English Archers

English archers were familiar with their weapon, often brought up from childhood shooting at targets and on the hunt. Constant practice was required, not only to maintain one’s skill, but simply to stay in condition to draw the heavy war bow. A competent archer should have been able to loose at least 6 aimed shots a minute at a bare minimum. This is much faster than a crossbowman can shoot.

But no matter how skilled the individual bowmen, in battle it was the rate of fire that counted. Froissart described “their arrows so wholly [together] and so thick, that it seemed snow.” Jehan de Wavrin, an eyewitness at Agincourt (1415), wrote: “I am of the opinion that the most important thing in the world in battle is archers, but they must be in the thousands, for in small numbers they do not prevail.” The sound of a flight of arrows was said to be like the great wind before a tempest. Mass shooting, taking advantage of the war bow’s combination of power and speed, could be breathtakingly effective against cavalry. The Monk of Malmesbury suggests that typically 3 or 4 flights will break a mounted charge, six at the outside. Most of the damage was done to the horses, as witnessed by Froissart’s account of Poitiers, but armored men were injured as well.

A bodkin point, striking armor at or near 90 degrees, can penetrate plate of a thickness typical of 14th century armor, but if the arrow does not strike cleanly, it can be deflected and can even shatter. The practical applications of this were understood by medieval armorers, arrow makers, and bowmen. Armorers shaped armor to provide glancing surfaces. Arrow heads were carefully forged to have hard tips for piercing and keep a softer inner core to absorb shock. Reputedly, English bowmen sometimes put a small piece of beeswax on the tip of an arrow to stop the initial deflection.

For a battle, the English liked to take a good defensive position and hold it, waiting for the enemy to come to them. They preferred to anchor the flanks on protective natural features. Froissart tells us that they used a formation called a herce, but unfortunately neither Froissart nor anyone else from the period explains the formation clearly. Archers were often deployed in terrain such as hedges, dikes, woods, and marshes that was difficult for their most dangerous foes, cavalry. When this was not possible, and sometimes even when it was, they strengthened their positions by digging holes, excavating ditches, and emplacing sharpened stakes.

Once the archers were in place, the idea was to channel the enemy into the killing zones where a continuous rain of arrows falling on his front and flanks would destroy his momentum and cohesion. Any surviving soldiers reaching the English position would arrive individually or in small groups, and could be dealt with easily.

Froissart describing the Battle of Poitiers (1356):

“[The English] have ordered it wisely and have taken post along the road, which is fortified strongly with hedges and thickets and they have beset this hedge on one side and on the other with their archers, so that one cannot enter nor ride along their road except by them . . . At the end of the hedge among the vine and thorn bushes, where no man can go nor ride, are their men of arms all afoot and they have set in front of them their archers in manner of a herce whom it would not be easy to discomfit …

“That Sunday the Englishmen made great dikes and hedges about their archers to be the more stronger …

“As soon as [the French] men of arms entered, the archers began to shoot on both sides and did slay and hurt horses and knights so that the horses when they felt the sharp arrows they would in no wise go forward but drew back and flang and took on so fiercely that many of them fell on their masters so that for press they could not rise again, insomuch that the Marshal’s Battle could never come at the Prince.”

What about an individual archer’s activities?

Contemporary foreign observers report that English archers knelt before battle, made the sign of the cross, and then kissed the earth. Some say they would take a small bit of the earth into their mouths in token of their readiness to return to the earth. On a more practical level, an archer would prepare himself by freeing his arrows from their bags and stuffing them point down under his belt, laying them out on the ground in front of him, sticking the points in the ground so that the nocks were near at hand for quick shooting, or possibly using his foot to hold them in place (and maybe to keep his mates from swiping them).

War Bows

The “English longbow” was neither invented by the English nor called a longbow during our period, although the weapon was certainly known as a characteristically English weapon. It was called many things: a bow or bowe; a war bow; in the case of issued weapons, a livery bow; and, yes, an English bow. Possibly the earliest use of the term “long bowe” is in one of the Paston letters dated to 1449.

