# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 11/Archery

ARCHERY.
The archery of England, famed throughout all its ancient annals, by which, nearly to the close of the seventeenth century, her greatest battle-fields have been won, is an institution dating back from William the Norman. It was during the long-drawn struggle between Charles and his Parliament that our chronicles made their latest allusion to this grand old historic weapon.
It is a remarkable fact, that for at least two centuries after the invention of gunpowder, and gradual improvement in the construction of firearms coexistent with it, the bow should continue to hold its own as a valuable arm of the service. Bows were found on board that redoubtable man-of-war, the “Mary Rose,” sunk in an action with a French squadron at Spithead, temp. Henry VIII.; and one or two of those very rare specimens of old English missile weapons, found in the vessel’s arm-chest by the divers employed to remove her timbers and those of the “Royal George,” are now preserved amongst the most recherché curiosities of the Tower and of the United Service Museum.
It would be a great error to suppose that this long lingering affection for the weapon of their forefathers, in preference to the “hell-born murderer,” as Carew quaintly styles the musket, which was destined to supplant it, arose from the imperfection of the latter. More than two centuries ago, at all events, English guns and ammunition are proved to have been far from despicable. In an entertaining narrative of the struggles and dangers endured by a few hardy pioneers who, in 1621, sought to establish a home on the North American coast, it is said that “Mr. Hilton,” one of the settlers, strolling along the sea-shore, “perceived a great shadow over his head, the sun shining out clear. Casting up his eyes, he saw a monstrous bird soaring aloft in the air, and of a sudden all the ducks and geese, there being a great many, diving under water, nothing appearing of them but their heads. Mr. Hilton, having made ready with his piece, shot and brought her down to the earth. How he disposed of her I know not, but had he taken her alive and sent her over to England, neither Bartholemew nor Greenwich fair could have produced such another sight.” Here we have a sportsman of Charles the First’s time, who shoots flying, with a single ball, for as well might he have pelted a bird of that size with peas, as with small shot. An old tract, speaking of the arrival of the Ambassador from Morocco, a.d. 1637, says: “He is so good a shot with his piece, that he will shoot eight score at a mark as big as an English sixpence and hit it.” There is plenty of evidence, beside, to the same effect.
It is obvious enough that the bowman, when opposed to combatants so completely armed as the mediaeval chivalry, had a far more difficult game before him than has the modern rifleman; for, unless his shaft would punch a hole clean through their shields and breastplates, it was wholly ineffective, being splintered or glancing off. “Thrice did Locksley bend his shaft against De Bracy,” writes Sir Walter in his story of “Ivanhoe,” “and thrice did the arrow bound back from his armour of proof. ‘Curse on thy Spanish steel coat,’ shouts the enraged yeoman, ‘had an English smith forged it, these arrows would have gone through as if it had been silk or sendal.’” Our archers, therefore, adopted a shrewd expedient to get more on an equality with their foes. During the heat and dusty whirlwind of oft-repeated charges, the man-at-arms, with barred helmet tightly secured, and sweltering beneath eighty or a hundred pounds of iron, concentrating the rays of a mid-day summer’s sun, occasionally sought to refresh himself with a mouthful of the pure element, and opened his visor. But a hundred and more of remorseless spirits, with eyes sharp as those of the lynx, are watching the chance, and have seen it. A hundred shafts with lightning speed have left the string, to be buried in the brains of as many incautious foemen. Thus fell Harold on the shores of Kent, pierced through the eye; at the Battle of Barnet, during the Wars of the Roses, King Henry takes refuge in a poor man’s cottage, wounded in the face by one of a storm of arrows that flew “like a snowdrift around ​him.” The Duke of Buckingham was similarly hurt; the Lord Sandys and Marquis of Dorset likewise.
In the Paston Letters, John Paston, writing to a friend, relates, as a piece of news, that the Earl of Oxford, making a sally from a castle where he was besieged, was shot through the bars of his helmet. “This day,” says the writer, laconically, “I saw the man that did it, and there I leave him.” And to select only one additional, out of a thousand recorded instances, Shakespeare introduces Prince Hal at Shrewsbury fight, wounded through the open visor, all the rest of his body being protected by his steel coat.
