Gary Teuscher wrote: |
But the measurements of found turkish bows when reconstructed point to a fairly heavy draw for weapons of war as well. over 100 pounds on average though not of the 150 pound average of the Mary Rose Bows. |
Against those Turkish bows preserved in arsenals we can put replica Scythian bows, and replicas of Tutankhamun's angular composite bows, both with draw weights around 20 kg. With the Scythian bows it is hard to be sure, because we have no well-preserved examples and only a handful of badly preserved ones, but Blyth made a good argument that the short reed arrows and light heads they used would not have benefited from a drastically stronger draw.
I can't recall any long European self bow from before the 16th century which was estimated to have a draw over 100 lbs. If you have citations I would be grateful. Most New World and African self bows that I have seen published had draw weights under 100 lbs, often in the 30-50 lb range. Even allowing for most of these examples being from times and places where archery was a dying skill, this is dramatically lighter than the Mary Rose examples. This suggests that 16th century English and 19th century Somalis expected different things from a long self bow.