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Sean Manning
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 Posted: Sat 24 Nov, 2012 11:24 am Post subject: |
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| Harri Kyllönen wrote: | | Sean Manning wrote: | | I suspect that the period solution of matching bows to men was "Your old bow broke? Try this one. Too strong? What about that one? That will be three shillings." That would not have been the first time that army issue kit was fitted to the user than that which soldiers chose for themselves! |
Pretty much yes. Thats actually exactly how (historically recorded) steppe and northern people learned to use more powerful bows from childhood becoming warriors.
I believe that bows would be customized according to their user just like they are today. Isn't that part of the bow makers job to build something suitable for the individual?
Going into modern warfare is quite interesting since many soldiers do customize their equiptment including weapons (scopes, lights, lasers, dual-mags, bodyarmor etc.). Of course this is the era before there was much standardization and most warriors got their gear straight from the smiths and they were custom fitted from the go. Weren't the best longbowmen actually professionals too after all? And if they were just random peasants, why would you give them a bow that requires a pro-powerlifter to draw? |
To clarify, I am talking about the issue of bows from large stocks of equipment before or during a campaign. That is how the cases of bows in Mary Rose would have been distributed. From the 13th century onwards it was ordinary for soldiers to borrow weapons from their lords, receive replacements for items which were lost and broke, or buy used from dealers. It was also very common to buy new weapons from merchants. Buying a new bow from a bowyer was just one common way that a bow might reach an archer's hands. The Great Warbow has a good discussion of some of these issues.
If someone went to a bowyer and had him make a bow, that someone could probably ask for one suited to their tastes (although all the sources I have seen deal with luxury objects such as manuscripts and armour; I would be grateful if anyone could give a reference to literature on commissioning cheap items in early modern Europe). But medieval commanders seem to have allowed for a high breakage rate of bows and strings on campaign. If you can handle 16th century English, the book Toxophilius by Ascham is our main source for the practice of Elizabethan archery.
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Harri Kyllönen
Location: Finland Joined: 12 Jun 2009
Posts: 42
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| Posted: Sat 24 Nov, 2012 12:13 pm Post subject: |
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[quote="Leo Todeschini"]Sean Manning wrote | Quote: | ....
The French are pressing in and readying to board; the archers are loosing like crazy and things are looking pretty bad, dead and injured all over. Just on the left of the quarter deck an orderly queue (being English it has to be orderly) of archers had formed, all waiting for Will Bowyer to finish tillering their replacement bows, and the decks resounded to screams, curses, cannon fire and polite enquiries as to "when they could expect their replacement bows as the French were looking awfully close". |
Valid point. Though isn't it generally accepted that wood bow shafts were often imported by this time? Didn't the best wood mostly grow mainland Europe and Brits had to purchase it there?
A boat crossing the British isles for another part of the kingdom would be in that of a risk of having to fight for it with the french?
What would be your opinion on the average draw weight of the english longbows? I'd also like to hear Sean's opinion on this question.
Again, I'm not an expert on the subject, propably wrong most of the time and interested in learning more.
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Timo Nieminen
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| Posted: Sat 24 Nov, 2012 4:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Harri Kyllönen wrote: |
I was trying to say that a 90 lbs can still make a fine warbow (and likely did) and there propably were samples of that draw outside the ML bows while the average would apparently be closer to 120. The largest "anomaly" draw weights I'd still consider bows that were yet to be "shaved" down to their end users draw weight.
But you're absolutely right that I didn't articulate myself that well. Perhaps the wording I'm going for here would be that warbows are generally somewhere between 90 and 140 lbs? Still I believe you'd get an average of below 120, bar flight bows that were more for show and tell.
I believe that the same physics applied to eastern recurve bows and a similar range of draw weights was in use. |
For East Asian warbows, 110lb to 130lb. 90 would be rather lightweight. East Asian bows should also deliver more energy for a given draw weight (more convex/less concave force-draw curves, longer draw lengths).
"In addition to being efficient, all pole arms were quite nice to look at." - Cherney Berg, A hideous history of weapons, Collier 1963.
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Sean Manning
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| Posted: Sat 24 Nov, 2012 5:38 pm Post subject: |
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| Harri Kyllönen wrote: |
A boat crossing the British isles for another part of the kingdom would be in that of a risk of having to fight for it with the french?
What would be your opinion on the average draw weight of the english longbows? I'd also like to hear Sean's opinion on this question.
Again, I'm not an expert on the subject, propably wrong most of the time and interested in learning more. |
Well, Mary Rose sank as she sailed into battle, so the stocks of bows on board were either being used by soldiers or were ready to be given to archers who lost or broke their bows. Merchants entering England in the 16th century needed to bring a certain number of unfinished bow staves of different qualities, which were worked up in England and sold at a fixed price. But Mary Rose was a warship sailing out to fight the French, not a merchant ship sailing in bringing tar and iron to Portsmouth.
The latest estimates I have seen are the ones by Kooi in The Great Warbow: the bows found on Mary Rose would have had a draw weight of 100 to 180 lbs at 28” when new, average about 150 lbs. I suspect that draw weights in the 14th and 15th centuries would have been similar. Longbows for hunting or shooting from horseback might have been less strong.