Westmoreland. Come, my lord, I’ll lead you to your tent. Prince Henry. Lead me, my lord? I do not need your help: And Heaven forbid a shallow scratch should drive The Prince of Wales from such a field as this.
Although the more robust of our old English yeomanry, with a stout Spanish yew-bow, could give to his flight, or lighter shafts, a range of twenty-four score, the ordinary distance at which they succeeded in wounding or killing man and horse was twelve score, or 240 yards. By the statute, 33rd Henry VIII., no youth having attained his full vigour was permitted, under a considerable fine, to practise at any shorter marks. Some very noticeable instances of their success at this distance occur in the older chronicles. Drayton introduces a grey-haired veteran endeavouring to excite the youth of his day to join the expedition destined for France, which resulted in the famous victory of Agincourt, by recounting the feats of archery traditionally handed down by those who “drew a good bow at Cressy.” He describes
How like a lyon they about them laid. *****
“And, boy,” quoth he, “I’ve heard thy grandsire say, That once he did an English archer see, Who, shooting at a French, twelve score away, Quite through the body, nail’d him to a tree.”
I have just now alluded to Sir Walter Scott’s attempted word-picture of a mediæval bow meeting at Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Although the great intellectual giant of the North knew most things connected with the usages of bygone times, he clearly knew nothing of bow meetings, ancient or modern. This is more extraordinary, since he passed so large a portion of his life in Edinburgh, the seat of one famous ancient society, the Royal Scottish Archer Guard, about 1200 strong, their place of tryst being just in the city suburbs. Of course I speak of him and his wonderful fictions with all due respect, but would beg any archer to inform me, if he can, what is meant by Locksley “bending his shaft” against De Bracy? We bend a bow, but always keep our shafts as straight as possible. Secondly. He speaks of removing the targets previously shot at. Every archæologist knows, or ought to know, that targets were not invented for more than four centuries after, the marks in King John’s time being a green earthen mound or butt, and, of course, stationary. Why does he describe circles thereupon, when the central mark was merely a square piece of rag, termed a “clout”? The feat of nocking, not notching, an arrow, or splitting that of an adversary with your own, which he so carefully describes, is mere fable, never performed: the nock of a shaft, being about the thickness of a goose-quill, is invisible to the eye at thirty paces, let alone the distance they were shooting, nearly the eighth part of a mile. Unless he could see, he could not aim thereat; unless striking by aim, the feat is nought. Locksley then substitutes a peeled willow wand for the target’s broad surface, at which the author absurdly makes Hubert express great astonishment, exclaiming, “My grandsire drew a good bow at Hastings, and never shot at such a mark in his life. If this yeoman can cleave that rod, I yield to the devil that’s in his jerkin. A man can do but his best; I might as well shoot at the edge of our parson’s whittle, or at a wheaten straw, or at a sunbeam, as that twinkling white streak that I can hardly see.” Now all this is picturesque enough, an it were in costume. Remember, the space for the wand was 100 yards only; and, so far from a peeled willow looking painfully indistinct so far off, take the word of an experienced bowman, that it is then just as palpable out against the clear blue ether, as if close to you. And wherefore should a yeoman of the thirteenth century be in a maze at the feat? It was parlous common in his age and for succeeding centuries. Every skilled archer tried his hand at it; allusions are frequent enough. One of this same Locksley’s bandit-foresters was famous for doing it “right yeomanly and well,” as his master would have said—
Clyfton, with a bearing arrow, He clave the willow wand.
And I shrewdly suspect some half dozen of our modern toxophilites, including many a bright-eyed Clorinda, would deem lightly of the feat, and perform it too, as will be seen by their “scores and hits” presently quoted. What Sir Walter says about “looking well to his bow, and changing his bowstring,” for the purpose of trying one final shot, is also mere verbiage, signifying nothing in an archer’s ears.