Most of our information concerning the physical details of medieval war bows comes from those found in the wreck of the Tudor warship Mary Rose. Comparisons of the artifacts with illustrative sources from our period show an almost complete correspondence. We also look at textual materials to determine details not visible in illustrations and to gather information regarding construction, distribution, and use of the weapons. We also review modern attempts at reconstructing bows and shooting techniques to understand how bows could be expected to perform in actual use.

The war bow was a relatively cheap weapon capable of throwing a projectile over a significant distance, and its effect in action was devastating. That much is clear. The issues of quantifying and understanding its power are more problematic.

Richard Galloway, bowyer and archery researcher, has made bows according to medieval references. Reconstructed bows range from 60- to 160-pound pulls with draw lengths from 28 to 34 inches. Robert Hardy’s study of the Mary Rose bows indicate typical poundages of 88-120 pounds with draws between 28 and 30 inches. The heavier bows (160-175 lb.) can throw a bodkin arrow up to 320 yards and a flight arrow up to 350. The lighter bows (100 lb.), which are the most typical of those found, can throw up to 220 and 250 yards respectively.

Can such long ranges be right? It seems that they may actually be conservative. The Ayme for Finsbury Archers of 1594 lists the targets that used to stand in the fields around the northern outskirts of London. Several of these are described as “eighteen score and eighteen” yards (378 yards) and the longest at “nineteen score and fourteen” (394 yards) used for shoots where the target “must be in every man’s reach.” Sir John Smythe states that war arrows could be shot to 12 score (240) yards, but also says that “some number of archers being chosen, that could with their flights shoot 24 or 20 scores.” The man made a difference as well as the weapon.

One of Edward IV’s statutes (1465) describes an archer’s bow as “of his own length and one fistmele (the length of a closed fist plus the extended thumb; about 7″) at the least between the nyckes.” We expect that such a description is suitable to our period as well, even though the Mary Rose bows average 6 feet 6 inches in length, with none shorter than 6 feet 1 1/2 inches. Some of the men associated with the Mary Rose archery equipment were 6 feet tall, significantly taller than the average crewman’s height of 5 feet 7 1/2 inches.

The war bow is simple to make, but strong and relatively durable. The bow is made from a single stave of timber. Far and away the most favored wood was yew, often imported from Italy or Spain where the wood was grown “industrially” in a process known as pollarding. A yew bowstave contains both heartwood and sapwood. The heartwood forms the “belly” of the bow and the sapwood forms the “back.” Belly and back are defined by the direction in which the bow bends (i.e. the same way a person bends). But yew was expensive and, though considered the best, was not the only wood used for war bows. A statute of 1542 requires that bowyers “for one bow of yew shall make four of elm, wych (a variety of elm), hazel, ash or other wood apt for the same.” In the fourteenth century the favored wood for bows came from bough wood, but the wood could also come from a sapling or the trunk (“bole”) of the tree. Ascham (in the sixteenth century) disparages bough wood and prefers bole wood.

Bows are often not straight and smooth. When the stave is cut along the grain of the wood, the result is sometimes an undulating surface. Also, the heartwood’s tendency to expand gives the unstrung bow a noticeable curve away from the user. Today a bow with such a curve at the tips is called “reflexed”. Ascham says to look for a bow that is “small, long, heavy, and strong, lying straight, not winding, not marred with knot gall, wind shake, wem, fret or pinch.”

A finished bow is of a length suitable to the archer, with a D shaped cross-section. Finished bows may be “painted” (polished) or “white” (unpolished). There is no “handle” (shaped place where one grips the bow). Ascham recommends waxing the center of the bow where the hand grips, to keep heat and moisture from spoiling the wood (modern bowyers oil the wood first). The Mary Rose bows have marks on the left side of the upper limb, marking the center of the bow. These are presumed to be bowyer’s marks indicating the point from which the arrow should be shot.

The issue of sheathing the ends of the bow in nocks of horn or some other material is still debated, but at least one late fourteenth century alabaster carving in the Victoria & Albert Museum clearly shows applied nocks on a bow. All of the Mary Rose bows seem to be set up to take nocks of some sort, and recently an actual horn nock has been recovered from the wreck. Why sheath them? Because such sheaths ease the stringing of the bow and reduce the wear on the string caused by friction generated by shooting. Ascham warns that a bow should be well nocked (presumably well smoothed) “for fear the sharpness of the horn shear asunder the string.”

