Primitive Archer
Main Discussion Area => English Warbow => Topic started by: Badger on March 06, 2014, 02:59:21 pm
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Has anyone read any history on the actual manufacturing process of war bows? I would be curious to see how a regular military bow looked as opposed to a soldier or officer who may get a custom one done. Did yhey use helpers to rough out bows and do the finishing? did one guy do the nocks while another guy built the bows? How much has been discovered on this?
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I've been kinda curious about the mass production needed for war as well myself. Is it too far fetched to think that bow making was not as uncommon as today, and maybe most men made their own, or had one made for them, opposed to having someone order a couple hundred from so and so, etc. If I was an archer, I would have a bow, period. And if I was going to war, I would bring my bow, period. But then again, maybe that is far from how it would of worked then. Maybe they would have military issued bows to each archer, is that more likely?
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Interesting topic. Looking forward to seeing lots of different opinions on this. Personally I see warbows back then as rifles today. Government issued in times of war, mass-produced and as normal during conflict as anything else but not personal or unique or made by the soldier.
Considering that the bowyers guilds kept their bow making methods a secret, and it was only passed through generations as compared to being shared with the community I think it's unlikely that everyone was making their own bows. I can see logic in the theory that perhaps some guys made their own from easy-to-find materials such as ash, holly, plum and hazel to have a bow to practice with but I would imagine that in most cases they were very simple affairs. Probably not particularly well finished or perfectly tillered as compared to the military-grade Italian, Portugese and Spanish yew bows that were made specially by the guilds and kept in storage for military use. These bows would probably then be handed out to soldiers in general. Looking at the bowyers' marks on the Mary Rose bows and the detailed tables in Weapons Of Warre, there are lots of recurring marks - bows can be grouped based on the marks. There are sets of chevrons (3, 5, 7 and so on) in fir tree patterns or crosses and these seem the most common. Perhaps the number of chevrons indicated the draw weight of the bow, and each soldier knowing his own draw weight would take a bow from the right chest or group safe in the knowledge that the bow would be within a certain tolerance of his particular draw weight.
There are bowyers' marks that are more unique - circles, crosses, intricate stamps etc - that might suggest personal bows or bows for higher-ranking archers or group commanders.
Whether there was a production line within the guilds is a really interesting question - we know there were horners who worked horn (and Mark Stretton's theory is that the young cow horn with it's natural cone hollow was prepared by the horners and then worked into a basic shape by the bowyer) but it's a fascinating thought that perhaps there were trained bowyers who prepared the stave - roughed out the stave blank into square stock and established tapers - and a second bowyer rounding corners and tillering (as Jaro said, once the tapers are established on a Mary Rose style bow, providing it's been done carefully and accurately then tillering only takes 40mins or less)
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I don't think there is any good info.
IMO it is futile to hypothesise as there is no way of proving or disproving the hypothesis.
Del
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Pretty interesting, your probably right Will. Always appreciate your sharing your knowledge, as well as everyone else. I've always been curious how a production line of bow making would work. Man, it must of been some back breaking work, using all hand tools to make hundreds of bows. I know I would of kept my hatchet and draw knife razor blade sharp. :)
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Knowledge? I don't know anything, I just like theorising. It's what I got into bows for in the first place :)
I'd love to get round to making a bowyers flote one day. I can imagine that it would make very short work of a stave, at least getting it to rough tillering proportions.
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I'd love to get round to making a bowyers flote one day????? What is a bowyers float??
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A series of blades mounted in a wooden block that has a handle. Whatever shape you want to make can be ground into the blades. It is used similary to a scraper mounted in a carrier.
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There are some nice pics if you google images molding plane.
I'd imagine a bowyers flote would be a long version of one of them.
Dunno if they would actually need a shaped blade,maybe a concave one would be handy.