​From these canons of criticism, presumptuous of course, however well founded, pass we now to a more grateful theme. Let us allude to the extraordinary and wide-spread enthusiasm for this graceful, health-giving exercise, which has possessed most of our well-born, well-educated women at the present day. In perfect harmony with this amiable furore is their undoubted skill, for the scores of these fair rivals for fame, published in the “Archers’ Journal,” sometimes exhibit their masculine competitors as “nowhere” in comparison with their own shooting. At a recent Grand National Annual Archery Prize Meeting, ten ladies, Mesdames Atkinson, Turner, Horniblow, Litchfield, Lister, Malet, Hare, Edmonstone, Greyson, and Dixon, scored to the tune of between three and four thousand, at what used to be considered “good rifle distance,” viz., sixty yards, and carried away about £150 out of the £500 subscribed as prize money. So much for their science, and the “solid pudding” resulting from it, which is all we can vouch for. How many hearts then and there were transfixed by another description of little shafts, of very, very deadly aim, although they don’t count anything on the target card,
They best can paint it who have felt it most.
Notwithstanding the marks are fabricated of hard twisted straw bass, full two inches thick, and covered with tough painted canvas, a combination making as good body armour as any Royalist cavalier’s buff coat, the ladies’ arrows not only penetrated, but showed their steel points some three or four inches at the reverse side. It follows, of course, that these redoubtable Amazonian dames—Amazonian only in their exquisite skill—with the same bows would, in mortal conflict, have pierced an equal amount of flesh and blood from breast to back.
The bold Penthesilea durst The Danish fleet oppose;
And from her bows sharp arrows sent,
To gall her harnessed foes.
No sooner was the battle done,
Her golden helm laid by,
Than those by arms she could not take
She slaughtered with her eye.
And what is the result? This exercise, in itself all gracefulness, seems to invest the fair toxophilites with mystic fascinations beyond even the legitimate influence of laughing een and cherry cheeks. The result is too obvious to escape remark. Recommence acquaintance with a bevy of these enslavers after a few season’s absence, and mark what a change comes o’er the spirit of your dream. Worse than Babel confusion of titles, the name that once knew no longer knows them—matronly graces; while, in addition to our friend Buchanan’s burnished shafts, which as vivacious spinsters they handled so deftly, many a comely arrow besides, to which the Psalmist so beautifully alludes, “happy are they who have their quivers full of them, they shall not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate.” It has been repeatedly remarked how, at most archery gatherings, the matrons far exceed the misses, in number as well as in skill. Verbum sat sapienti, “a hint to the wise is sufficient for her.” Doubtless, the attractions are, and ever have been, reciprocal; at least, we are not left in ignorance that four centuries ago your bowman was the truest, most loyal, and most chivalrous of lovers. “Thomas Boyd, Earl of Arran,” says John Paston, in a letter to his brother, dated about 1470, “is one of the lighterest, deliverest, best spoken, fairest archer; devoutest, most perfect, and truest to his lady of all knights that ever I was acquainted with. So, would God, my lady liked me as well as I do his person and most knightly condition.”
A very clever modern bowman thus cheerily paints these festive gatherings, at which he is constantly a visitor:—”Everybody looks pleased and satisfied with a well-spent day, especially with the achievements of the lady archers, for with them lie the real beauty and charm of our weekly assemblies. On the level, smoothly-shaven lawn, whose cool verdure contrasts pleasingly with their flash and glitter, appear the broad faces of twelve pair of targets, resplendent with circlets of gold, crimson, and azure; and behind each—standing, sitting, or reclining on the turf, in knots of five and six—a long line of England’s fairest daughters, in all the witchery of modern costume—coquettish hats, feathered plumes, flower wreaths, and the proud distinction of prize-medals, the green archer’s meed. Thus they remain, blooming, laughing, and discoursing liquid music, till, at a bugle note, they step forth in front of their butts, like a crowd of brilliant skirmishers thrown forward in advance. Anon the bow is elevated, and one figure, graceful as Dian, lets fly her shafts and instantly retires, to give place to the others. Then follows a whole storm of missiles, ‘iron sleet of arrowy shower,’ and the echoing thud! thud! thud! upon the target face—a sound so pleasant to the shooter’s ear—intimates that the two grand conditions, viz., shooting straight and keeping a length, have not been essayed in vain. And now each quiver being emptied, ‘Over!’ shouts their ​gallant field captain, signalising not only the shooters, but the whole company of spectators, to march in array to the opposite mark.” Here we leave them for the nonce, presuming to add only one word of advice, proffered by a veteran who has heard the bugle call in many and many an archery-foughten field. First, then, be it remarked, that during this present season of 1864 there will be an accession of archers to the national muster-roll seven times greater than any previous year has witnessed. An enthusiastic determination also to excel in the practice of this perfectly national sport animates the score or so of professors in both sexes who have hitherto borne away the palm of merit and struggled for the champion-medal, the first flight, the crême de la crême, of England’s modern bowmen and bowwomen. To win and wear for more than a very brief period this prized distinction of archery merit, is a stroke of good fortune not likely to fall to any single competitor. There are too many of our best toxophilites who exhibit a near equality of adroitness, and who, if they choose, can so fortify themselves by judicious training as to realise any score they please, to allow of long exclusive possession of the championship. We assert, it will be again and again lost and won, until ladies, and gentlemen likewise, throw aside their present passion for attitudinising, and settle down to sensible and regular practice. No shooter, were he to devote half his life to studying the position of Apollo Belvidere, would, from that kind of drill, be able to hit a haystack. There is another very prevalent delusion, viz., that certain archers have already attained to their uttermost maximum of skill, and must now retrograde. This is somewhat too rash, and contrary to all the known results of energetic, persistent labour. The student of any art retrogrades only when he ceases to practise. He is brought to a standstill when his practice is insufficient; and no modern archer that we have known practises one-fourth part of what the object he aims at demands. Two hours daily promenading in an archery ground, will never put the promenader in possession of the championship, he may rest assured. No; let fair dames, as well as their attendant squires—and many of our rustic beauties possess a healthy constitutional physique which no sensible man would wish to see diminished—let them, we say, cultivate assiduously the biceps muscle of the forearm, with a correspondent increase of power and expansion of chest. When every bunch of fleshy fibre on the breast and shoulder stands out in bold relief during exercise, as if carved in bronze against a surface of ivory, then may an archer’s drill be said to have approached the end desired. “To know how to shoot an arrow is the first and most important accomplishment,” exclaimed a Manchoo Tartar warrior; “for though success seems easy, it is of rare attainment. How many are there who sleep with the bow in their arms, and yet how few have made themselves famous. How few are there whose names are proclaimed at the matches. Keep your body straight and firm; avoid vicious postures; let your shoulders be immoveable; and shoot every arrow into its mark. Then, and then only, may you be satisfied with your skill.”
Such were the rules of discipline pursued by those vast hordes of equestrian archers who, under Timoor, their emperor, subjugated all Asia, from the Chinese wall to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
Referring once again to a very grateful theme, namely, the part which ladies have contributed to the present extension of archery, we would observe that their appearance in the shooting fields is by no means a modern fashion of the sex. Queen Elizabeth maintained amongst her household a master and keeper of her cross and long bows. Her poor prisoner and subsequent victim, unhappy Mary Stuart, sometimes essayed, but vainly, as it would appear, to banish troubled thoughts by archery exercise, which has been always deemed an admirable temporary relief to the harassed spirits. “This ladye,” writes her grim and savage keeper, the Earl of Shrewsbury, to his mistress the queen, “hathe begone this Monday, being the 8th of Maye, to exercise her longe bowe agen with her folkes, with troboled mynde as I thynk.” The Marchioness of Salisbury, wife to Cecil, King James the First’s Lord Treasurer, fancying she could work wonders with her bow and arrows amongst her husband’s game preserves, obliges a near relative, Lord Hertford, to escort her hither and thither with that intent; and his lordship indites a merry postscript, descriptive of the caprices of the beautiful archeress. “And now,” he says, in a State Paper letter, “to draw myself out of melancholy, and entertain your grave affair with pleasant conceits, I must acquaint you with my lady your wife’s inveterate malice against the poor rabbits and conies of your castle warren of Old Sarum. She went thither without me on Tuesday last with bows and arrows, reckoning to murther many, and to have forthwith sent them unto you; nay, if she had killed but one, that one should have been sent, I assure you. Happily, as she thought, after some small pains taken, when she could kill none, she revenged herself upon a stout cock of the game, belonging to your lordship’s keeper, who was absent, ​whereof she will write herself, and pray you to send her more bows and arrows, which, I pray you, do not, both for that she lacketh none, and because I would not have you accessary to the destruction of your said warren.”
