[Gary Teuscher]

Just thought I'd move this to a seperate topic, in order to not sidetrack the Genoese Crossbow Thread.

[Gary Teuscher]

Clifford Rogers wrote

[Bartek Strojek]

Bows from Kraków and Opole would fit into that period:

http://arcus-lucznictwo.pl/index.php?id=47

Don't know much more about them, not much in the Internet at least, and saldy Opole ones got wrecked during WWII.

[Gary Teuscher]

I can't read the info, but I probably should have mentioned western europe, or even northwestern europe, where the tradition of horse archery and the tradition of composite recurves did not factor in much.

[Bartek Strojek]

Those bows are about ~ 6 feet tall (Kraków) and 200 cm in case of Opole ones, so they probably weren't for horse achery...

Bows weren't really all that popular in Medieval Poland in any case, and certainly not for mounted use, got to go further east for that.

They're of rather 'familiar' roughly D cross section selfbows, with interesting change of shape at the ends though.

Bow from Wawel is interesting in apparently having flat belly and rounded back, instead of other way around.

[Gary Teuscher]

My idea of stying out of areas with a horse archery tradition was not for these specific bows, but in general. I was just hoping to stop people from posting info on Magyar or Cuman Horse bows

Insteresting though, about a 6' bow. What time period are these estimated form?

One other thing I would find interesting - find some illustration (period of course) of archers that were known to use bows of longbow length, and see if the illustration portray them as shorter.

St Edmund and the Danes would be one example. There is an illustration of his execution by bowmen in the late 9th century, within 100 years of when bows of longbow length have been found for scandanavians, so it would seem to reason that the Danes would be using longbows.

The illustration shows the bows to be of "shortbow" length. However, I am not sure of the date of the illustration.

I guess my main resaon for belief that bows were of longbow length, and that there was not a commonly used shortbow is the archaeological evidence.

We have more than a handful of bows from prehistory through the Renaissance of bows that were roughly 6 feet in length or longer. We have 2 bows to my knowledge that are of a 54" length, both from the same find.

If the "shortbow" was the precursor to the longbow and in common usage throughout Europe, you would expect more finds of these shorter bows. Instead, all we have is finds of predominantly bows of 6' or greater.

Admittedly, we are dealing with a small sample base. But that small sample base points towards longer bows in use throughout history.

The one thing I would say is that it seems most bows, other than the Mary Rose are right at 6' in length - the Mary Rose bows run from about 6' in length to about 7', with a average of about 6'6".

This does point to the Mary Rose Bows being about 6" longer than most other found bows. Why? A gradual lengthening from the 11th century to the 16th? A sudden lengthening? Are the Mary Rose Bows different from the contemporary longbow due to the unit's "elite" status? I really have no idea here.

[Mikael Ranelius]

Regarding the length of hunting bows vs warbows, there are examples of hunting bows that are both comparatively long as well as quite powerful and in all respects difficult to separate from warbows. Saami hunting bows of the 17th and early 18th centuries are described as being about 6 ft in length, and the only completely preserved Saami bow, the so called Örbyhus bow (at 177 cm), is estimated to have pulled ca 70 lbs at 27".

[Gary Teuscher]

Iteresting about hunting bows. When you compare them to modern bows, the draw weights for hunting bows seem heavy. But the modern bows are much more efficient, based on projectile speed and weight.

For example, I thik for elk a bow in the range of 60-70 pounds is recommended. However, to get the same results of nergy transmitted, a middle ages selfbow would need to be in the 90-100 pound range.

[R. Kolick]

read the chapters on shortbows in "The Great Warbow" it answers your questions better than i could as well as give example from the time period your looking for also explains why the shortbow isnt part of the evolution of the longbow but a modern misconception from artwork and propoganda rather than fact there are some ancient bows that have been found in recent years that where over six feet some one posted it on this site but i couldnt find it but it seems unlikly that the bow devolved from a longbow than evolved back into one

[Gary Teuscher]