addressed to Henry VIII, on the merits of archery. Ascham was tutor to Henry’s children and taught them archery. Henry was himself an expert archer in his youth. [Fig 4] Cannon and muskets became the weapons of choice for warfare over the following centuries. The loss of too many of the King’s deer led to a ban on bow hunting (also still in force), and archery in the UK gradually became a leisure sport. [Fig 5]
Archery was revived in Victorian times and became a popular pastime in country houses for both men and women. The standard target colour scheme (gold, red, blue, black, and white) is sometimes referred to as the Prince of Wales colours. This derives from Queen Victoria’s eldest son, who was a keen archer. When the Olympics were revived at the end of the 19th century, archery was included as one of the sports, [Fig 6] but was dropped after World War I. Bows were still essentially light, wooden
Fig 2 – Archer
Fig 2b – Mongolian archer
Fig 3 – Agincourt
Fig 4 – Henry VIII
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