Between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the ravages of the Black Death in 1348–50 the practice of archery among the ordinary people of England and Wales produced archers and bows of such power and capability that they became a significant factor in European history, to the amazement of contemporary chroniclers. This has been much discussed by historians, but no clear picture of popular archery in medieval England and Wales has emerged to explain how this came about. Archery is an activity that developed in nearly all cultures and peoples for millennia. The Australian Aborigines are the most significant exception to this. Examples of the traditional use of self bows of different lengths are widespread, and can be found throughout history in four continents until the last quarter of the previous millennium.
Archery had been practised in the British Isles for something like four millennia before 1066. Perhaps the earliest evidence of the significant use of archery in war was found during the excavations at the Neolithic fort at Carn Brea near Redruth in Cornwall. About 700 flint arrowheads were found, many of them Neolithic leaf-shaped heads, and the largest concentration was around the probable site of one of the gateways into the fort. While the excavator observed that it is impossible to guess the nature of the warfare evidenced by the arrowheads, he felt that it was almost certainly fighting among the various Neolithic communities of the area and that the assault on the fort took place at some point in the mid third millennium BC.1
Despite this long history of popular archery in the British Isles, its use in warfare ebbed and flowed as various cultures arrived or developed. In general, although archery was used in hunting throughout the long period starting with the Neolithic period, it remained peripheral to the development of military practice. But some combination of circumstances after the irruption of the Normans into British history led to the development of both the skills and the equipment necessary for longbow archery to become a revolutionary change in Western European military practice. The three most commonly quoted reasons for this development are: the importance of archery in the Norman victory at Hastings, albeit using bows less than man height in length; the unpleasant experiences of Welsh archery suffered by both English armies in the decades before the Conquest and the Norman armies after it; and the Norse tradition of longbow archery in those parts of England and Scotland heavily influenced by the Vikings. But these factors alone aren’t enough of an explanation. All three applied in Ireland: Norse settlements; experience of the effectiveness of the Welsh archers; and military leaders who understood the usefulness of military archery. Yet the Irish themselves did not develop a military practice exploiting powerful hand bows despite their experiences on the receiving end of it. The Anglo Norman community in Ireland continued to develop military archery to the extent that there are records of companies of archers from Ireland being included in English royal armies in the fourteenth century. It most certainly was not for want of good bow wood in Ireland since yew bowstaves were imported from Ireland to England between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. One reason for the lack of development of archery in medieval Ireland was because the population of England at large seem to have practised archery for sport and hunting more commonly than was the case in Ireland in the Middle Ages.
But the evidence of what was going on in Ireland is very important, because Ireland has provided that rarest of archery-related archaeological finds, a medieval yew bow from before the Tudor period. One complete bow has been found that dates to the period of the Anglo Norman invasions of that island in the twelfth century.
An understanding of the development of popular archery in England of the twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries can be built up by looking at the eclectic collection of records mentioning archery that have survived. These include court records of criminal activities; wills and inventories that show men owning bows; records of sports and pastimes; accounts of hunting, most of it illegal, and military archery. Archaeological finds are important because they show actual practice unfiltered by legal scribes, chroniclers or any other observer. But these are a bit ‘one sided’ consisting almost entirely of arrowheads; finds of bows, arrowshafts and bone or leather archery accessories are very rare, as are finds of artefacts made of organic material in general. As yet there have been no finds of anything that might be archery butts confirmed for the period 1066–c.1350. Then there are all the statutes and orders that both encourage the ownership of bows and arrows and restrict their use. Artistic representations showing archers with their bows and arrows include manuscript illustrations, church wall paintings and a few carvings, but these come from a time before rigid representational art. Finally there are any records or events that give an insight into the value that was put upon archery skills. Taken together the activities described in these records and a study of the various artefacts make up a patchwork picture of popular archery before the successes of Edward III’s reign made the practice of archery part of the nation’s self image.