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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Fri 30 Nov, 2012 8:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Timo Nieminen wrote: | | For East Asian warbows, 110lb to 130lb. 90 would be rather lightweight. East Asian bows should also deliver more energy for a given draw weight (more convex/less concave force-draw curves, longer draw lengths). |
Not too lightweight for a horseman's bow. As far as I know, the Manchu and the Japanese are the only cultures that made regular use of bows over 100lbs on horseback; most others used lighter bows (depending on the place and time, this could go as low as 40-50 pounds or as high as 80-90) although many of these horse archers would have carried longer and heavier bows for dismounted use.
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Timo Nieminen
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| Posted: Fri 30 Nov, 2012 9:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: | | Timo Nieminen wrote: | | For East Asian warbows, 110lb to 130lb. 90 would be rather lightweight. East Asian bows should also deliver more energy for a given draw weight (more convex/less concave force-draw curves, longer draw lengths). |
Not too lightweight for a horseman's bow. As far as I know, the Manchu and the Japanese are the only cultures that made regular use of bows over 100lbs on horseback; most others used lighter bows (depending on the place and time, this could go as low as 40-50 pounds or as high as 80-90) although many of these horse archers would have carried longer and heavier bows for dismounted use. |
90lbs isn't even too lightweight for an infantry bow, nor is it for a horsebow. Late Qing bows are often reported as about 90lbs (though that's perhaps measured at less than full draw).
Song and Ming military exams used about 90lbs as the weakest allowed horsebow (the heavier ones used were about 105lbs and 120lbs). The same candidates shot much heavier bows on foot, so I think the mounted archery part of the test was mainly for accuracy rather than ability to draw a heavy bow with acceptable form.
IIRC, Song sources say that about 150lbs was typical for a Mongol bow. Right, wrong, exaggerated? Anyway, high draw weight enough to impress the Chinese it seems. The Mongol regulations of the time were along the lines of "every soldier will have two bows, or one good one", so perhaps one might be significantly weaker.
Surviving Ottoman warbows are mostly 90-130lbs, and don't appear to be segregated into foot and horse versions.
I think it looks like quite a few people used bows of over 100lbs on horseback often enough, though the majority might have been weaker. Those same people don't look to have used warbows much lighter than 90lbs or so, even on horseback. That's biased towards more modern bows, since we have more surviving bows and more surviving written records. Given that trying to increase range to more than the enemy, or to improve armour penetration against their armour, will tend to push draw-weights up, I wouldn't be at all surprised if earlier draw-weights were much lower.
"In addition to being efficient, all pole arms were quite nice to look at." - Cherney Berg, A hideous history of weapons, Collier 1963.
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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Fri 30 Nov, 2012 10:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Timo Nieminen wrote: | | Given that trying to increase range to more than the enemy, or to improve armour penetration against their armour, will tend to push draw-weights up, I wouldn't be at all surprised if earlier draw-weights were much lower. |
Exactly. Most of the data we have is for the 16th and 17th centuries (plus later bows that follow this era's designs with only cosmetic changes), but the problem is this is exactly the era when the draw-weights of both horse and infantry bows peaked just before people (apparently) gave up pushing it any further and shifted to much more practical firearms for greater penetration. Earlier styles didn't always mandate quite as much power; Taybugha seems to advocate bows of about 80lbs. (if the conversion factors are correct) as a "golden mean" standard in the 13th century or so, though I suspect this number is meant for bows that can (also) be used on horseback.
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Gary Teuscher
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| Posted: Sat 01 Dec, 2012 4:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Most of the data we have is for the 16th and 17th centuries (plus later bows that follow this era's designs with only cosmetic changes), but the problem is this is exactly the era when the draw-weights of both horse and infantry bows peaked just before people (apparently) gave up pushing it any further and shifted to much more practical firearms for greater penetration. |
Actually, I think the problem using data from bows from the 16th-17th centuries is that firearms are becoming the weapons of war. Bows are seeing less war use and more sport/hunt use. I think one issue with many of the found bows in England (other than those from the Mary Rose) is that many of these weapons I think were more weapons of the hunti or for sporting. Most Found longbows from this late period have draws of 100 pounds or less, the lightest (IIRC) being about 60 pounds, whcih would make it geared more for fowling and other light game (a 60 pound selfbow from this period projects arrows with the energy of a modern 35-40 pound range if using modern technology).
The one red herring in this I think is the flight bows from the Turks, these were fairly powerful and used to loose arrows for record long distance casts that still stand today.
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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Fri 07 Dec, 2012 1:33 am Post subject: |
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| Gary Teuscher wrote: | | Actually, I think the problem using data from bows from the 16th-17th centuries is that firearms are becoming the weapons of war. Bows are seeing less war use and more sport/hunt use. |
In Europe, perhaps. In the Far East this was arguably the pinnacle of bowmaking technology (as well as practical draw weights), and later developments down to the 20th century have been largely concerned with preserving the advances made in this "last hurrah" era rather than improving upon them (which would probably have been nearly impossible anyway without modern innovations like glass and/or carbon fibre composite constructions).
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