From: WHITE@DUVM.BITNET (Avid Reader - Fledgling Writer)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: Combat Archery (was Arrows (was Authenticity...))
Date: 13 Aug 92 14:02:31 GMT
Organization: The Internet

>> On 11 Aug 92 14:18:37 GMT, archer@utkux1.utk.edu (T. Archer) said:
>In article <VgFcPB1w162w@micor.ocunix.on.ca> graydon@micor.ocunix.on.ca
> (Graydon) writes:
>
>  Graydon> I honestly don't see any reason to try to put archery on the
>  Graydon>  tourney field;
>T. Archer> Because it's fun.
>
>I think soccer is fun, too. {...}
>I think programming computers is fun. {...}
>Laser tag is a lot more fun than rattan fighting. {...}
>As Graydon pointed out, shooing gold tubes is not a medieval recreation.
>{...} please do not pretend to be a medieval recreation group.
>
>Peregrine Payne
>Ray Lischner

    Rather than try to interpret what either Graydon or T.Archer was
saying, I will instead answer Mr Payne's observations in a way that I
hope will speak to what both Graydon and T.Archer were getting at.

    First, I don't think I've ever seen or heard of combat archery being
part of the way the SCA recreates tournies - i.e. the one-on-one, or
even melee-team combats, usually in a list, or a bear-pit format.  The
normal venue for combat archery, as I understand it, is the 'war' as we
attempt to recreate it - Pennsic, Estrella, various border raids and
inter-baronial encounters.  It may be that what we in the SCA consider a
'war' is much more like what was normal at a medieval tourney, but that's
not the point.  What we are usually trying to emulate is a war (which, at
times, was what they were trying to emulate as well).  If we are thinking
of these events as wars and not as differently staged tourneys, then the
inclusion of an important element of said wars - archery - only makes
the recreation more real.
    Now, it has been said that golf tubes aren't much like arrows.  Well,
neither is a 2 inch round hunk of rattan much like a flat metal sword -
or, they are similar in the same ways.  What we are trying to do is be
safe as we re-create combat.  Frankly, I'd be scared on the field if
archers were using 'real' arrows, blunt or not.  But then, I've never had
the opportunity to face such, nor do we do combat archery in any flavor
in the East, so I don't have any first hand knowledge.  But, it would
seem to me that having a lumbering, waffling, padded golf-tube arrow
coming at me would be far preferable to a small, straight-shot, wooden
arrow....Anyway.
    What I would like to ask Graydon and Peregrine is this:  What about
combat archery makes you think that it is unmedieval?  The existence of
golf-tube arrows?  Or the existence of the 'sport' itself?  How do you
justify this objection?

     And, as a colateral comment, I would like to state that I don't
believe that the SCA *is* a medieval recreation (re-creation) group, at
least to the level that would require the use of real arrows and metal
swords and no modern protection on the battlefield.  In the scope of the
SCA's re-creation efforts, when rec-reation is really the aim, I think
that we've done some good work.  Rattan fighting is not as much like
'real' fighting as some people would like to believe.  And, if combat
archery in some kindgoms must use golf-tube arrows to make the people
engaging in it feel safe, it is still a period practice to shoot arrows
at people (unlike soccer, laser tag, or computer programming), and I
don't believe that including it in our re-creation of the events of war
is reducing us to a 'cocktail party in funny clothes.'

           Arglwydd Dafydd Cyhoeddwr o d'yr Chwilfriwhuan
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca