[Garrett Hazen]

Did archers or should i say, bowyers, ever back up their bows with sinew or some other wood? And if they did, I wonder, how did they do it? What did they use?

I have attempted to create an ametuer bow before, ( and failed all three times ), and i tried to back the bow with glue or something. But what i cant figure out is, what would a bowyer from the middle ages use for glue?

- Garrett

[Jason Daub]

Garrett,

For the most part bows in Europe were unbacked self bows. If you are looking for information on the construction of a backed bow I would suggest picking up the Traditional Bowyers Bible Vol. 2, it covers composite bow construction.

As for the backing materials used, you can find a lot of bows built with leg sinew, rawhide or linen, attached with hide glue. As long as you use a covering for the bow to keep it from getting damp, hide glue will hold like iron.

[Garrett Hazen]

Yes, thank you. So bowyers never created bows with any type of backing? They were just self bows?

[Jason Daub]

Garrett,

No, there are some illustrations in Carolingian and, IIRC, Ottonian art that show the characteristic shape of a composite bow, a backed bow would be, I think, most hard to identify as it would closely resemble, if not be identical to, a self bow in form and colour. As to either of them being common, I would say not. Illustrations and archaeological evidence to this date show no evidence that I am aware of for the use of backed bows or composite bows in the latter middle ages in western Europe. Composite construction was used for crossbow prods before the widespread introduction of the steel prod but this is all that I am familiar with. If eastern Europe is taken into account then you will see quite a bit of composite construction, but again as far as I am aware, no backed self bows. I think that the lack of evidence for the use of a backed bow would indicate just that , a lack of common useage.

As an example, if you have access to quality wood and moderate woodworking skills a self bow is easy to make with nothing more that a drawknife or spokeshave and a scraper. A backed bow however, is a much more skill intensive endeavor, it requires all the same tools plus extra materials and the finished product is also much more fragile than a self bow, so, why use it?

I guess now that I have managed to confuse myself what I am trying to say is that it was most likely possible that some medieval bowyer, somewhere, sometime, produced a backed bow, but it would not be at all common. A great problem is that the bow has a finite lifespan and after it is no longer useful it is useless and discarded, and this leaves us with not quite no physical evidence to back up our speculations, but close to it.

Jason