Del
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This is the badge of the Worshipful Company of Bowyers and shows three bowyers' flotes on the shield
(http://www.bowyers.com/images/aboutUs/armsLarge.jpg)
There's also this image
(http://karlwilcox.com/parker/wp-content/uploads/parker/m269b.png)
Something similar is this wooden block plane which is much easier to get hold of, or even make and I've seen Chris Boyton using one of these. The blade is toothed, which leaves nice grooves in the wood. It has no bias to grain, so it will square off any wood without getting caught or digging into knots or grain swirls.
(http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a262/Derek50/Planes/Strike%20Block%20Plane/SB36_zpsaca15c51.jpg)
I would imagine it was a very common tool - I guess the stave would be inspected, marked up, squared off and tapered with the block plane then the edges simply rounded and the bend checked and refined.
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There was a thread on here (2010) asking what a flotte was. It contained plenty of petty bickering and unconvincing argument.
This pic was the only thing of value on that thread, and is can be seen that the illustration on the Worshipful Company of Bowyers coat of arms could be a representation of such a thing.
Del
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There was a thread on here (2010) asking what a flotte was. It contained plenty of petty bickering and unconvincing argument.
This pic was the only thing of value on that thread, and is can be seen that the illustration on the Worshipful Company of Bowyers coat of arms could be a representation of such a thing.
Del
Cool! I've never seen one before! Does it work like a bunch of little scrappers without the burs?
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That doesn't look solid enough to me to be able to handle a raw stave. Looks perfect for rounding an established belly though.
I think the one shown here at 2min is closer, personally.
youtube.com/watch?v=-ISS1MfbC_I&feature=youtube_gdata_player
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Ah, That looks like a big dreadnaught file with a handle.
Del
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Yup, but it's still not quite right is it. The drawings show a much deeper body.
FWIW I use a dreadnaught file for all my roughing out as the guy who first showed me how to make bows recommended them. I can imagine a really deep one with handles like that would go through wood like butter.
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Hm, I've got a "dreadnaught file" blade laying around here. I've never heard of that term before, but after googling it appears to be the same as a car body file, (http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q55/bigcat_tiga/002-30_zps60fec8a2.jpg) which the thing is called locally. I've not yet used the thing at all, it was stashed somewhere in my bowyery stuff corner. Time to try and get this thing to work this weekend. It's 12" long and looks rather agressive. I'll try the blade itself first. If it seems to work, I might even make a handle for it. The blade feels sharp as is, and might take some skin without a holder for it. The intended adjustable handle looks very good, but is rather expensive. A simple wooden handle for it is probably sufficient and is easily mounted due to the two holes in the blade. Let's test the thing this weekend!
We're going slightly off topic, but okay :p
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I use mine for roughing out staves, chugging through knots and right through to chasing sapwood rings. With pressure it eats wood for breakfast and yet with a bit of care you can use it for the craziest detail work. I have a tonne of various cabinet rasps, files and so on and just never use them as none are as versatile I don't think.
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I don't think we'll ever know for sure how medieval bowyers made their bows, but it would sure be interesting to time travel and find out! I seriously doubt they did it much differently than we do now, or they knew the final draw weight, or that the bows were overly finished, judging by what I saw at the Mary Rose Museum. But, as Del said, we'll never know for sure.
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I think you're right, although they were making hundreds of thousands of bows in a fairly short space of time and the bows had to be good enough to pass muster and be war-worthy. You wouldn't send troops into the Middle East today with poor quality firearms, and they wouldn't have issued poor quality warbows back then. While we can take our time and spend a week tillering one bow to a perfect draw weight, fitting beautiful grips and snake-skin accents and sanding it to look like glass and carefully shaping horn nocks and so on, I just can't see that back then. Mass produced quickly but to a very high standard is my guess.
Whether this means highly skilled bowyers working in the same way we do, or whether there were methods used such as fast reduction of staves by one bowyer and rounding/tillering by another or a combination of the two we'll probably never know.
One thing that I'd really love to know is the draw-weight quandary. Did they know draw weights, or was it all just base dimensions and the outcome was the outcome depending on the timber? We'll never know that either. Personally I find it slightly unlikely that the soldiers were trusting their lives to a bow with an unknown draw weight, but without accurate scales and methods of measuring the bows, I can't see how they would have been able to know. Fascinating, either way, and all the more reason these weapons and their history are so exciting!
