[Timo Nieminen]

Thanks for that! Good to see the distribution. Only leaves the question of whether Medieval bows were the same (which is a common Mary Rose bow question).

Definitely you don't want sharp edges/corners anywhere, when you're approaching the limits of strain the wood will cope with. "D with sharp corners" would be bad.

[Will S]

No worries. Happy New year by the way!

It's a tricky one regarding the MR bows being the same or different to medieval bows, because there's good arguments for both sides. On one hand they were the cream of Henry VIIIs crop, so you'd imagine they were as good and as powerful as you'd get.

On the other hand, it's a period where the Warbow was running out of use due to firearms, so perhaps they were either more powerful to attempt being used against better defensive methods, or less powerful than medieval bows as they didn't need to be clearing 240 odd yards with heavy plate-cutting arrows. The Tudor bodkin associated with the period certainly isn't a head designed for punching through armour.

Then again, when you look at bows like the Balinderry Bow from the 10th century, it was almost identical in dimensions and materials as these late Mary Rose bows, so you'd have to imagine the same size and weight bows being used from the 10thC to the 16thC at the very least.

If Otzis bow was finished, again it was almost identical.

Personally I'm of the opinion that the MR bows are pretty typical of medieval bows of the middle ages - they found a working method and made it a standardised procedure.

As a side note, while I know it's a popular theory, I'm not a huge fan of the idea that the D section came about due to maximising yield from a log. There's too much variation in a yew trunk for it to work. If it was ash for example, which grows straight and knot free then it would make sense (although a D section doesn't work at all with ash!) but yew always tends to have one side full of knots, or one side tension wood (ideal) and one side compression (not good for bows) due to the wood leaning as it grows. Those billets that Richard bought from Carson on PA aren't exactly split logs - those have been worked down with a bandsaw from the original split to get them as small as possible for easy international shipping (Richard is in the UK and Carson in America) and for ease of working. A split section of yew is always feathery and fibrous until it's worked down a bit.

I think the tree would be cut down, split to remove the sections that would make good bows and one bow laid out within that section.

You could possibly get a ring of D section longbows from one trunk if the bows were very narrow, the trunk completely flawless and the grain lying perfectly to split into ideal sections. With a typical MR style bow however, you're looking at having a stave around 2" wide to begin with, in order to lay out the 1.5" width of the bow. To get a ring of 2" wide perfect warbow staves seems impossible to me, but then I've only split and worked with less-than-ideal English yew which usually only yields two heavy bows from a large trunk section. Perhaps high quality Spanish, Portugese or Alpine Yew yields slightly more.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

[Lafayette C Curtis]