Primitive Archer
Main Discussion Area => English Warbow => Topic started by: poplar600 on December 13, 2015, 06:58:26 pm
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The majority of yew in Europe is knotty, kanrly and twisted. The stuff doesn't grow straight, especially as compared to other woods, such as ash. The good stuff also takes an age (hundreds of years) to grow, so it could hardly be tended to or farmed for the sole purposes of bow staves.
Yet England was making thousands of thousands of yew bows, and also importing thousands of thousands of bow staves. England even taxed merchants and required them to 'pay in yew staves'.
How was this even possible considering how rare good yew is to come across? Maybe they chopped all the good stuff down, but it's been hundreds of years since the warbow was decommissioned, so plenty of trees would have replaced the ones cut.
I keep hearing Alpine yew was also considered the best, but most of that is short, twisted and stubby, just like Juniper in the desert. The MR bows looked super clean and with only few knots, almost like pacific yew.
Thoughts?
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The first two lines of you post are entirely incorrect.
I'm not going to quote stuff I've heard or read...
But bear in mind, in the middle ages woodland management would have been the norm. It doesn't take that much effort and they probably knew a lot more about it than we do.
Here's a post on my blog that shows what a fallen Yew will do if left to it's own devices. Now if you imagine visiting that tree once a year, rubbing off unwanted buds and maying thinning out the odd shoot, cultivating and harvesting bow timber no longer seems such a daft idea does it.
You can also see they are growing straight and true.
Draw your own conclusions.
http://bowyersdiary.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/yew-staves-in-tree.html (http://bowyersdiary.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/yew-staves-in-tree.html)
Del
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The first two lines of you post are entirely incorrect.
Don't say you didn't ask, Mr.Poplar! :o ;D
John T.
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In former times the sovereigns have places where only yew is cultivated and thisplaces were strictly protected by the sovereign.
Often you can image where this was, if the place is called for example "Ibengarten" (Garden of yew).
15 years ago, I was on such a place near Dermbach in the Rhoen, Germany and there are old yew trees in the woods more than 500 years old and you need minimum two people to encircle the biggest trees with your arms. There are over 350 old yews in this place.
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In former times the sovereigns have places where only yew is cultivated and thisplaces were strictly protected by the sovereign.
Often you can image where this was, if the place is called for example "Ibengarten" (Garden of yew).
15 years ago, I was on such a place near Dermbach in the Rhoen, Germany and there are old yew trees in the woods more than 500 years old and you need minimum two people to encircle the biggest trees with your arms. There are over 350 old yews in this place.
V interesting, thanks for sharing.
Del
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Del that fallen yew is a very interesting post.
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Del that fallen yew is a very interesting post.
Likely enough someone long ago saw a tree like that and thought encouraging this would (wood?) go a long way toward large scale farming of yew.
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We're talking about 100,000's of prime slow growing yew staves. The same tree would have had to be "encouraged" by multiple generations. Most T.Baccata, though not all, is worthless when compared to it's North American counterpart.
I can't see how England acquired such vast amounts of tier 1 yew wood.
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In former times the sovereigns have places where only yew is cultivated and thisplaces were strictly protected by the sovereign.
Often you can image where this was, if the place is called for example "Ibengarten" (Garden of yew).
15 years ago, I was on such a place near Dermbach in the Rhoen, Germany and there are old yew trees in the woods more than 500 years old and you need minimum two people to encircle the biggest trees with your arms. There are over 350 old yews in this place.
I know places like that. Most of the trees are very quick growing (15rpi) and often do not grow straight.
I'm talking 80rpi stuff that is virtually free of any big knots.
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Here's a fallen yew with new branch/tree at my local copse.. I've been eyeing it but I've decided not to cut it, the original canopy has fallen away out of sunlight and the new branch/tree has formed the new canopy so I may kill this old yew if I cut it, but a good example of how straight they grow, its a good 7ft clean and 4"+ diameter. If it grew in this manner in an alpine region I reckon it would make a top bow(?).
Ruddy Darter.
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We're talking about 100,000's of prime slow growing yew staves. The same tree would have had to be "encouraged" by multiple generations. Most T.Baccata, though not all, is worthless when compared to it's North American counterpart.
I can't see how England acquired such vast amounts of tier 1 yew wood.