Bow Strings

The string, according to Roger Ascham in Toxophilus, “though it be little, yet [is] not a little to be regarded.” A short string might snap the bow and a long string might be snapped by the bow, to the bow’s detriment. Also the string must be set on straight (nocked correctly) lest one end twist differently from the other during a shot, possibly torquing the bow and breaking it.

Ascham tells us that a good string is made of “good hemp, as they do now-a-days, or of flax, or of silk,” then goes on to tell of fanciful sounding materials used “in old time.” Sir John Smythe, the great Elizabethan champion of the longbow, writes, “and the strings being of very good hempe, with a kind of water glewe to resist wet and moisture; and the same strings beeing by the Archers themselves with fine threed well whipt, did also verie seldom breake. But if anie such strings in time of service did happen to breake, the soldiers archers had alwaies in readiness a couple of strings more readie whipt and fitted to their bows to clappe on in an instant.” Philip D. Hartley, writing in the Journal of the Society of Archer Antiquaries, postulates that “English Hemp” came primarily from the common stinging nettle. Nettles are related to ramie, which Tim Baker finds to be the strongest of natural fiber bowstrings.

In The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible, Baker says that, with a little practice and a drop spindle, one can spin enough fiber to produce a bow string in about an hour and a half. A starter thread is tied to the spindle just below the weight and fed through the notch. Enough raw fiber is teased out to lay over the starter thread. The two are twisted together and the spinning begun. “Pulling the threads from the bundle before you need them,” he says, “is the secret to fast, uniform spinning.”

How the spun hemp was made into a bowstring is a mystery, as there are no surviving bow strings to show us. We pattern reconstructions on the “traditional” Flemish string, as its design appears most likely to have come out of a medieval bowstring-making tradition. Baker provides details on producing several “Flemish” strings in The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible.

Whipping (modernly called “serving”) involves winding thread around the loops and center section of the string to protect it from wear.

A “fitted” string is one made to the measure of a particular bow, with loops at either end. Where string cannot be matched to bow, a single loop serves better. In such cases, the non-looped end is tied to the bow using a timber hitch. This method allows string length to be adjusted and the bow to be braced correctly.

Arrow nocks from the Mary Rose suggest that the strings were 1/8 inch in diameter, although this may reflect the somewhat larger diameter of the “whipt” section.

Ascham says, “When the string beginneth never so little to wear, trust it not, but away with it; for it is an ill-saved halfpenny, that costs a man a crown.”

Arrows

We have no evidence that archers of the Hundred Years War used “clothyard arrows.” The term does not seem to have been used before 1465. They did use “flight” (lighter arrows for long range) and “standard” arrows, also called “sheaf” or “livery” arrows. Sometimes they used “broadhead” arrows. Sir John Smythe says that of every sheaf of 24, 8 arrows should be flights.

The body of the arrow, called the “shaft” or “stele”, could be made from any one of a variety of timbers. Ascham lists fifteen, of which he prefers birch, hardbeam, some oak, and some ash. Most of the Mary Rose arrows are poplar, but some are of beech, ash, or hazel. By documentary evidence, the most common wood for war arrows seems to have aspen (Populus tremula). Indeed, a statute of 1419 reserves aspen solely for arrows. Ascham, however, preferred good ash to aspen for war arrows, saying that ash is “hevye to geve a great stripe,” which is to say “strike a hard blow.” Clearly different qualities of arrows were manufactured, for in 1359 William de Rothwell, Keeper of the King’s Privy Wardrobe, was told to buy 10,000 sheaves of good arrows and 1,000 sheaves of the best arrows.

Most of the Mary Rose arrows are made “taper fashion,” going from 1/2 inch thick at the head to 3/8 inch thick at the nock. They range from 28 to 32 inches in length, but average 30 1/2 inches from the nock to the shoulder of the head. The second Mary Rose type is parallel-sided and about 7/16 inches in diameter. Ascham speaks of two other shapes of steles: “barreled” and “big breasted” or “chested,” recommending the “chested” arrow for strong shooters. Modern experiments have shown the chested type to be the most aerodynamically stable.

Most of the sampled Mary Rose arrows fall into two lengths. One group fits a draw of 28 inches and the other, far more numerous, group fits a draw of 30 inches. The range of draw lengths appears to run from 24 to 32 inches. The information currently available to us does not allow us to tell whether the draw length groupings match the shaft type groupings.

The nock of the arrow was reinforced with a horn insert set at right angles to the notch of the nock. These pieces were 2 inches long, slightly tapering, and 1/16 inch thick, and were set in a slot sawn into the stele. The insert reinforced the shaft against the stresses of release. 

Feathers were commonly of the gray lag goose, but peacock and even more rarely swan were used. Some of the fragmentary feathers recovered from the Mary Rose may be swan. Iolo Goch, bard of Owain Glendower, speaks of “long low fletchings bound with green silk.” Illustrations show us that the fletchings were commonly cut in a triangle, leaving the natural back slope (presumably to speed production). They were attached to the stele starting 2 inches down from the nock. Three feathers were set around the shaft, each equally distant from its fellows with the “cock feather” set perpendicular to the nock. The feathers were 6 to 6 1/2 inches long; they must be clear of the bow when the arrow is nocked to the string so that the feathers are not damaged in the process of nocking. Feather length plus the nock must be less than the fistmele (the length of a closed fist plus the extended thumb; about 7″).

The feathers were tied as well as glued to the stele. The thread took a couple of turns at the back end and was wound toward the head at about five turns to the inch, wrapping the forward end of the feather as the back. The shaftment area of at least one Mary Rose arrow is covered in a green pigment, but the color may simply an artifact of the gluing. Some illustrations show red coloration in the same area. Ascham worries little about the color of the feathers save that the cock feather be “black or grey, as it were to give a man warning to nock right.”

The most common Mary Rose arrows are believed to have borne Museum of London Type 16 heads. The secondary type are believed to have borne Type 8 heads. Heads similar to Type 16 are shown in period illustrations and it is the most common “medieval” type in the collections of the Museum of London and the British Museum. It is not an armor-piercing head per se, rather it appears to be a compromise design halfway between an armor-piercing bodkin and a broad head (also called swallow-tail) such as would be used for hunting: an all-purpose head, as it were. Type 8 is called a “bodkin” point and was designed to pierce armor. Some bodkins had much longer bodies and blades, very suitable for punching deep between links of mail. Recalling that the Mary Rose archers would be firing most likely at unarmored men and possibly at long ranges, we speculate that their common arrows were “flights” and we have adopted the secondary type as our “standard,” the arrow necessary to deal with armored men on the battlefield.

Arrow Bags

Quivers as we know them today are not found in medieval illustrations of archers at war. Usually when archers are shown carrying arrows, they have them tucked under their belts. Sometimes, however, an illustration shows something we call an arrow bag.

An arrow bag would be designed to carry a sheaf of 24 arrows. The ones we use are based on a functional arrangement drawn from practical experience, medieval illustrations, and Mary Rose recoveries. The illustrations tell us that the bag is a tube of cloth, probably linen canvas or some other tough bleached or natural cloth, perhaps lined with cloth of a contrasting color (though apparent linings in illustrations may simply be artistic license at play). The bags were closed by means of a drawstring at each end, allowing either end to be opened. Thus when the archer inserts the arrows (point first) or removes them (also point first), the arrows are always moving forward, reducing wear on the fletchings.

The Mary Rose arrow bags include leather spacers to separate arrows and help preserve the fletchings. The Mary Rose reconstructions show the spacer set at the head end of the shaftment area, but this would offer little protection for the fletchings when the nock-end drawstring is drawn tight. One descriptive reconstruction of such a Mary Rose style bag refers to the stitching holes visible at the edge of the leather disk. All these marks are on the lower edge of the disk, and they speculate that one end of a cloth tube was sewn to the leather and the other ended in a drawstring. Arrows were supposedly removed by pulling them downwards through the leather and out of the sleeve. This would seem to put unwarranted stress on the fletching. As these spacers are found with archers’ bodies and not in the arrow chests where bulk arrows were carried, we suggest that the spacers were part of cloth “quivers” that worked much like a modern golf bag, with arrows inserted through spacers point first into the bag and drawn out again in reverse. Such “quivers” may not even have had a section to cover the fletching.