Many similar notices of the choice of archery as a ladies’ pastime occur in illustration of England’s fashions two centuries ago. Sir Francis Leake writes, in 1605, to the same grim old Earl of Shrewsbury, thanking him for sending “a verie greatte and fatte stagge, the wellcomer being stryken by yo$^r$. ryghte honorable ladie’s hande, and he shall be merrilie eaten at the assises.” He adds, that his “balde bucke” lives still to wait the Earl and Countess’s visit: only this he begs, that my lady “doe not hitt hym through the nose, to the marring of his white face. Howbeit, I knoe her ladyshipp takes pity of my bucks, since the last time it pleased her to take the travail to shoot at them. I am afraid that my honorable ladies, my Lady Alathia and my Lady Cavendish, will command their arrow heads to be very sharp; yet I charitably trust such good ladies will be pitiful also,” &c.
London in the 16th and 17th centuries had many famous bowmen amongst her citizens, as might be presumed in so large a population and with so many pleasant, suburban green pastures, easily accessible, and expressly set apart for its practice.
When Clerkenwell Church was being rebuilt (1791) contemporary archers manifested their respect for Sir William Wood, an old marshall of the Finsbury Archers, by expending a considerable sum in the re-embellishment and removal of his monument from the outside of the old to the interior of the new building; and the epitaph still survives to tell us—
Sir William Wood lies very near this stone, In’s time, in archery excelled by none. Few were his equals, and this noble art Has suffered now in its most tender part; Long did he live the honour of the bow, And his great age to that alone did owe.
Queen Catherine, consort to Charles II., presented him with a large and splendid silver badge, now in possession of the Royal Toxophilites, Regent’s Park. The tradition is, that the king, at a grand parade of bowmen in 1669, seeing an arrow remarkably well aimed, inquired who the archer was, and immediately knighted him.
These same Finsbury Archers, a division of the Artillery Company, at the beginning of the present century, had still, by Royal grant, the privilege of exercising in all the beautiful meadows, which, in the memory of one or two still surviving citizens, extended, without a single intrusion of brick and mortar, from the present site of Finsbury Square up to Islington village. Time was when, on the least show of building there, the London ’prentices, raising their well-understood watchword, “Axes and spades! Axes and spades!” rushed forward, bearing down all opposition, and speedily levelled dykes, hedges, and enclosures, obstructive to the manly votaries of the English longbow.
So late as 1786, the Artillery Company marched their body of pioneers across the disputed fields. Finding a field enclosed with a brick wall by Messrs. Walker and Ward, proprietors of a lead mill, they commenced an unceremonious attack thereon. The lead merchants pleaded ignorance of the company’s right, and promised complete redress; so one of the archers’ division then present was ordered to shoot an arrow over the wall in assertion of the company’s right, and then passed on to deal as summarily with other delinquents. A cowkeeper named Pittfield had put up some sort of fence, and, in doing so, one of the archers’ stationary marks was removed; him they obliged to replace the butt and inscribe it, “Pittfield’s Repentance,”—well remembered by many at the present day.
