top of page
חיפוש

When the English longbow invaded America \ Paul Comstock, Article 1/7

תמונת הסופר/ת: Omri MatzliachOmri Matzliach


בחודשיים הקרובים אני עומד לפרסם בבלוג שלי באתר 'נוצה חומה' 7 מאמרים בנושא ההתפתחות של הקשתוּת בצפון אמריקה.

מדובר במאמרים מרתקים ששופכים אור על אחד האזורים ההכי משפיעים בעולם על הקשתוּת הקדומה המודרנית, שחווה רנסאנס מאז שנות ה-80 של המאה הקודמת.


את המאמרים כתב פול קומסטוק (Paul Comstock), מחבר הספר "The Bent Stick" שנכתב לפני 36 שנים והיה פורץ דרך בזמנו ואחד מהסופרים המרכזיים של ארבעת הכרכים של "התנ"ך של הקשתים המסורתיים".


מעולם לא פגשתי את פול פנים אל פנים ואני מאוד מקווה שעוד אזכה לכך. הכתיבה הקולחת שלו והידע הרב שהעביר בספרים, יחד עם הסופרים האחרים, היוו את הבסיס לכל מה שאני יודע היום בתחום ולא פחות חשוב מכך, גם לדרך שבה אני ניגש לתחום. אני ועוד עשרות אלפי אם לא מאות אלפי קשתים ברחבי העולם חבים לו המון על מפעל החיים שהוא בנה במו ידיו בחייו. הוא מהווה עבורי מודל ודוגמה אישית לאדם שלא רק עושה לעצמו, אלא אדם החושב שבעה דורות קדימה...


לאחר שסיפרתי לו על קהילת הקשתים הקדומים הקטנה שלאט לאט מתפתחת בארץ ועל הרצון שלי לפתח מורשת ומסורת בתחום הזה בארץ, הוא הציע לי את האפשרות לפרסם את סדרת המאמרים באתר שלי, כדי שיהיו חשופים גם לקורא הישראלי המתעניין בתחום.

כמובן שקפצתי על ההצעה שלו ואני מרגיש זכות גדולה להעביר את הכתיבה הנפלאה שלו בתחום כל כך משמעותי בעיני, אליכם, הקוראים הישראלים!


המאמרים מיועדים לכל מי שמתעניין או עוסק בקשתוּת, לאו דווקא הכנת קשתות וחיצים קדומים, כמו גם לחובבי היסטוריה ולקהל הרחב.


השבוע אני מעלה את המאמר הראשון (מופיע למטה בהמשך הפוסט), אשר עוסק בפלישה של הקשת האנגלית, בעלת חתך האות 'D', לאמריקה.


אשמח לשמוע מה דעתכם על המאמרים ולהשיב לכם על שאלות שתעלו בפוסטים.


קריאה מהנה,

עמרי מ'נוצה חומה'


בתמונה: פול קומסטוק



© 2025 Paul Comstock

When the English longbow invaded America

 

By Paul Comstock

---

I have a hard time imagining anybody who shoots a bow would fail to be mesmerized and thrilled by the archery and bowhunting described by Maurice Thompson in his book "The Witchery of Archery."

America's pioneering volume on archery and its first book on bowhunting, it traces the hunting of Thompson and his younger brother, Will, from their teenage years in Georgia to the Florida wetlands following the Civil War.

It would be easy to conclude the brothers were virtually alone among non-native Americans as they trailblazed a path of archery prowess right up to the book's publication in 1878.

That's not exactly the case, and Thompson tells us so in the introduction to the second edition published in 1879.

"Archery seems to have obtained a firm hold in America," he wrote.

A few months after he wrote that sentence, 69 men and 20 women traveled long distances to shoot their bows at Chicago's White Stocking Park, where the new National Archery Association held its first national tournament. The archers shot at distances up to 100 yards for the men and 50 yards for the women.

Thompson mentions this upcoming event in the second edition. He also points out his second edition contained new information designed to help those attending future competitions.

Not only that, his first edition apparently drew so many unsolicited letters from other archers that he graciously wrote, "The author's thanks are sincerely offered to the many archers in England and America who have sent him valuable hints and suggestions."

So in 1879, recreational archers (at least in modest numbers) were all over the place. How did that happen?

Thompson credits a number of magazine articles he wrote that predated his book.

