SISTEMAS ESTRUCTURANTES URBANOS
CATEGORIZACION DE LOS USOS DEL SUEL O
Based on the preceding analysis, this chapter has taken a stance between the two main camps in the debate on longbow’s history. Rogers' medium-long bows were something of a red herring, as they emphasised only one aspect of the longbow, and not the most important one. As the previous sections have shown, the Waterford bows may look based on length to have been an entirely different sort of bow from the Mary Rose
but in fact shared several important design features with them. However, the earlier longbows did have distinct and important differences from the later Mary Rose bows that cannot be ignored. The Waterford and Balinderry bows, as well as the earlier Danish and prehistoric bows, all shared some features with the Mary Rose bows, such as comparable lengths or width to thickness ratios, but they also had very important and significant
232 Andrew Halpin, “Archery and Warfare in Medieval Ireland: A Historical and Archaeological Study”, pp.
2:5-9.
Xenia Pauli Jensen, “Alliances and Power Structures in Southern Scandinavia during the Roman Iron Age”, pp. 35-40.
J.G.D. Clarke, “Neolithic Bows from Somerset, England, and the Prehistory of Archery in North-western Europe”, pp. 64-70; 89-95.
Clive Bartlett, Chris Boyton, Steve Jackson, Adam Jackson, Douglas McElvogue, Alexzandra Hildred and Keith Watson, “The Longbow Assemblage”, pp. 596-9.
Xenia Pauli Jensen and Lars Christian Nørbach, Illerup Adal, p. 49 Andrew Halpin, “Archery Material”, pp. 546-52.
90 differences. These weapons were not simply interchangeable. The most important
difference was simply that of scale. The Mary Rose bows were bigger and more powerful than the other bows. While they were not double the size of other bows, and in some cases the difference was only a few millimetres, they were significantly bigger. However, there may have been a simple explanation for why these earlier bows were smaller, and therefore weaker: earlier soldiers may simply have had no need of bows with the power of the Mary Rose bows. While the relationship between the design and use of the longbow will be explored in a later chapter, it is worth considering here that longbows were difficult weapons to use, and the larger and more powerful they were the harder they would have been to use.233 The knowledge and the techniques required to make a
Mary Rose style longbow existed well before those bows were in widespread use. At the time these earlier bows were being made, there would have been no need to equip an archer with a bow of Mary Rose draw weight. The Mary Rose bows required a
significant investment in time and training to use effectively, and early medieval cultures may not have had the means or the need to invest that time and effort into building and using their bows. In his chapter on the decline of Tudor archery, Strickland showed how maintaining the training required to shoot a Mary Rose bow was no small feat even for an early modern government.234 It would have been a non-trivial feat for an early or high
medieval king to have established the training regimen across his subjects to have made a force of archers wielding Mary Rose style bows effective. The requirement for heavier longbows would also have been related not only the quality of armour available in the High Middle Ages, but also to the the frequency with which soldiers, especially common levies, wore armour at all. Against an unarmoured opponent, the difference in
performance between a 70 lbs bow and a 150 lbs bow would have been largely academic since, after a certain point, the extra energy primarily contributed to the force of impact rather than to the range.235 There was no revolution in the design or implementation of
the longbow, simply a slow improvement of the weapon as the need for heavier bows developed and the infrastructure to train and maintain archers to use those bows became more sophisticated.
The archaeological evidence for the longbow shows that yew has long been the predominant wood for making longbows, and that bows over 4 ft in length were present as far back as prehistory. The layering of yew sapwood and heartwood can be dated
233See Chapter 7.
234 Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy, The Great Warbow, pp. 405-6. 235 W.F. Paterson, A Guide to the Crossbow, (Oldland, 1990). pp. 30-32.
91 reliably as far back as the fourth century, while the characteristic D-shape of the Mary Rose bows existed at least as early as the tenth century, if not before. The Mary Rose
bows were unique in their size since they were both longer and larger in cross-sections than any of the other surviving bows, but an approximation of the ratio of their width and thickness can be seen in many of the surviving Danish bows suggesting that this concept was not entirely new. All of this evidence taken together suggests that, while the Mary Rose bows were likely more powerful than earlier longbows, they were an improvement upon an already existing weapon and not a brand new invention. The Mary Rose bows can be used as a rough approximation for fourteenth and fifteenth-century longbows with some reservations. It is likely that the Mary Rose bows were slightly more powerful than their predecessors but that is a minor problem, easily accounted for with an appropriately sceptical methodology.
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