When he was still shooting wood arrows, Howard Hill would make a batch and shoot them. He kept the ones that hit where they should and gave the others away.
L.M. Stemmler recommended numbering the arrows, as said up thread.
I suspect it was not generally know how an arrow behaves going around the bow before the high-speed filming done in the 1930s. That's when people began to talk about spine. The definition of that term was indefinite for a while, as were ways of measuring it.
Plenty of in depth reading on the subject in "Archery, the Technical Side."
Jim Davis