It is not easy to find evidence of widespread popular archery in England before the thirteenth century. More evidence becomes available in that century and in the first half of the fourteenth century leading up to the great victories of Edward III’s reign. But there still isn’t any consistent surviving evidence of the widespread use of heavy bows, that is bows with a draw weight of at least 110lbs (50kg), the estimated minimum draw weight of the Mary Rose bows.2 In fact, the evidence from before Edward III’s reign does not even suggest that all archers habitually used ‘longbows’, that is bows about 6ft (1.83m) long. For much of the period when the military reputation of the English and Welsh archer was becoming established in Europe, the term longbow was anachronistic, since it is first recorded in the mid-fifteenth century.3 Before then, written records, whether official accounts, inventories or chronicles record just two sorts of bow, crossbows and bows. The Latin word arcus is used for a bow, which really just describes its shape. It is used for a hand bow of whatever length, and at some points in this book the term hand bow is used to make a clear distinction from crossbows in use at the same time. In line with this, the term archer will only be used to mean men using hand bows, those using crossbows are crossbowmen. Some of the evidence suggests that ordinary men commonly used shorter bows, maybe 4½–5ft (1.37–1.52m) in length in this period, although at the same time there are a very few records that make clear mention of men using bows 6ft or more (1.83m) in length. The widespread use of lighter shorter bows also becomes apparent from the discussion of medieval arrowheads. Many of the surviving arrowheads have a socket size of about 0.35in (9mm) or less, realistically allowing them to be used only on fairly light shafts, which in turn means that they were used with fairly light bows. Arrows of this size would not work well with bows with draw weights similar to those found on the Mary Rose because they would not have been stiff enough to cope with forces generated by these bows. The diameters of the arrow shafts from the Mary Rose range between 0.43in and 0.5in (11mm and 13mm) at the head end.4 Arrowheads found at Camber Castle, Rye, which are more or less contemporary with the sinking of the Mary Rose, also have an average socket diameter of about 0.5in (12.6mm).5 Taken together these figures confirm that the medieval fletchers knew what modern heavy bow archers have worked out, that it easy to make arrows for heavy bows using shafts of between 0.47in and 0.5in (12mm and 13mm) because you know that all the arrowshafts will tolerate the forces involved in being shot from such a bow without time-consuming work weighing and selecting arrowshafts. Given the large quantities of arrows made for military use in medieval England in response to royal orders often at fairly short notice, economy in the use of the fletchers’ time was vital.
There is no evidence to contradict the long-held view that the indigenous bow type in Western Europe is the self bow. Traces of laminated bows in ancient and medieval Western Europe arise in three ways: bows used by men hired from, or invading from, further east; equipment brought back by the Crusaders or by travellers; bows used by the Saracen population in medieval Sicily and Italy. Evidence of different lengths of self bow being used in Europe does not mean that long bows and short bows developed as different types of bow. In large part it arose from the availability of bow wood, the skill of the bowyer and that of the archer. It is quite possible that many of the bows used in the activities described in the following chapters were not made by craftsmen bowyers, but by general woodworkers or even the archer himself. This would have been most likely when the archer belonged to the broad class of peasants.
The most substantial pieces of evidence for the widespread use of short bows are the Bayeux Tapestry and the finds from excavations at Waterford and Limerick. Both of these are widely regarded as reflecting the same tradition, that of Norman or Northern French military archery. An experienced war leader like William of Normandy clearly considered these ‘short bow’ archers an important part of his invasion force. As far as one can tell from accounts of the battle at Hastings their tactical role was to launch showers of arrows to disconcert and disrupt the opposing forces, inflicting as many injuries as the opposing forces’ protection allowed, making the onslaught of infantry or cavalry more effective. It is likely that they were not expected to inflict mass slaughter. The tactical role of the English and Welsh longbow men in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was more ambitious; they inflicted injury or death on many of their opponents until expensive armour was developed to resist their arrows. The major difference in the roles of the archers in the Norman army at Hastings and the English and Welsh longbow archers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was that the Norman archers did not have the power to make an opposing army wilt or provoke them into desperate charges in the way that the longbowmen could. Without wishing to belittle the skill or military value of the archers in the Norman armies in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it is difficult to believe that men needed to practise as much to use these short bows effectively as was necessary to use a heavy warbow. Therefore their presence and usefulness did not depend on there being a substantial tradition of popular archery in the archers’ home countries in the way that the use of the English warbow did.
Any study of a human activity such as popular archery, the practice of archery by the ordinary mass of the population of medieval England who are almost invisible to history as individuals, needs to be put into the context of what life was like for these people. Firstly, how big was the population in the period from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries? The compilation of the Domesday Book in 1086 has allowed historians to estimate that the population at the time was about 2.2 million of which over 90 per cent lived in the countryside. By the start of the fourteenth century the population had grown between two and threefold to at least 5 million, with between 80 and 85 per cent living outside the towns and cities.6 This meant that the growth in the population was largely due to the growth in the numbers of the rural peasantry.7 The rural population fell into two groups, the free and the unfree, often called serfs. These were unfree in the sense that they owed labour dues to their immediate ‘landlords’, were not meant to travel without the lords’ permission and were to a large degree under the jurisdiction of these lords’ courts, although they were beginning to gain some limited rights of access to the King’s courts. By the thirteenth century there is strong evidence that a customary understanding of rights, services owed and fines due had developed between the peasants and their lords which meant that matters were not as oppressive as they appear from a twenty-first century perspective. Serfs were not a uniform ‘class’ but fell into two groups. Villeins made up about 40 per cent of the rural population and held enough land to feed themselves and their families and even produce a surplus for sale. Bordars and Cottars represented about 30 per cent of the rural population, and held small landholdings which were insufficient to feed their families. They had to add to the produce from their landholding with income from all sorts of wage labour just to survive.8 There tended to be a higher proportion of serfs in the Midlands and Southern counties than was the case in the Northern and Eastern counties. The majority of these peasants lived in villages and hamlets. The rapid growth of the population between c.1100 and c.1300 was mirrored by a large increase in the number of towns in the same period. These increased from c.100 in the eleventh century to c.830 by c.1300 in the whole of Britain, with the vast majority of these being found in England.9
The increase in the population and in the number of towns also stimulated an increase in the number of markets. All the towns would have markets and many villages also had a weekly market. Medieval lawyers declared as a rule of thumb aimed at ensuring the financial viability of town markets that the residents of a town could object if it was proposed to establish another market within a 6.75-mile radius.10 As a result much of the rural population had access to a thriving local market. But another important consequence of the increase in the number of towns was that the rural population had more access to skilled craftsmen since these could find enough work to earn a living in the area of a town, whether they lived in it permanently or travelled from town to town. As regards archery, while it is very unlikely that a specialist bowyer or fletcher lived in most towns in the early fourteenth century, it is probable that town smiths had an effect on the types of arrowhead in use in the surrounding countryside.