An old antiquary’s drawing (reproduced in Barlett and Embleton’s English Longbowman 1330-1515) illustrates an arrow bag once preserved in Canterbury. It shows the spacer, set about mid shaft. Interestingly, it also shows “hay” (more likely straw) stuffed in the bag around the heads of the arrows. This lends credibility to the drawing, as we have discovered that something is necessary to keep the arrow heads from piercing the cloth and opening a way for the arrows to escape. The upper portion of the bag as drawn, however, looks like nothing we’ve seen yet in period illustrations. Indeed, one period illustration suggests a shape under the cloth at the upper end of a bag that tapers down to half or less the diameter of the upper end. Placing the spacer on the nocks of the arrows and tying a thong near the arrow heads to group them closer together (or using a small leather bag to contain and cover them) yields a silhouette that comes close to that illustration. Because this scheme matches the illustration and uses known components, it is the one that we are currently using for our arrow bags. We are starting to experiment with stuffing the head end with straw.

Bracers and Gloves

Bracers

Roger Ascham tells us that a bracer serves to save the archer’s arm from the “stripe of the string” and his doublet from wear. It also keeps the string “gliding sharply and quickly” across the shooter’s arm, thereby making a “sharper shot.” Even so, Ascham believes it best “to give the bow so much bent, that the string need never touch a man’s arm, and so a man need no bracer.”

Where they are shown wearing bracers, the archers of our period wear what many modern archers consider a very small one. One can imagine that professional archers would have a very good idea of the exact point where the string might contact their arm. One can also imagine that soldiers might find it a matter of ego to “need” the least possible amount of this sort of protection, with the result that the smallest practical bracer was worn.

Ascham argues against having any sort of decoration on the bracer, such as “nails” (presumably metal mounts), buckles, or even aiglettes on the laces. Any sharp or raised surface is a problem. Nails can cut the string, and buckles and aiglettes can “raze his bow, a thing both evil for the sight, and perilous for the fretting.” Yet the lead archer in the Luttrell Psalter picture of an archery practice wears a studded bracer.

An example surviving in a private collection and illustrated in Egan and Pritchard’s Dress Accessories, c. 1150 – c. 1450, provides a suitable design for a bracer. This example is made of one piece of leather and fitted with copper alloy mounts: a buckle, a strapkeeper, eyelet reinforcements, and a strap end. A cheaper version might have lead alloy fittings and/or be made from assembled leather (i.e. the straps sewn or riveted to the main body).

A second surviving example excavated in York consists of a stout piece of leather pierced to take separate straps that are prevented from coming through the holes by the simple expedient of cutting the ends of the straps into wider “shoulders” that butt up against the edges of the slit. This example had an iron buckle (probably once tinned) that, appears to have been re-used from another item, possibly a shoe (stitching holes on the leather strap to which it is attached have no correspondence to any other part of the piece).

A speculative, extremely cheap bracer might be a leather piece with a thong passing through holes at the edges of the guard and simply tied on.

 Shooting Gloves

A shooting glove is intended to save an archer’s fingers from being hurt by the pressure and friction of the string. Ascham calls for the leather on the forefinger and the ring finger to be thicker than that on the middle finger, as they take the most weight. The forefinger should be thicker yet as it is most involved in “sure loosing.” He recommends lining the glove with a soft and thick fabric. Warning that the string does not roll well off a new glove, he suggests cutting the fingers short and trimming them with an ointment, “that the string may glide well away.” He also says that a “shooting glove hath a purse, which shall serve to put fine linen cloth and wax in, two necessary things for a shooter.”

No surviving examples of gloves for the Hundred Years War are known to us. The nearest representation in time comes from a 15th century Flemish tapestry called the “Black Tapestry of Zamora.” The glove depicted there offers the most likely model from which to pattern a reproduction glove. We do not know how common shooting gloves were among military archers of our period. Ascham says that some men use a glove or “other such thing” on their bow hand to ease chafing.