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If a bowyer were not held to a specific draw weight but instead an acceptable range I can easily see a bowyer making 2 bows a day with mostly a draw knife. When you are making that many bows you can pretty much finish it without even putting a string on it.
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If a bowyer were not held to a specific draw weight but instead an acceptable range I can easily see a bowyer making 2 bows a day with mostly a draw knife. When you are making that many bows you can pretty much finish it without even putting a string on it.
Yup, once you get you eye in for a certain wood, style, size and draw weight it get much easier.
I've just gone from making 100# @32" to making 45# @ 30"... nightmare.
Now I'm trying to get back to 85# and I'm in danger of coming in under weight.
It's easy to get your eye in if you are makin' 'em all V similar.
I agree 2 a day no prob, especially if someone else is doiing the horn nocks.
Why I've may half a dozen this very morning! ;) >:D
Del
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I think it would be a cool contest to have a bunch of bowyers see how many bows they could make from rough split stave to "shootable - ready - to - apply - finish" bows in a day. Maybe the winner could get a bottle of advil or something, :).
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I'd pay to see you guys do that! It takes me four months to work out the best center line and taper at the stage I'm at!
It would certainly make for better viewing than the rubbish on tv these days.
On a serious note, I do think the top guys like Jaro for instance are able to crack out these bows super fast, and that's with (I'm assuming) far less time learning and watching older generations doing it as they would have in the middle ages. I've also been told by a couple of bowyers I personally respect highly that the longer you take tillering the worse the bow performance so establishing shapes and tapers early on and only minimal bending on the tiller seems very logical. It's something I didn't realise at first. I would rush the first stage, and get very rough staves up on the tiller and spend days at a time sorting out hinges, stiff spots, weaker limbs and so on which is clearly the wrong approach!
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As Del said the key is making bows of similar length and draw weight. Simply sight down a limb pressed to the floor and making the other limb feel the same will pretty much deliver a finsihed bow without really bending it much. When I am changing length and style every day as I often do it really slows me down, but even at that I have no problem going from a raw stave to a shooting bow in about 4 hours if I choose to.
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I think it would be a cool contest to have a bunch of bowyers see how many bows they could make from rough split stave to "shootable - ready - to - apply - finish" bows in a day. Maybe the winner could get a bottle of advil or something, :).
Well I bet Blackhawk would probably win that without even trying.
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Interesting topic. The Guilds no doubt would have this down to a near science, probably like Henry Ford and his assembly line. Recalling that many of the bows on the Mary Rose weren't finished I suppose this allowed for individual, last minute adjustments.
I believe the rasp and file also have a long history and likely were regularly implemented.
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Recalling that many of the bows on the Mary Rose weren't finished I suppose this allowed for individual, last minute adjustments.
Woahhhhhhhhhhh. That's a big ol' can of worms you just popped open there..... :o ;)
That theory has been pretty much disproved at this stage. I don't think any of the "powers that be" still think they were unfinished.
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Really...oops.
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None of the bows I saw at The Mary Rose Museum looked unfinished to me. Why would an unfinished bow be on a war ship?
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Its been a decade or so since I ready Robt. Hardy's 'History of the English Longbow', but at the time of its writing, I recall some were of the opinion that some of the bows were still in the stave stage; on this premise I speculated that perhaps final tillering or finishing was to be done by/for each individual archer upon distribution. Just a theory.
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I think that theory has since been rejected.
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I know they carried a pretty hefty inventory when campaigning and was wondering if anything has ever been uncovered listing the support personnel, bowyer's and fletcher's specifically.
Robby
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Robby101 there are several sites which offer information about the Mary Rose. According to the ship's log there were 185 soldiers (archers) on board; supposed to be 250 longbows of which 177 have been recovered. Several interesting facts are noted: the bows weren't fitted with horn nocks--although horn nocks were on board--the theory is that the bowstrings were already affixed to the nocks and would be slipped onto the bows when used; the ship had been re-fitted for guns and cannons, including side gun ports, and was carrying a crew of gunners as well. Apparently by this time, on this particular ship, the brunt of her weaponry and offense, for sea battles, were cannon and gun, and not archers.