Even these days some jobs are done over generations, woodland management, breeding of livestock and such like, it's nothing out of the ordinary.. I think maybe you are viewing it with the eyes of a 21st century urban person.
Yew will grow with very tight grain if many of the side branches are taken off, which they would be if it was managed.
I cut a limb which had been growing near vertical, the top had been cut off many years before and it had one side branch at the top which was still live. The wood was very dark and tight grained, I'm assuming it's because the growth was slowed by removing most of the branches.
I recently had a bloke turn up with a stave of "High Altitude Italian Yew" he proudly showed me how tight the rings were. I went over to my pile of offcuts and picked up a piece of Yew which was cut in Suffolk (a very flat low lying county) the rings were tighter... his jaw dropped.
Del
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I cant really comment on this but I do find it fasinating. I would tend to agree that many generations cultivating and prtecting the Yew. But I also have wondered quite how they managed to arm the archer armies. Pretty sure they destroyed a great deal of forest to do so though.
I wanted to say respect to Ruddy Darter for leaving that Yew shoo. Thats really sound of you mate- i'd like to think that i'd be as foresight-ful but that does look like a really sweet branch! :)
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We're talking about 100,000's of prime slow growing yew staves. The same tree would have had to be "encouraged" by multiple generations. Most T.Baccata, though not all, is worthless when compared to it's North American counterpart.
I can't see how England acquired such vast amounts of tier 1 yew wood.
Even these days some jobs are done over generations, woodland management, breeding of livestock and such like, it's nothing out of the ordinary.. I think maybe you are viewing it with the eyes of a 21st century urban person.
Yew will grow with very tight grain if many of the side branches are taken off, which they would be if it was managed.
I cut a limb which had been growing near vertical, the top had been cut off many years before and it had one side branch at the top which was still live. The wood was very dark and tight grained, I'm assuming it's because the growth was slowed by removing most of the branches.
I recently had a bloke turn up with a stave of "High Altitude Italian Yew" he proudly showed me how tight the rings were. I went over to my pile of offcuts and picked up a piece of Yew which was cut in Suffolk (a very flat low lying county) the rings were tighter... his jaw dropped.
Del
I don't buy into the "Alpine yew" as much anymore. Labelling something as "Italian" yew is just for marketing purposes. One guys sells these Italian staves for good money, and the majority of it is fast grown, kiln dried rubbish.
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Ring count means next to nothing sometimes. Personally I've used English Yew with about 6 rings to the inch that made bows well over 100lb even though the stave was roughed out to be about 50-60lb. I've also seen some astonishingly high poundage self yews made of English timber with coarse rings - 150lb range at least. If the wood is healthy the bow will be good.
I don't know if its more important with American Yew (you certainly see it bandied about on stave websites a lot as a way of distinguishing "premium" timber) but it definitely doesn't guarantee a good bow, having a high ring count with European Yew.
There are still places in the alps that have more dead straight, knot free, dense European Yew than you could get through in a lifetime. There is in fact a superb bowyer on this very forum who uploads photos onto Facebook of his trips into the mountains and the insane stash of beautiful yew he picks up - logs and logs of the stuff. It's not rare if you have the time and determination to find it.
Don't get hung up on ring count!!
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Please may you post pictures of the yew? Is he the German guy?
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Please may you post pictures of the yew? Is he the German guy?
forget the photos, ask for the GPS coordinates!
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Yeah its Michael. You'd have to ask him for the pics, but it'll only depress you ;)
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I hope he makes good use of it all. Better than being turned into knife handles! A bow he posted was as clean as I've ever seen.
Don't mind a few good pins though ;)
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@poplar600
you can't compare the flora of today with the flora of the middle ages....
The place of the "Ibengarten" was one example, where you can remind what was done in former times....
The fleet of the british empire was build of wood and I'm wondering how they can get all the different wood for so much ships...
Not all of the bows in thee middle ages were out of yew.... In the Mary Rose is one found out of elm and there is an example of laburnum from Europe that is probably older than the MR bows.
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TO expound slightly on the multi-generational tree tending, that would have been completely normal at the time. Remember under the feudal system your job was whatever your fathers job was, it was unusual for a son to venture out to a different trade, well a first son anyway, the other sons may go to different trades if the fathers trade does not support more than one or two at the time. But if part of your job as a forester was to tend the yew trees so they grow to good bow material then there would be an unbroken continuity from father to son tending the trees and no one would have thought anything of it, completely normal for them.