A singular occurrence, which fell out in these fields in the reign of Queen Mary, led to the foundation of Lady Owen’s Almshouses and Schools in Islington parish. One lovely Midsummer eve the London Archers were assembled in great force in all the open pastures around the village. On the same spot where the charity was erected, there sat a woman milking a cow. The Lady Owen, a maiden gentlewoman living hard by, strolling about with her maid-servant, observed the dairy-woman, and “had a mind to try the cow’s paps, whether she could milk,” which she did; and as she rose from the stool, a random arrow passed through the crown of her steeple-fashioned hat; startled and alarmed, but grateful to the Almighty power that had saved her harmless, she, on reflection, vowed that should she ever live to be a lady, she would erect something on the very spot commemorative of this signal deliverance from a painful death. The result was a school for thirty boys, and ten almshouses, built originally with a cluster of iron arrows surmounting the roof.
We have spoken at large and done ample justice to the foregone and modern race of English bowmen. Let us not overlook our valiant brothers of the Cymri, whose archers ​strong and mighty, poured forth from the mountain fastnesses of Montgomery and Carnarvon, and with that weapon only, long harassed and defeated their Anglo-Saxon and Norman invaders. Davyd ap Gwillim, one of the most famed of the Celtic bards, lived in the thirteenth century. He was an enthusiastic, and therefore a skilful archer. One of his allusions to this accomplishment, affords us a curious insight into Welsh fashions of that age. It would appear that to possess a costly bow of Spanish yew, was as indispensable to the modish equipment of a handsome young Welsh gallant five centuries ago, as a polished steel-hilted rapier to the modern fullcourt dress. “Yesterday,” says one of his stanzas, “I was in anxious mood and ardent expectation, beneath a shadowy tree, with the gold and jewel upon my brow, waiting the arrival of Gwenllian, maid of dark and glossy tresses.” Whilst thus engaged, there appears in the distance what he styles “a harsh-voiced, dog-hating, poultry-eating fox.” He then turns vulpicide, a character most hateful to modern country gentlemen, but a public benefactor in ancient Wales. “I aimed between my handes, he adds, “with a valuable yew bow that came from abroad, intending to send a keen arrow from the dark-headed forest, to dye his hair in blood. I drew—unlucky shot! it passed by his head altogether. Alas! my good bow is splintered into a thousand pieces.” When lamenting the ill-success that attended his addresses to Morryth, he compares himself to a man standing on the beach, “with a yew bow in his hand,” shooting at sea-gulls; who neither recovers his shafts, nor gains possession of the objects at which he aims. “My poetic strains,” exclaims the bard, “are all sent forth in vain. As well might I discharge an arrow at the stars.”
Even in the most trifling matters he introduces allusions to the bow, so as to make them highly picturesque. When addressing the roebuck which he despatches with a letter to his mistress, he warns the animal not to allow any obstacle to impede his course, nor to fear
The grinded arrow.
To a swaggering companion who demands hospitality in a lone valley which was his home, and who somewhat imperiously demands to know “where he can put up his horse,” the bard replies, “Turn him loose into the forest, where some night prowler will save you the trouble of catching him again, for he’ll take a spring upon his back, and give him such a heel-stab (sawel frath), as will send him to Sax-town, beyond Saxon-town.”
“Aye,” replies his guest, who, though a roysterer, is no craven; “but suppose I were in yonder wood opposite, and in my hand a bow of red yew ready bent, with a tough tight string, and a straight round shaft, with a well-rounded nock (notch), having long slender feathers of a green silk fastening, and a sharp-edged steel head, heavy and thick, and of an inch wide, of a green blue temper, that would draw blood out of a weathercock; and with my foot to a hillock and my back to an oak, and the sun at my side and the wind at my back, and the girl I love best hard by looking at me, and I conscious of her being there; I’d shoot him such a shot, so strong and far drawn, so low and sharp, that it would be no better there were between him and me a breastplate and a Milan hauberk, than a whisp of fern, a kiln-rug, or a herring net!“
H.
* ↑ An allusion to the white feathers with which arrows are winged.
* ↑ These are terms applicable to a clever shooter.
* ↑ Three arrows are the complement, discharged in succession.
* ↑ Talbot MSS.
* ↑ Records of the Brewers’ Company.