Main Discussion Area > English Warbow
Evidence OTHER than MR Bows of 120+ bows?
Del the cat:
--- Quote from: WillS on November 24, 2013, 05:57:52 pm ---...The reason the bowyers guilds imported yew from so far away was to get premium quality. They were only using the absolute best of the best!
--- End quote ---
There is absolutely no justification for that statement!
a) Yes they imported it, as a tax... but we only know that it was because we didn't have enough of our own.
b) High altitude Yew? Yes, because all the low lying land in Italy would be used for agriculture and it is a relatively mountainous country. Ipso facto the Yew will be growing in the mountains!
I too have handled the Mary Rose bows and there certainly some less than premium staves there.
We should confine ourselves to fact and not attribute random motives to fit them.
A classic story is the bowl shaped depression in the doorway of some Iron age roundhouses found between the post holes. These were attributed by various 'experts' to be of religious significance, where small offerings or rituals would take place.
When experimental archeaologists built such a settlement and lived in it, they found it was merely where the chickens chose to dust bath.
Please note:- I'm not saying Italian Yew isn't better etc etc. (IMO it's debatable) and I have no personal axe to grid.
What I'm saying is we cannot say we imported it because of quality, any more than because of price (free!) or quantity.
Del
Del the cat:
Great photo!
It nicely shows the section of that particular bow is more circle with a slightly flattened back than a 'D'
Del
WillS:
--- Quote from: Del the cat on November 25, 2013, 06:00:52 am ---
--- Quote from: WillS on November 24, 2013, 05:57:52 pm ---...The reason the bowyers guilds imported yew from so far away was to get premium quality. They were only using the absolute best of the best!
--- End quote ---
There is absolutely no justification for that statement!
a) Yes they imported it, as a tax... but we only know that it was because we didn't have enough of our own.
b) High altitude Yew? Yes, because all the low lying land in Italy would be used for agriculture and it is a relatively mountainous country. Ipso facto the Yew will be growing in the mountains!
I too have handled the Mary Rose bows and there certainly some less than premium staves there.
We should confine ourselves to fact and not attribute random motives to fit them.
A classic story is the bowl shaped depression in the doorway of some Iron age roundhouses found between the post holes. These were attributed by various 'experts' to be of religious significance, where small offerings or rituals would take place.
When experimental archeaologists built such a settlement and lived in it, they found it was merely where the chickens chose to dust bath.
Please note:- I'm not saying Italian Yew isn't better etc etc. (IMO it's debatable) and I have no personal axe to grid.
What I'm saying is we cannot say we imported it because of quality, any more than because of price (free!) or quantity.
Del
--- End quote ---
No no, you are right. I love debates like this and I always get a tad carried away and get all "but it MUST have been because..." when I don't actually know. I'm really bad at it!
BUT.
Surely - picking up on point a) - the reason we didn't have enough is because we didn't have enough QUALITY yew. England is FULL of yew - it's one of our native plants. There's no way the entire country's yew population was wiped out just to make bows and then we looked elsewhere to carry on.
I honestly think that they went through the majority of yew and realised it just wasn't good enough. Our yew is perfect for the hobby bowyer, because you can take your time going through loads of it, and end up with one or two fantastic warbows/longbows. But if you had to make thousands of seriously good, seriously heavy bows it just isn't reliable and dense enough, when compared to the yew that grows in really harsh, really cold environments such as in the alps. The bowmakers on this forum for example relish the thought of crazy staves, little dips and knots to work around, the challenge of uneven sapwood, twists, cracks etc etc. It's a bit of an adventure and makes it all far more exciting. We also can all appreciate the workmanship if the bowyer manages to pull off a fantastic bow despite all of these "flaws" in the wood. But a medieval bowyer, commissioned to make hundreds of warbows in a very short time would surely not want to spend his life with a scraper easing around knots and taking his time. He wants to bash out a load of powerful, heavy warbows because to him it's a job. You can't do that with English yew, each piece seems to have some challenge or problem.
I know you know this, but harsh climate = slower growth. Slower growth = denser, tougher wood. Tougher wood = higher poundage without needing 2inchx2inch handle areas. Italian yew is unquestionably different to English/American yew. The huge price tag on it is not just because it's "more traditional" or for the stigma attached to it. It's definitely better quality wood as a whole. If you know that another country has "premium" quality wood compared to your own hit and miss quality, of course you're gonna get it imported, right?
Now, obviously some of the Italian/Spanish/Portugese wood that was imported wasn't AAA grade wood, and some of that wood made it to the MR bows. But in general, the majority of those bows are top quality wood that would take somebody a long time to find in the UK. And that time just wasn't available when you had to cater for large numbers in a short time.
WillS:
Oh, also, by the time the MR sank in 1545 the 100 Years War had been and gone. So I would imagine (no facts here ;) ) that a huge amount of the really good European yew that was imported had been used during the campaigns and was perhaps starting to run thin around the Tudor times. It's really impossible to know what sort of wood was used during the HYW as we just don't have any examples (which I still find weird...?) but I guess there's a chance the MR bows is a spectrum of the really really good stuff (like in that cross section photo) down to much lower quality wood because that's all that was left.
I was talking to one of the owners of Fairbow during the NLHF and he actually told me that Italian yew now that most people are able to get hold of is starting to get much closer in quality to American yew/top English yew just because all the good stuff has been taken or used. The price is coming down for the wood itself, but the import price is still more or less the same so it seems like the wood is too expensive for the quality.
Del the cat:
The big confusion is in the word 'Quality'
If you mean clean straight Yew suiatble for a longbow that is entirely different from saying the actual properties of the wood are somehow "higher quality".
You can buy plenty of really "good quality" Yew on the internet really cheaply... but it's 300mm long and won't make a bow!
There are plenty of other factors which we just don't know... here are some that may or may not be relevant.
Yew may have been managed in plantations, if so it takes a long time to get a crop. Our native wood lands may have been full of gnarled twisted stuff whereas plantations grown close together in naturally occuring high altitude woods (where the trees all huddle together for warmth ;) ) may have yielded close grown straight trees
Woodland was being maintained for hunting? Growing Oak for ship building? Being managed for charcoal for iron making? or cut down for agriculture?
Language is a tricky chap and people will interpret the words to suit their own purpose. We should try and apply scientific rigor to what we say.
Note my prolific use of the word 'may' I don't know the answers, but at least I know that I don't know (drifts off into that famous Donald Rumsfeldt speach about the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns) ;)
Your ability to leap to unsupported conclusion is still pretty breathtaking. The 130# Yew bow I just made could easilly have been a 150#, I had trouble getting the weight down, it the quality of the wood was so bad, I'd have had to make it bigger than MR dimensions not smaller.
You are certainly right about the current Italian Yew ... what I've seen in the flesh and on the internet is V similar to the English Yew I've used, and some has paler wood of lower ring count.
Del
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