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This is an extremely old yew tree local to me. I'm pretty certain this has been managed purely for bow staves in the past.
(http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb363/Will_Sherman/IMAG0953_zps3619cbed.jpg) (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/Will_Sherman/media/IMAG0953_zps3619cbed.jpg.html)
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I don't expect the English particularly cared where the staves came from as long as they came, and I think others have suggested in the past that they were using high altitude, hard to get yew at the time of the Mary Rose because all the easier to harvest ancient growth across Europe had been cut down already and yew works on about a 80-100 year coppice cycle. If you were trying to make money selling wine to England and one of your business overheads was to provide 10 yew staves per barrel then you would presumably shove whatever yew staves cost you the least into the ship. If medieval civil servants had the same job satisfaction back then that they do today I can't imagine they would be inspecting every yew stave passing through their hands for suitablility as a bow, but they would just count them and leave the details to the bowyers. Maybe that's why the levy got increased from time to time - quality of staves was reducing so the pool needed to be bigger?
Even today coniferous forests that are grown exclusively to cut, ie effectively a crop in a field, grow for about 50 years in the case of Sitka spruce and 80 odd years for ash just for a couple of examples, so multi-generational forest management is still entirely normal. It's only in the last 100 years or so that ancient pollards stopped being routinely cut, which is why our woodlands are now in such bad shape.
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Yo Will, paint my name on a couple of those ;)
@ Lucasade:- Your post is far too sensible for the Warbow section ;) ::) :laugh:
Del
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Have you guys seen those incredible Medieval buildings scattered around the UK that have hundreds of squared-up Yew staves built into the walls and ceilings? They're quite a sight! Most of the roof staves are reflexed as well.
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Is it not just one house? Saw it on the net.
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There's at least two that I'm aware of, and I'm sure there are more.
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Can pictures be found easily with search engines? That sounds fantastic!
(and also supports my hypothesis... ::))
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I've seen the pics on a friends Facebook page. I'll ask him to find them again at some point!
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I wish I could find where I read this at but I read an article that talked about yew being a dominant species of tree in the Alps at one time instead of just an understory species. Yew is not able to recover as quickly as firs and pines once deminished.
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Lets not forget the huge importation of yew, that was going on, and the bows of conquered foes. ;)
The French donated a lot of bows, with their loss. ;)
The conquered foes, were also required to furnish the Brits with good wood, from their forests. You didn't just conquer someone and walk away, with out looking at their resources. ;D
Wayne
Wayne
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Forget Yew, get yourself out there in the miserable wet English weather and cut yourself some weeds (ash) and make some lovely fast longbows and flatbows. Yew is for noobes 8)
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Or come to Wales, get even wetter and cut some Wych Elm ,if you can find it in the fog. ;) ;)
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Been tracking down the perfect yew stave over here on vancouver island canada, for a couple of years now and have seen and split alot of yew, and have noted a few things.
- ring count and altitude seem to have no relation, it has more to do with light, water, and soil. I've found 50 rpi at 2 feet of altitude ( I was standing in the ocean while I cut it off the rock)
- The best staves seem to come from "leaders" where the tree splits off into smaller trees, the host tree can be a nasty mess of twist and limbs but can host straight leaders. those pieces in the pic look alot like leaders.
- Found many blow down yew in my travels (usually they go over with a large cedar) the ones that survive are interesting pieces because you can see in the ring count when the tree went over, the water soil and light are dramatically changed, you end up with two distinct ring counts -lower rpi closer to the center tighter rpi near the edge.
- The opposite occurs at the edge of a logging cut block, when the forest is cut back and a yew tree is left standing the growth rate increases drastically and you get two different ring counts.
-I believe that tree farming yew would have been possible because you don't need alot of material to build a bow, all you really need is 5inches round by 80inches long, that would make 20rpi in 50 years.
- The blow down yews seem to naturally grow multiple leaders which more often than not seem to be straight even though the host can be very twisted, and is living on its side.
- Figure out how to grow leaders, add alot of man hours and you got yourself a yew stave farm.
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Where on the island do you live yew hunter?
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Top of the island, at the end of the road. Port Hardy. You should check it out sometime, lots of yew around if you look in the right spots.
