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Randall Moffett
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 Posted: Mon 30 Apr, 2007 2:22 am Post subject: |
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It would be uncommon from what I have seen for a ship on active war duty to be hauling freight or anykind. By Henry VIII time you have a much more defined system of class; warships, transport, even scouting ships. Anything on the mary Rose when it went down would have had to be ready for use. If I remember right an article that just came out on the mary rose covers this as well but not I cannot remember where it was but it staves would only have been in the last 2-3 months past it came out (I read it when waiting for a meeting to start...).
Earlier it is possible as the ships were often just lumped together and the number of archers and men at arms on the ship made any merchant vessel a warship. The scale of bows and arrows made in england is massive. I know that the tower has tens of thousands of final product bows made during prep for war. One fletcher from london when he died left half a million arrows in his shop..... ready for the continuation of the Hundred Years War. I cannot even imagine the huge scale these were being made sometimes. Southampton has men entering the port and gate with thousands of bowstaves and bows. Totally incredible organisation, London even more so.
RPM
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Matthew D
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| Posted: Tue 01 May, 2007 8:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Jonathan Harton wrote: | | Couple this fact with the reality that a horsebow took between 12-18 months to produce, compared to a few days for a yew longbow, and you can start to see why the English favored it. Sure it was not the best system around, but it was the best choice to mass produce and field to a group of men who knew how to use it. |
From my experience with bows, I would say that production time was the major deciding factor and you are correct about production time, I do know that there are some skilled bowyers this day and age using only hand tools can have a bow ready to shoot in about 15 minutes working from a blank or stave.
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Glennan Carnie
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| Posted: Wed 02 May, 2007 3:47 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | From my experience with bows, I would say that production time was the major deciding factor and you are correct about production time, I do know that there are some skilled bowyers this day and age using only hand tools can have a bow ready to shoot in about 15 minutes working from a blank or stave. |
A heavy-weight (war) bow takes a little longer to create. It has to be fashioned a little more carefully as it's under considerably more stress. And by all accounts English archers were a pretty discerning lot. After all, they'd been shooting and assessing bows most of their lives and they knew a good or bad bow when they saw it. There are statutes stating that two 'white wood' (Ash? Elm?) bows were to be made for each Yew bow. The records state this was very unpopular, presumably because 1) The archers didn't want inferior bows and 2) The bowyers couldn't sell them!
(And before all the bowyers jump on me: I know that ash and elm can make excellent bows.)
But even so, you're still only talking hours, rather than days to make each bow. When preparing for war the orders for equipment went out 3 - 4 months before campaign. So you're looking at acquiring 10 - 15, 000 bows in 4 months. Speed of production becomes a really big issue.
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James Barker
Location: Ashburn VA Joined: 20 Apr 2005
Posts: 365
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| Posted: Wed 02 May, 2007 6:36 am Post subject: |
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Glennan is touching on an important point about longbows and arrows; you need tons of them for a campaign. Sure the recurve is a better bow but it takes longer to make. When the English went to war they took thousands of archers with them and bow break so you need extra bows too. The simple design of the longbow made it easy to mass produce.
James Barker
Historic Life http://www.historiclife.com/index.html
Archer in La Belle Compagnie http://www.labelle.org/
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This is a standard topic