I haven't been able to find any evidence of bowyer tools or related artifacts. There remained several thousand arrows, while most of the horn nocks and bowstrings decayed over time.
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Weapons of Warre is by far the most comprehensive list of items found on board. Nothing is left out. There are no bowyers tools because the ship wouldn't have had bowyers onboard. It was going out to fight an immediate battle just off the Portsmouth coast. Unfinished bows, craftsmen and so on would have been pointless and heavy.
As for the removable horn nocks theory, again that's been more or less disproved. There was a thread about it recently and HUGE discussion on the EWBS forum with a few people adamant that it was the case but no evidence to support the idea. It also makes the bows impossible to string. Imagine trying to get two horn nocks onto the tips of a 150# bow. You need a stringer as no human could do it without, and yet a stringer requires both horn nocks to be in place in order to work! Personally I thought it was a sound theory until a couple of very knowledgeable bowyers and warbow archers set me straight!
Interestingly however, the actual mechanics does work though - on a bow light enough to string without a stringer you can have unglued removable nocks because at brace the string tension keeps them in place.
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Robby101 there are several sites which offer information about the Mary Rose. According to the ship's log there were 185 soldiers (archers) on board; supposed to be 250 longbows of which 177 have been recovered. Several interesting facts are noted: the bows weren't fitted with horn nocks--although horn nocks were on board--the theory is that the bowstrings were already affixed to the nocks and would be slipped onto the bows when used; the ship had been re-fitted for guns and cannons, including side gun ports, and was carrying a crew of gunners as well. Apparently by this time, on this particular ship, the brunt of her weaponry and offense, for sea battles, were cannon and gun, and not archers.
I haven't been able to find any evidence of bowyer tools or related artifacts. There remained several thousand arrows, while most of the horn nocks and bowstrings decayed over time.
There were almost no horn nocks because the horn gets eaten by microrganisms... yum yum horn protein :).
Same as there are no strings... (well I think there is one fragment). The position of the horn nocks is clearly visible on the bows. There is also evidence that some final tillering or finishing was done after the horn was fitted.
Del
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... just like there were no remaining arrow heads. Long since rusted away.
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Apparently (god knows where I got this but it's stored away in my memory bank from somewhere!) the divers that first found the arrows saw impressions of the arrowheads (or at least residue in the silt the exact shape and size of the arrowheads) but the minute they started moving the arrows they lost all sign of them.
Somebody, somewhere who was first to dive the MR wreckage knows what those arrowheads looked like. And we'll never find out!
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Has anyone read any history on the actual manufacturing process of war bows? I would be curious to see how a regular military bow looked as opposed to a soldier or officer who may get a custom one done. Did yhey use helpers to rough out bows and do the finishing? did one guy do the nocks while another guy built the bows? How much has been discovered on this?
I do not know much about this topic, but I do know all English men (in the middle ages) were required to have a bow and practice with it at least once a week (it was in some documentary about the English yew longbow, I think). I would there for assume they would make their own bows and arrows, as they were doomed to break at some point and buying a new bow every other month was not really affordable(???)...
But who knows.
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I do not know much about this topic, but I do know all English men (in the middle ages) were required to have a bow and practice with it at least once a week (it was in some documentary about the English yew longbow, I think). I would there for assume they would make their own bows and arrows, as they were doomed to break at some point and buying a new bow every other month was not really affordable(???)...
But who knows.
I think it's unlikely they'd make their own, personally. The guilds were secretive and the skills were only taught to a select few. It's more likely that the apprentices would have been churning out simple meane wood bows for practice or recreational use, and the more valuable Spanish, Portugese and Italian yew bows made by the master bowyer and delivered to armouries for campaigns.
That's not to say some of the people might have dabbled in making them, of course.