The laws which controlled the ownership of weapons in general and bows and arrows in particular are discussed in detail in The Law of Archery before the Black Death.
But life for a medieval peasant wasn’t just a matter of endless toil, they had a lot of holidays. Since God rested on the seventh day, the Church insisted that man should also have a day of rest, so work was forbidden on Sundays. In addition there were between forty and fifty religious festivals and holidays a year when most or all work was also forbidden.11 So the medieval peasant had more holidays than we do! The religious festivals and holidays included ‘Church Ales’ at a parish level, and major saints’ days on a grander scale. The people enjoyed these and celebrated them with parades and plays. Sundays and religious holidays became very important in the development of popular archery since these days of rest were when ordinary men could indulge in sports. A few accounts of these popular sporting activities can be found below. From 1363 onwards, the King and Parliament issued proclamations and statutes to try to limit popular sports to archery for the benefit of the country, but before that, in the period this book considers, there seemed to be less interference with popular sports.
So, two questions arise: Firstly, how did the tradition of popular archery develop among the English and Welsh to such a degree that Edward III could field an army in the Crecy campaign of 1346 that, by the time of the Battle of Crecy itself, included perhaps 6,500 archers using bows of sufficient draw weight to devastate the Genoese crossbowmen and then shoot down the French knights’ warhorses and possibly considerable numbers of the knights themselves?12 But that was not all, at the same time as Edward was marching through northern France towards Crecy, the Archbishop of York managed to raise enough men, including a considerable proportion of archers, to defeat King David of Scotland at the Battle of Neville’s Cross. The events of 1346 make clear that there were substantial numbers of men available to serve as military archers. This is a big point. Men are not able to use heavy bows effectively without putting in a lot of practise. Most men in medieval England and Wales were in the habit of regular often heavy physical work from a fairly young age, as their skeletons show. As a result they were fit and strong despite the risks of disease and a sometimes very limited diet. But they would still have to practise. In many ways the long bow is a most unlikely weapon to become the main weapon of an army in the Middle Ages because it requires so much consistent practise in comparison with staff weapons. What was it in the English and Welsh character that made ordinary men choose this most difficult of options?
The second question is; is it possible to determine when the stages in the growth of popular archery happened? How much were Englishmen in the years after the Norman Conquest able to practise archery, or did the Normans try to prevent it for fear of trouble from their new subjects? How widespread had the practise of archery become by the early 1340s, or did Edward III’s spectacular successes in that decade alter the popular opinion of archery so that a higher proportion of men took it up? Did the tales of these victories and the riches that archers could gain as booty in France lead those ordinary men who were practising archery with ordinary bows of varying lengths and qualities as their legal duty under the Statute of Winchester to decide that this was not enough, and that they would go on to develop archery skills using heavy warbows?
Whatever the answers to these big questions may be, it is absolutely clear is that by the 1360s the king, the magnates and the Parliament of England perceived that warbow archery was vital to the defence of the kingdom, and to successful military adventures in Europe. Most of the evidence we have for the development and practise of archery and its official encouragement comes from after the glory days of Edward III’s reign. The first royal proclamation requiring the practise of archery that can be found in the official records was made in June 1363, a time when England and France were technically at peace as a result of the Treaty of Bretigny made three years earlier. Thereafter in the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, proclamations and statutes were made at irregular intervals which aimed to encourage the practice of archery specifically for the defence of the realm. In the latter half of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century these were interspersed with statutes and proclamations which tried to control both the supply of bowstaves from abroad and price of bows within the kingdom. In a statute made in 1511–12, Henry VIII even tried to direct where bowyers should live in an attempt to ensure that Englishmen everywhere in his kingdom had easy access to bows so that they could practise for war.13 All these laws and statutes had the purpose of maintaining the archery tradition that the kings, nobles and Parliament wanted to see exist in England and Wales in these centuries.