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Dont forget the english roved most of europe to get their yew. Due to the english, yew turned from a common to a rare species. Harvesting wasnt exactly sustainable at the peak of the demand.
For every yew bow a bowyer made, he had to make at least one bow from other wood so as to spare the yew. Forgot where I read this, though
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It was 2 meane wood bows for every yew bow, I believe.
It's interesting how important ring count is when discussing American yew. I don't know if it's just an international belief that ring count is important or if it actually means more with American yew as it's a different species but there's certainly no correlation with European yew ring count and bow performance.
You can get impossibly fine-grained European yew that makes terrible bows, and stuff with 5 rings to the inch that can reach 120lb and still be physically lighter/smaller than you'd expect.
It seems to me that it's the health of a tree that makes the difference, not the ring count. Growing conditions and quality of soil are crucial. One of my favourite bows was a 105lb English yew bow that I roughed out to be 50lb. It's the same size as a 50lb bow but the final draw weight was far higher than I thought it would be. It's got 6 rings to the inch on average, and heartwood showing through the back due to odd growing conditions and yet it took no set at all and shot beautifully for years before it chrysalled at a pin knot.
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Ring count, guess it's the human nature to value rare things more than common things.
Everyone wants elk sinew for sinew backing, but I bet cow sinew works just as well.
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I just recently learned that yew has an incredible ability to fully overcrow cut off twigs or even branches. The expert who told me is convinced that this sort of cleaning out was a major part of the wood management over a looooong period of time resulting in a great amount of usable staves.
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-10 rpi or less would make farming yew even that much more possible.
-I have noted two large differences in loose and tight rpi in pacific yew. The first one is that tight rpi yew seems to have much richer colour in the heart wood which makes a better contrast of colour between the sap and heart wood. The second thing to note which is probably more important, loose rpi wood has a far greater possibility to "shatter" when you split it, I've seen loose rpi do some unpredictable things. tight rpi is much easier to stave.
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You can get impossibly fine-grained European yew that makes terrible bows, and stuff with 5 rings to the inch that can reach 120lb and still be physically lighter/smaller than you'd expect.
And with the "meane" wood bows I make, the rule of thumb has always been that the denser the wood within it's species, the better the bow! Goes to show, yew simply does not play by the rules.
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yew simply does not play by the rules.
Never had a truer word been spoken!
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Dont forget the english roved most of europe to get their yew. Due to the english, yew turned from a common to a rare species. Harvesting wasnt exactly sustainable at the peak of the demand.
For every yew bow a bowyer made, he had to make at least one bow from other wood so as to spare the yew. Forgot where I read this, though
I did read that during Spanish civil wars in the 14th&15th century some major yew groves where set to fire and destroyed by factions not allied to the English, as much to prevent trade and income as well as English warbow maufacture,
Ruddy Darter.
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And with the "meane" wood bows I make, the rule of thumb has always been that the denser the wood within it's species, the better the bow! Goes to show, yew simply does not play by the rules.
I'm not so sure yew doesn't play by the rules. I rather think that ring count is often not a good predictor of density. Not just for yew, but in general. I've seen some woods with rings of 2 cm wide of equal density as same species woods with 10 rings per cm, and intermediate staves being much lighter. I've been fooled by ring count a lot.
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That may be true, but yew is still an enigma! It can tolerate serious ring violations, ridiculous knots, bad tillers, splinters and cracks across the grain... Crazy stuff.
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That may be true, but yew is still an enigma! It can tolerate serious ring violations, ridiculous knots, bad tillers, splinters and cracks across the grain... Crazy stuff.
For all we talk about the toughness of osage and hickory, NEITHER will let you get away with half the foolishness of yew!
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It's quite ironic in a way. Yew is the ultimate beginners wood. It can be treated extremely badly by complete novices and still give a great result, and yet for some reason it's considered hard (which isn't actually the case) to find so beginners use every other timber they can get hold of.
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It's quite ironic in a way. Yew is the ultimate beginners wood. It can be treated extremely badly by complete novices and still give a great result, and yet for some reason it's considered hard (which isn't actually the case) to find so beginners use every other timber they can get hold of.
Well said :P
That's what I always say to these osage and yew adepts. Wood for beginners >:D
No seriously: it's a LOT easier to find other bow wood. Simply because there are so many decent bow woods.
joachim