Elsewhere in the book we find another equally significant hint. He mentions "yellow-colored lemonwood bows of Highfield's make," and the "snakewood, yew, lancewood and the backed bows" also from Highfield. As well as "best-footed, parallel-pointed" Highfield arrows.

Highfield was one of a number of British companies making archery tackle for sale. By 1879, such companies had been around quite a while. And their existence was no secret in the United States.

In these articles I will frequently mention a medical doctor named Robert Elmer. He started shooting a bow in 1910 and won seven NAA national archery championships. He is significant because he made it his business to know a very great deal about archery and he wrote about it repeatedly for decades. He oversaw and wrote for an anthology of articles printed in 1917 (American Archery), wrote a 500-plus page book in 1926 (Archery), updated it in 1933 and wrote an entirely new 500-plus page book (Target Archery) in 1946. 

In both 1926 and 1946 books, he wrote about a club formed in 1828 called the United Bowmen of Philadelphia. (In Philadelphia, of course.) The group held shoots for 30 years. Its members began by making their own bows and virtually all of the first ones broke. Very quickly they contacted Thomas Waring, a British bowyer in London, and ordered an archery outfit of one lemonwood bow, arrows, quiver, shooting glove and shooting instructions. The cost at the time was $90 and it took the products 18 months to be delivered. Once they did, the archers began copying Waring's design and pronounced their new weapons just as good.

Elmer wrote about the popularity of British recreational archery at length. For example, an organization called the Royal Toxophilite Society (it still exists; they have a website) was founded in 1781. The York Round -- an acid test of accuracy shot at distances of 60, 80 and 100 yards -- was developed in Britain in 1844. In addition to Highfield and Waring, I've learned from other sources that famous British manufacturers also included Aldred, Buchanan and Muir.

While the Philadelphia Bowmen and just about everybody since then has been determined to make their own bows, the commercial availability of good tackle was a constant all through the following wooden bow era, right up to the invention of fiberglass.

If it needs to be said, the bows we've been talking about so far are the narrow-limbed, long, rounded-belly English style bows that Saxton Pope extolled in "Hunting with the Bow and Arrow."

For men, the standard length of these bows was 72 inches, six feet. In the early 20th century, some

bowhunters used these bows at 68 inches long, five feet six inches.



Like many of us, a young guy named A.E. Andrews was inspired by that book and studied it at length. Unlike us, he did it in the mid-1920s. In 1927, he and a friend obtained a catalog from Stemmler (one of a number of U.S. archery dealers) and ordered two six-foot English style lemonwood bows backed with clarified calfskin. Andrews planned to hunt with his.

In a 1948 article in Archery magazine, he wrote, "Those old 72-inch bows were great weapons. My old long lemonwood had tremendous power." It pulled 65 pounds.

When one of Andrews' friends was asking a farmer for hunting permission, the farmer told the hunter to demonstrate his longbow by shooting an arrow at a barn door. Despite the archer's protests, the farmer insisted. The arrow blew a hole through the door and sailed out the other side.

We should pause here to explain that woods like lemonwood and lancewood helped make commercial bowyery a viable proposition.

Lemonwood is actually dagame, and most came from Cuba. Which helps explain why Americans haven't seen much of it lately. Lancewood came from the West Indies and South America.

James Duff, who moved to the U.S. to make bows after working for at least a couple of the British manufacturers, tells us the story in his 1927 book Bows and Arrows.

Both woods grew year-round, fairly close to the equator, and lacked the familiar ring structure of North American trees. Great amounts of each were used for British carriage and wagon axles for many decades. Duff said bows could be made from long scrap pieces of each, and unless the grain was badly twisted, virtually any board would make a bow. The availability of lancewood eventually dried up and Duff wasn't sure why. A lemonwood bow cost less than half the price of a yew bow in 1927.

Duff also said the cast of lancewood was superior to yew and lemonwood. Elmer, who owned an Aldred-made lancewood bow since 1911, agreed. Elmer said lancewood came in many types and yellow lancewood (the subspecies, not the color) was more reliable than others.

Starting in the 1930s, most U.S. bows eschewed English style rounded bellies for flatter bellies. Field shooting and bowhunting had grown tremendously, and Andrews noted bows as short as 64 and 62 inches, often backed with sinew, were becoming more common. More and more, he wrote, bows were resembling those used by Native Americans. That transition began in the 1930s, after engineers began to lecture the archery world on the virtues of flat bellies -- which I'll cover in detail later.

