[Gabriele Becattini]

Will, i have a few questions for you, that might be relevant in order to answer the question posed originally by Neal:

1- could you briefly explain the technique that you use in drawing a heavy bow? stance, anchor point, etc.

2- have you ever used one of your heavy bow on a rugged terrain, or in a dense undergrowth or Woods or behind a cover of some kind ?

3- it is possible to "snipe" at short range or it is useful only for shooting at long distances?

4- could you describe it handy or fit for an "hit and run" style of fighting?

i'm trying to image the typical situation where an bow armed man could be placed in gaelic rish/scots warfare context, may be that, if you have never attempt do to this kind of things with your bows, you know someone that has used an heavy bow in such contexts.

i would like to ask also the general opinion about other "longbows", at the moment we have talked only about the Mary rose bows:


The Flodden Bow

the Mendlesham Bow

the Hedgeley Moor Bow

[Will S]

I am absolutely not an expert on shooting heavy bows by any means but:

1. Everybody is different and everybody shoots differently. Some people use the rolling of the shoulder to get leverage, some people stand very wide, some stand very tight and naturally and don't use any rolling at all. It's down to strength, body type and shape.

2 - 4 you're describing a basic warbow roving shoot. Under trees, over hills, across water, in ditches, on your knees, through branches etc. All of this is normal at a roving shoot where people use bows up to 170lb to shoot at targets throughout the day.

The hit and run thing I've no idea, but there's a video on YouTube uploaded by the New Zealand chapter of the English Warbow Society where they demonstrate "tactical" archery running between targets and shooting one arrow at each from bows in the 125lb range.

[Sean Manning]

[Gabriele Becattini]

very interesting Will,

if a heavy bow can be conveniently used in this way, probably the answer to Neal's question lay in our ability to determine the kind of bow that was used in gaelic warfare.

if the irish bow was really shoerter, and thus lighter because a short recurve self bow cannot support 150lb, why did the irish choose this kind of design, given the fact that they had already encountered the heavy longbow of scandinavian tradition?

a parallel can be done between the viking and gaelic society in terms of lack of heavy armours in warfare (a bulk of unrmoured man with a mail clad elite, we have to take in account shields of course) , so why the scandinavian develop a powerful long bow design while appereantly the irish were not?

[Timo Nieminen]

[Nat Lamb]

to quote Adam Savage
"the difference between science and screwing around is writing it down"

[Michael Brudon]

I'd be interested in seeing some chronographing and ballistic data also. Efficiency drops off rapidly the closer to design limits of the substance you get. Or if in order to get a certain poundage you are thickening material to the point , relative to the length of the human draw , the limbs are no longer rebounding faster anyway. I'd assume these guys are indeed getting measurable gains but how many % ?

[Gabriele Becattini]

i have taken a look again to the very few written descriptions of the dress and armament of the higland scots, mostly from the XVIth century.

according to them, it looks very likely that the kind of bow used in Scotland was the same desing of the english warbow, and so more likely the same poundage.

thescottish highalands and isles were influenced by norwegian the culture and we know that the scandinavian bow was long and powerful as the later warbow,

archers were used by wallace and bruce in the war of indipendence and the scottish troops sent to france to help the frenchman against the english in the 1420s contained a large number of bowmen

the french king were so impressed to the powress of the scottish archrs that they formed the garde ecossais bodygards and they were armed also with longbow.

so given the fact that the bow was well established as a weapon of war in the scottish culture, i don't see why the scots should have used a shorter and less powerful weapon respect to the english.

honestly i'm not able to guess a typical poundage and we have seen that it is indeed a complicate subject, but i have to retink about my original statement, probably 50 lb as a minimun poundage is a very low figure respect to the reality

the irish bow remain a bit more a mistery, the irish culture was exposed as well to the scandinavian influence but apparently the scandinavian form of bow was not adopted, indeed all the descriptions of the irish bow in the XVIth century are pointing toward a shorter and lighter form, very different to the contemporary warbow

[Pieter B.]

[Dan Howard]

[Neal Matheson]

"so given the fact that the bow was well established as a weapon of war in the scottish culture, i don't see why the scots should have used a shorter and less powerful weapon respect to the english.
"

Because overwhelmingly contemporary sources describe this being the case in both images and written account.


The Lowland Scots who fought with Wallace and formed the Kings bodyguard in France may well have used a bow we would describe as a longbow. Gaelic Scots are almost always (as you have noted there are two exceptions) described as using a shorter, weaker re-curved bow.