In seeking the answer to these questions, it should be possible to get some idea of how far the men of medieval England and Wales developed their tradition of popular archery for themselves and how far they were led and encouraged into it by the kings and nobles.
The skills of the military archer developed in a period in the British Isles which was dominated by three events of undeniable historical significance: the Norman Conquest in 1066; the signing of Magna Carta in 1215 and the Black Death in 1348–50. All three had a significant effect on the ordinary man and woman of medieval England. The Conquest introduced new kings, nobles and local landholders as lords of the manors, the majority of whom could barely speak the language of the mass of the ordinary people, and a number of laws which discriminated against the English. The survivors of the men who had held lands as nobles and leading local landholders under the Anglo-Saxon kings, usually called thegns, found themselves with much reduced holdings and a less influential position in society under the Norman kings. Carpenter has summarised their position writing ‘Most [men of status of king’s thegn pre conquest] held just a few hides of land, but they were also probably local officials – huntsmen, foresters, sheriffs bailiffs – and thus significant.’14 A goodly number of these are listed in Domesday Book. So the mass of the population of England found themselves owing services and dues to men they viewed as alien, while the leaders of society that they recognised and could communicate with worked for the new landholders and helped implement the changes that the Norman Conquest brought to England. The barons, churchmen and nobles who drafted and negotiated Magna Carta were openly concerned with restricting royal prerogative powers, and re-establishing what they claimed to see as a Golden Age in England when the king ruled within the law and with respect for tradition. But Magna Carta also had the probably unintended consequences of giving the mass of the population both free and unfree more secure legal rights and remedies. Finally the Black Death was a catastrophe that we can barely comprehend. In three years, 1348–50, it killed about 40 per cent of the population. But this death toll gave the survivors a broad range of opportunities. In simple terms, there was a shortage of people. Men were not scarce enough that peace reigned between England and France, the great victory at Poitiers, where the archers made a huge contribution to the Black Prince’s success, happened after the Black Death. But the real consequences were felt in the rest of the fourteenth century when it became difficult for landlords to hang on to their tenants both free and unfree. So there was a noticeable degree of both geographic and economic mobility among the population at large despite legal restraints on both wage levels and movement.
Looking back over a millennium how is it possible to see how popular archery developed in medieval England? In part by taking a very old-fashioned approach to history. As Karen Armstrong put it ‘Since the eighteenth century, we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned above all with what actually happened. But in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past they were more concerned with what an event meant’.15 The whole point of what follows is not to provide an account of illegal hunting by ordinary people, or to study medieval crime, but to discover what these activities signify in the story of popular archery in medieval England before the great days of the archer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
1 Mercer R.J., ‘Excavations at Carn Brea, Ilogan Cornwall 1970–73’ (Cornish Archaeology, Vol.20, 1981)
2 See Hildred, A. (ed.), Weapons of Warre: The Armaments of the Mary Rose (Portsmouth, Mary Rose Trust, 2011) pp.616–29. For a discussion of the draw weights of the bows recovered from the Mary Rose. This makes clear that there is still debate about the draw weights with some authorities thinking that the minimum may be as low as 65lb. However, the draw weights of replicas noted in the book and others made by members of the English Warbow Society suggest that draw weights were over 120lbs.
3 The first occurrences seem to be in the 1440s in the Paston letters and an order for military equipment necessary for the defence of Caen issued in 1449 which can be found in Stevenson, J. (ed.), Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France in the Reign of King Henry VI (London, 1861–4) Vol.1, p.501
4 Hildred, A. (2011) p.682
5 Biddle, M. et al., Henry VIII’s Coastal Artillery Fort at Camber Castle, Rye, East Sussex (Oxford, 2001) pp.196–8
6 Dyer, C., Making a Living in the Middle Ages (Penguin Books, 2003) pp.95 and 233
7 Ibid., p.155
8 Ibid., pp.97–8
9 Ibid., p.187. This figure includes towns in Wales and Scotland although the large majority were in England
10 Ibid., p.191
11 See Hutton, R., The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1996) for more about these festivals
12 Figures derived from Ayton, A. and Preston, P., The Battle of Crecy 1346 (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2005) pp.190–1
13 More detailed accounts of these legal efforts to encourage archery in England can be found in Wadge, R., Arrowstorm: The World of the Archer in the Hundred Years War (The History Press, 2007) pp.53–6, 210–13, 226–8
14 Carpenter, D., The Struggle for Mastery; Britain 1066–1284 (Penguin Books, 2004) p.80
15 Armstrong, K., A Short History of Myth (Canongate, 2005) p.17