In retrospect, it might seem odd that civilized recreational archers in the eastern U.S. would for so long follow the English tradition and apparently ignore the closer at hand examples set by Native Americans. A big part of the answer has to be the fact that starting in the early 19th century, English tackle and information on how to use it was available and reliable. For those with the money to buy, obstacles to getting started in archery could be overcome handily.

And, as the case of the United Bowmen of Philadelphia shows, the lubricating efficiency of capitalism was overpowering. Once the club got its shipment from Thomas Waring, it absorbed the information and ran with it. Decades later, Thompson and many others were avid consumers of the British products.

No doubt from the beginning of colonization to 1900, at least, many European descendants were knowledgeable about Native American archery. But their body of writing on the topic, whatever it may have been, was drowned out by what the British were selling.

One example is Horace Ford's book on target shooting, "Archery, Its Theory and Practice." It appeared in 1859 and was considered the definitive English language source for recreational archers for more than 50 years. Another piece of evidence is the fact that every American bowmaking book before 1930 that showed a bow cross-section showed a rounded English style belly.

Another significant detail is the British system was tailor-made for hobbyists entertaining themselves by shooting at targets as far away as 100 yards. Native American bows were built to have shooting properties for far more practical purposes.

Saxton Pope's book, A Study of Bows and Arrows (1923) examines aborginal and composite bows from North America and elsewhere. The bows were measured, weighed and shot for distance at a time when most of them were still in quite good shape.

But a number of those bows drew disparaging remarks when Pope compared them to English style longbows. Which misses a very big point -- that the native bows were not designed to entertain Europeans and their descendants.

Despite Pope's prejudices, he acknowledged one of the bows in the book -- a Yaqui-made 59.5-inch unbacked osage -- that pulled 70 pounds at 28 inches and outshot every other aboriginal bow tested. It's not likely the bow was intended to draw 28 inches; the only Yaqui arrow Pope described was 25 inches long. But it doesn't take much imagination to see that by adding a few inches length (or not) such a design would meet the requirements of a 20th century sportsman. It's an idea that eventually took hold.

No doubt some native bows had (or have) cultural or even religious connotations I am not qualified to discuss. But from a structural standpoint, bows that have the same cross-section along their length and often bend at least slightly in the handle follow the tenets set by aboriginal (and nonaboriginal) bowyers around the globe and into prehistory. And in North America, that cross-section was often wide and often nearly flat.

As I said in the last issue, in the 1980s I latched onto the idea of flat bellies almost immediately, without knowing anything about what the engineers wrote in the 1930s. But I certainly was influenced by their legacy -- the rectangular cross-sections of fiberglass laminated bows.

Early on, two sentences in "The Witchery of Archery" stirred me to the core. The first was the view of Thompson's Florida Indian companion, who said, "any stick" will do for a bow. The second paraphrased that opinion later in the book, saying a wooden bow of any kind, if it has enough spring, will shoot a Highfield arrow with unerring accuracy.

Add to those a story that Elmer told -- of a novice who made an osage bow riddled with checks from end to end, and so crooked it turned half sideways when drawn, yet Elmer won both a competition and flight shoot with it.

For me, those sentences were like throwing gasoline on a fire. For one thing, it quickly became obvious a near perfect bow requires near perfect wood. "Any stick" would do the trick and I made a number that were little more than that. I still own several that are basically tapered slats with nearly rectangular cross section from end to end.

Before long, I was making 68-inch round-bellied yew bows. Because a flat-bellied bow can be made from many woods, and a long clear piece of yew still isn't that easy to get (for me, anyway), I wouldn't use a nice yew stave for anything else.

All told, I've made bows that are glossy marvels of polished art and symmetry, perfectly straight, and others that are gnarly, half-warped and ugly as sin. I love 'em all because no matter what they look like, they are lethal.

And that's half the game. The other half is our ability to get the most out of them, upon which all else hinges. And I'll be talking more about that here before long.

---

The text of James Duff's book and other vintage archery volumes can be found at https://www.archerylibrary.com/books/

 


אני מקווה שנהניתם לקרוא ולהחכים. מוזמנים להשאיר תגובות למטה. בשבוע הבא אפרסם את המאמר השני בסדרה, אשר יעסוק בהשתלטות של הקשתות בעלות החתך השטוח על צפון אמריקה. הישארו מעודכנים!

72 צפיות0 תגובות

פוסטים אחרונים

הצג הכול

Comentarios


bottom of page