[Timo Nieminen]

That doesn't really address the "why", though. As for the "why", the high draw weights don't come for free. Upthread, "less than a year" and "a year" were given as times needed to train to use a 100lb bow, and 5-6 years to train to use a 150lb bow. Using high draw weight bows reduces the pool of archers you can draw on to those who have put in that training. Use 50lb bows, and you should be able to turn almost anybody fit for military service into an archer in a few weeks (maybe not a great archer, but they'll manage the bow, and hit human-sized targets at short range).

Especially if you expect that most of the enemy army will be unarmoured, you can be better off using relatively low draw weight bows.

[Neal Matheson]

Yes Timo thanks for pointing that out. To clarify I was answering the implied question "why we should think the Scots etc etc".

[Gabriele Becattini]

yes, it is true that Neal asked specifically for the kind of bow used in the gaelic world context,

to answer the point raised by Pieter, i do not see the reason to suppose that the lowland bow was different from the bow used in the highlands or isles, also because it was in the latter two areas of Scotland that the scandinavian tradition was more strong (we have to remember that the far North of Scotland and the western isles were under the rule of the king of Norway at least until 1263).

we have to remember also that "longbow" or "warbow" are modern terms, for a contemporary eyewitness they were simply "bows", not all the bows recovered in the context of the british isles were big like the Mary Rose examples and in my opinion a bow that reach the bowmen shoulder or chin is not a "shortbow" (for example, i won't label the bow that Neal show in is recostruction a shortbow.)

also the recurved tips were appareantly a pretty common feature in many XVth century illustration, like the so called "burgundian bow" or the ones seen in many italian artworks.

i have to admit that my knowlw3dge of the subject came mostly from JT Dumbar "history of the highaland dress" were the descriptions deals only with dress and the listing of arms and armour is incidentally, i have thus missed many written sources, like the ones linked by Dan.

if you have more sources were the gaelic archery is described i would love to read them Neal.

to summarize my thinking: i believe that the highland scots uses bows that could be described as "large" or "long" and so a man's high or slightly smaller

we cannot be sure 100% about the design but it is most likely that they were or stright limbed or with recurved tips,

about the poundage, probably the uses different kind of bows for different purposes, lower poundage bows for hunting and heavier pondage for war.


one last note on Timo comment, what you say make sense, but we have to consider also that, in culture were the bow is taken in great esteem, it is more likely that people were accustomed to use it since the childhood and so their ability and strenght werte allowed to increase with the age, i think very unlikely that someone started to train with archery in adult age just like a bunch of recruits with firearms.

[Neal Matheson]

Thanks guys I've really enjoyed this.

[Leo Todeschini]

Thanks for the discussion guys, it has been interesting and I have little of merit to add other than my own experience. However what glared at me was people talking about bench presses and so forth and although I have not read it in this thread I have in previous ones where people say "I can bench press 250lbs but can only draw 90b, so there is no way they were drawing 150lbs" or sentiments like that. As far as I can see the two activities are not really related and have little to do with each other as I know people who can draw 120, 130 , 140 who could not bench press half of that.

I have got into war bow in a very modest way to date and I shoot 95 almost daily (well up to the winter), but previous to this I would shoot 55 with a Victorian style. Although I do physical work I am not particularly strong and I could shoot 55 all day fairly happily.

The reason I started was a friend came into my trading tent one day and I knew she shot war bow and I asked her a question about it, bearing in mind she is 5'2" and an office worker, it turned out she shot 85lb. I went down to the range with her and her husband that evening where I borrowed a bow, was shown the technique and shot an 85. I had never drawn more than a 70 before and really struggled with that. It was enlightening.

In my experience I could shoot a 55 all day, but how many Scottish armies had enough arrows to shoot all day? or I could shoot the 85 with some but very little training (albeit badly). I then practised every day with a 95 over the course of a summer and was getting 3' spread at 50 yds which made me happy enough.

So in my case, 20 arrows a day for 5 days a week, for 8-10 weeks and I would hit a mans torso half the time at 50 yds with a 95lb.

Tod

[Pieter B.]

[Gabriele Becattini]

Pieter,

i agree with you, it is exactly what i said , i'm pretty sure that the bow used in Scotland was the same used in england,

but i'm also quite sure that the scottish archers were recruited all around scotland, not just in the lowlands or the border,

at flodden and Pinkie a part of the bow armed contingent were provided by highlanders, and thus i do not see reasons

to suppose that the bow used in the highlands was different in design from the one used in the lowlands

the recurved tips are a convenient way to increase the casting speed of the bow using a simple technology, so it should have been very common to see recurve bows side by side to the straight limbed design , basically all around western europe

[Stephen Curtin]

[Stephen Curtin]

Here is another quote about Irish bows from 1518 by Laurent Vital.

"I saw some who had little Turkish bows which were a yard long, of which the string was a big sinew and the arrows were steel tipped reeds and feathered to shoot."